Free Hideaway Cove (A Windfall Island Novel) by Anna Sullivan Page A

was built on a lie.
    It wasn’t as though he didn’t trust Jessi, he told himself. Despite her clear and unapologetic yen for the ease money would buy her, he didn’t believe she’d set her cap for him if she knew his net worth counted in the millions.
    Still, money—that kind of money—changed everyone. He didn’t know where they’d end up, but he was determined to work his way around Jessi’s resistance. No, not just determined; frantic would be the better term for what churned in his stomach and whipped through his blood whenever he set eyes on her. He couldn’t put a name to it—or wouldn’t, yet—but he could no more turn his back on it than he could stop his own body from drawing in air, or his own heart from beating.
    What sense, he reasoned, would there be in complicating an already confusing matter? There’d be time enough later, once her feelings—and his—were sorted out, to tell her about the family fortune. And if his need for her burned out as fast and hot as it had roared into flame, then what harm would have been done? It wasn’t as if he was deceiving her, after all; he was just choosing what to tell and what to keep to himself.
    “I talk funny,” Hold answered Benji, “because I’m from Louisiana.”
    “Loo-Loosiana?”
    “Louisiana,” Jessi corrected. “It’s way down south by Florida. Where Disney World is.”
    “Have you been there?” Benji asked, all but dancing in place. “Mom says we can go.” He shot her a look. “Maybe.”
    “We’ll talk about it, Benj.”
    Benji nodded, watching his mother with the supreme confidence of a child who’d never been let down.
    Jessi poured milk and added chocolate syrup, looking like a mother afraid she’d have to do exactly that.
    “Why are you all dressed up?” Benji asked him, and Hold had to let the pang of sympathy—edged with that snap of dislike for her predicament—go.
    “What is it with the pair of you and my wardrobe?” he murmured for Jessi’s benefit. To Benji, he said, “My mama isn’t so laid back as yours. She frowns on jeans.”
    “But you’re all grown up.”
    “You never outgrow your mama, son.” He held Jessi’s chair for her before taking his own.
    “Yeah, that’s another thing Mom tells me all the time.”
    “And now you have living proof.” Jessi slid a piece of pizza on her son’s plate.
    “All the other tourists are gone,” Benji said around a mouthful of pepperoni and cheese. “So what are you still doing here?”
    “Just now I seem to be doing all the talking.”
    “Benji’s got a point,” Jessi said. “How is it that you can just take off from your regular life to work on a small-town gen—” She broke off, and the way she glanced at her son told Hold he wasn’t the only one taking care with what he said. “Shouldn’t you be manning a desk somewhere?”
    Hold winced. “No, ma’am, no desks for me. You might say I’m a kind of salesman.”
    “And what do you sell?”
    “Happiness. Or at least a chance for it.”
    Jessi dropped her pizza and stared at him.
    Hold tapped lightly on her forehead. “What’s going on in there?”
    “Mom, can I watch some TV?”
    Jessi latched onto the diversion. “Homework?” she asked Benji.
    “Did it in school.”
    “Okay, one hour, and keep it down.”
    Paper plate in hand, Benji whooped and raced all of ten feet to their little family room, snatched the remote from the top of the TV and flopped down on a beanbag chair.
    “I repeat,” Hold said, reaching out.
    Jessi grabbed his finger before he could tap it against her head again.
    He curled his hand around hers and lifted it, bringing her fingers to his lips. Those lips curved when she jolted, when he saw the pulse throb to life in her neck. She trembled, and he feared he was pushing too hard, but when her eyes lifted to his and he read the desire there, heat flared inside him and spread.
    “Jessi—”
    “Hold, I…” She eased back, but he knew if he let her think, she’d