got in bed and had a light on and didn’t mistake his own reflection for a burglar.
Before Guy could ask him to stay, Will slipped out, crossing the patio and the small lawn that separated the houses. Inside, he dropped into a kitchen chair and stared at the pile of Guy’s mail. Doctors’ bills, insurance bills, pharmacy bills, and more doctors’ bills. All to keep Guy relatively stable. A losing battle, on every front.
And the cost of private nursing? Astronomical.
Will knew exactly how much money Guy had; he wrote out the checks every month. The account just got smaller and smaller. Stabbing his hair, he blew out a breath, imagining just how much money Jocelyn charged as a life coach. How much she’d get for selling her story about sex with Miles Thayer to some tabloid.
Didn’t matter. As far as anyone knew, Jocelyn had been home exactly three times in fifteen years after… that night. He’d heard she came home for her mother’s funeral almost ten years ago and once, about a year ago, after the hurricane wiped out Barefoot Bay, Will had seen her at a Mimosa Key town council meeting. But the minute she’d laid eyes on him she disappeared again. And although he wasn’t there, he’d heard she’d made it to Lacey and Clay Walker’s beach wedding.
Now she lived in another world, three thousand miles away, breaking up movie-star marriages. Funny, he was the one who was supposed to have become rich and famous, while she’d wanted to live in a comfy house in the country, if he recalled her childhood dreams correctly.
Fifteen years and a lot of water had passed under that burned bridge. And he couldn’t exactly blame her. Or call her for help. Or even, as much as he tried, forget her.
And God knows he’d tried.
Chapter Two
Jocelyn did everything she could to get comfortable, but it just wasn’t going to happen on a cross-country flight. She shifted in the plane seat, her back and bottom numb, her head on fire from the itchy wig, her hand throbbing from filling three notebooks for a grand total of… too many lists to count.
The lists gave her some measure of peace, but not much. Each had a title and a theme, a strategy with potential action items, and those all had priority ratings, a deadline, and, of course, her very favorite form of punctuation: the check mark.
So far, only one action item was checked, although it was more of a survival technique than anything strategic: Get out of L.A. and hide.
Nor was her destination exactly her first choice on a list of possible hiding places, but all her wealthy friends and clients—owners of multiple chalets in Aspen and getaways in Italy—had been conveniently unavailable. No surprise, really.
But Lacey had come through, of course, as the truest of true friends. When she’d suggested that Jocelyn take refuge at Casa Blanca, Lacey’s partially built resort in Barefoot Bay, there’d been no hesitation. Jocelyn needed sanctuary from this personal storm, a place to avoid the media and figure out just where to take her life from here.
Funny that such a decision had to be made on the island of Mimosa Key, but beggars and homewreckers couldn’t afford to be choosy.
Except that Jocelyn was neither.
Two seats away, a young woman skimmed the pages of People magazine, blind to the fact that the “other woman” in Miles Thayer’s broken marriage was sitting a foot away, sipping water and wishing it was something stronger.
Jocelyn stole a few glances at the pages as she closed her notebooks and tucked them into her bag, narrowing her eyes at the image of Coco Kirkman on the cover of the magazine.
That defenseless shadow in her eyes had served her well in front of the camera, making her an empathetic character no matter who she played. That vulnerability had attracted Jocelyn, too, reminding her of another woman who needed a little help developing a spine. Coco was a young, talented, still-fixable version of Mary Jo Bloom, but, once again, Jocelyn had failed to make that fix.
Leaning against the glass, Jocelyn peered down at the swampy Everglades of Florida’s southwest coast, the lush, tropical wetlands so different from what was now her home state. California was brown most of the year, horribly overpopulated and packed with people who thought they were rare birds, not real rare birds.
But this? This little corner on the Gulf of Mexico was home. A shitty home full of heartaches and bad memories, but it