Sanctuary Island turned out to be tiny … and chilly.
Johnny was glad for his leather jacket, even though the walk from the ferry landing to the address he’d memorized from the file took less than five minutes. It was five minutes of walking along a winding, hard-packed dirt road with the cold wind off the water scouring his cheeks with salt. Five minutes added to the hours of nonstop travel since he’d let himself into the empty, echoing town house he’d shared with Terri, to shower and pack before heading right back out the door.
He’d been glad to leave. The dust and silence of their home haunted him. He’d gotten through five deployments and nearly two years undercover by picturing Terri going about her life, safe and warm and there.
Without Terri, the house meant nothing. It wasn’t the home he’d longed for.
And now here he was, not so many miles from their tidy little place in northern Virginia … but Sanctuary Island felt like another world.
The air smelled like saltwater and sunshine, threaded through with the scent of the budding rose garden he’d passed as he strode down Main Street toward the center of town. He passed a florist, a library, and a family-owned hardware store with two grizzled old men playing a lazy game of checkers out front. The old guys clocked Johnny’s movements with interest, clearly gathering intel to grease the town’s gossip wheels.
Johnny paused, unwilling to pass up the chance to gather a little intel of his own.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, giving them his best, nonthreatening smile.
Judging from the wary glance they exchanged, Johnny could stand to work on his nonthreatening smile.
“Hello, there,” the younger of the two old men said. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt under his overalls, and Johnny was startled to notice a battered, dull gold crown glinting from the gray curls wreathing the man’s head. “What brings you to our fair island?”
Johnny hitched his backpack a little higher on his shoulder. “I’m looking for someone. Do either of you gentlemen know a Terri Alexander?”
The older man scratched at his grizzled beard and squinted across the street and the quiet town square. “Can’t say I do. And I know near about everybody in town, I woulda thought. King, what do you say?”
The man called King was, unsurprisingly, the one with the crown. Sure. He frowned, more in confusion than anything else, Johnny thought. “I don’t know any Terri. Pete? Is there a stranger?”
Sanctuary Island really was tiny if two old guys could be so sure of knowing absolutely every single person on it. Johnny had a fleeting thought about how freaking impossible it would be to go undercover in a place like this, where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else’s family—and everyone else’s business—probably for generations back.
“I think she’s working at a bakery,” Johnny offered offhandedly, from the file he’d memorized on the ferry over to the island. “Patty’s Cakes?”
King’s troubled expression cleared. “Patty Cakes,” he corrected, sounding relieved. “Great sticky buns. You must be talking about Tessa. Right? Moved here a year ago to help Patty retire?”
Tessa. Not Terri. But Tessa was another nickname for Theresa, his wife’s full name. It could be her.
Johnny didn’t betray the sudden jump of his pulse by so much as the flicker of an eyebrow. “Mind pointing me in the direction of this Patty Cakes?”
To his surprise, King frowned again. And the other man stood up from his rocking chair, bones creaking and popping, to lean against the porch railing and stare down at him forbiddingly. “You’re not here to make trouble for our Tessa, are you?”
The depth of his own reaction to the casual possessive stilled Johnny. Instead of growling that she wasn’t their Tessa, she was Johnny’s, he managed to pull together a semblance of a reassuring smile. “No trouble, sir. I’m just here to catch up, see how she’s doing.”
“Don’t worry, Pete,” King said in a loud undertone. “If he’s a bad guy, Miss Patty will take care of him.”
Johnny was starting to get the idea that there was something a little off about King. First that weird fake crown, now this conviction that a retirement-aged old lady was some kind of match for anyone who might want to harm Terri? It was a damn good thing Johnny was the only one who’d showed up looking for his wife, if that was her only protection on this podunk island.
To his surprise, though, Pete didn’t laugh. Instead, he gave Johnny an appraising glance and nodded once in agreement. “True enough. Keep heading down Main Street, mister. You’ll find the bakery on the corner, just past Hackley’s Hardware.”
“Try the apple fritters,” King added, smiling and carefree once more as he sat and returned his attention to the checker game on the table. “They’ll change your life, guaranteed.”
Johnny nodded his thanks and started down the sidewalk, his mind swimming with new information. He was still in mission mode, making connections and coming up with and discarding potential courses of action as he walked, feverish and strung tighter than a guitar string.
It was a problem, the fact that he hadn’t come down from mission mode yet. He knew it, Brad knew it, Dr. Reeves—the department shrink—had definitely known it. But Johnny couldn’t help it.
Until he saw Terri with his own eyes, alive and safe and smiling that tiny half smile that barely lifted the corner of her generous mouth, part of Johnny was still tangled in the nest of vipers he’d lived in for the last two years. He couldn’t get free until he knew she was all right.
But when he walked past the hardware store and found himself nose to glass with a wide display window showcasing cake stands topped with towering white coconut layer cakes and vibrant yellow buttercreamed confections, the tension inside him coiled even tighter.
The woman behind the counter inside was achingly familiar—but a stranger, at the same time.
Instead of his wife’s long, brown hair, this woman’s hair was short. Wisps and feathers of bright blond framed the delicately angled face Johnny had dreamed of over and over. But instead of the almost-smile he used to work so hard to coax from her, this woman’s pink-glossed mouth opened on a laugh so big and happy it made her throw her head back.
It was Terri. Intellectually, Johnny knew it was her. But she was laughing in a way he’d never seen her laugh. And even when the laugh faded, the smile that was left behind pierced to the center of Johnny’s chest. He’d never seen that particular smile before, either.
That smile turned her into someone new. Someone beautiful and vibrant and full of life. Someone Johnny could hardly believe was the shy, timid girl he’d found hiding in the barn behind his parents’ Maryland farm eight years ago.
To his dismay, his body responded to her even more fiercely and undeniably than it usually did. Desire flared, bone deep and aching with frustration. Blood racing and heart pounding as if he’d taken a shot of adrenaline, Johnny stared at Terri.
He’d assumed he’d find her alone, miserable, in need of help—the way she’d been when he first met her. He never pictured her like this. She seemed … happy. And she definitely wasn’t a kid anymore.
Terri bumped hips with the woman working beside her at the counter and sashayed into the back as the customer she’d been helping pocketed his change and scooped a brown paper bag off the counter. Johnny stepped aside to let the man exit the shop on a waft of warm, cinnamon-scented air.
Johnny caught the edge of the door with his hand and stood for a moment, breathing in while glancing around the interior of the bakery. It was second nature by this time to catalogue potential threats and size up the situation without letting on. The steel-gray-haired woman behind the counter returned his easy smile with a curious glint in her friendly gaze.
“Welcome to my store. I’m Patty Cuthbert. Don’t believe I’ve seen you in here before. Are you in town visiting family or friends?”
Johnny kept his smile firmly in place, biting down on the desire to say he was here to collect his runaway wife. “How do you know I’m not a tourist?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed, deepening the crow’s feet fanning out to her temples. Patty was in her seventies, Johnny guessed from the crepelike quality of her tanned skin and the lines of a life well lived scoring grooves in her handsome face. Her dark gray hair was threaded with strands of white, silver, and black, pulled back from her face and knotted into a complicated, soft-looking bun at the back of her neck. Despite the flour-streaked red apron covering her yellow polka-dotted shirt and what looked like a pair of denim overalls, there was an aura of regal dignity about the bakery owner that made Johnny classify Patty as … not a threat, exactly.
But not someone to be trifled with, either.
“We don’t get a lot of tourists on Sanctuary Island,” Patty said slowly, leaning both elbows on her glass countertop and studying him with frank interest. “Considering we have no hotel and only one single restaurant.”
“You have a world-class bakery, though,” Johnny pointed out with his most disarming grin. Instinct had him working to charm Patty and get her on his side before Terri came back out. “Or so I’ve heard.”
Flattery was always a good tactic. Patty visibly preened. “Oh? What have you heard?”
“I’m told your buns are the best in the world.” Johnny wasn’t above pressing his advantage by strolling over and leaning casually over the counter, close enough to shoot Patty a wink.
The older woman went faintly pink with pleasure. “Oh, go on with you. I’m old enough to be your grandmother! Our sticky buns are good, though. We already sold out the first batch, but a new tray should be coming out in a second. Not that I believe for a minute that a man like you eats sticky buns for lunch.”
Patty’s appreciative gaze swept down his body, making Johnny grin. “Hey,” he said, throwing his arms out and pretending to be hurt. “I like sweet things as much as the next guy.”
“I’ll just bet you do.” Patty fluttered her lashes, good humor quirking her mouth.
“Miss Patty, are you flirting with the customers again?”
Everything inside Johnny went still and alert at the laughing voice calling from the back of the shop. He couldn’t stop it or hide it, even as he registered the sharpening of Patty’s glance—his head came up and he was staring hard at the doorway Terri had disappeared behind.
The instant she stepped around the corner holding a huge rimmed baking sheet laden with butter-soaked rolls topped with brown sugar, Johnny felt his heart give a hard kick against his ribs.
It was her. His wife. Almost close enough to touch for the first time in a year and a half.
He wanted to vault over the counter separating them and seize her in his arms, feel her warm, beating heart and living body against his. He wanted … all the things he’d never allowed himself to want from Terri, who was vulnerable and soft and so in need of protection.
She looked up and met his eyes, and everything Johnny thought he knew about his life and his marriage went up in flames.
Shock rounded her lips into a gasp and drained her face of all color until she was as pale as the flour dusted over her apron. The tray dropped to the floor with an almighty crash, splattering syrup and making Patty cry out in alarm.
Johnny barely registered the older woman hurrying to grab the tray from the floor and investigate whether any of the sticky buns could be saved. He had no attention to spare for anything or anyone except his wife.
His wife. Who was staring at him in tense silence. The trembling hand she brought up to cover her mouth was sun-kissed. A shiny scar crossed the back of her knuckles above the old, faded scar on the side of her wrist.
New burn scar, Johnny’s brain reflexively spat out. She works in a bakery.
It made logical sense. But all Johnny could think was that it was yet another way he didn’t recognize the girl he’d married in the woman standing before him.
For instance, he was used to Terri being glad to see him. In her quiet, reserved way, sure—but he knew he hadn’t imagined the fact that her wary, wounded eyes would light up when he walked through their front door.
He’d held on to that memory through nearly two years of living life as someone else, desperately clinging to his sense of self with everything he had. Somewhere along the way he’d convinced himself that if he saw that look in Terri’s eyes once he got through to the other side of the assignment, he’d know for sure he’d come through it in one piece.
He’d been counting on it, all the way back to their house, and then all the way to Sanctuary Island and this moment, right here.
Johnny stared into his wife’s eyes, and all he saw was dismay.
Please, Terri, he begged silently. Please be glad to see me.
She dropped her hand and ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip in a sharply familiar way. But then she shook her head, the soft tufts of her short, highlighted hair glinting gold in the warm bakery lights, and a wave of vertigo swamped him.
“Johnny,” she said. Her voice was the same, throaty and soft, but the tone … He put out a hand to steady himself against the countertop. She sounded strong. Sure of herself, in a way he’d never heard her before. Above all, she didn’t sound happy to see him. She sounded … almost as if she were afraid of him.
Johnny, who’d spent the last two years convincing himself he wasn’t the violent, dangerous man he was pretending to be, suddenly discovered the limits of his endurance. He’d held on for Terri, for the look of welcome in her green eyes.
He couldn’t take her fear.
Without a single word, Johnny turned and walked out of the bakery.