Chapter 4

Juliet found shade near the table outside her work trailer in Liberty Square, took off her hard hat, and grabbed a water bottle from a cooler. Men in coveralls with City of Savannah Public Works insignias drove backhoes while Bob’s workers hauled pink and white impatiens. The thunder rolling in the distance, threatening another storm coming in from the Isle, didn’t help her mood.

She still hadn’t heard from Calum. That meant if she wanted to save her business, her only other choice was Deke.

She took a drink, needing the water to soothe her hoarse throat. Then she pressed the bottle against her forehead and closed her eyes, letting the condensation drip down her hot cheeks and neck. Despite the stress about her loan and Deke, she couldn’t stop worrying about Rafe. He’d come home. But would he come see her?

Then again, did it matter? She’d spent the past eight years grieving him and moving on with her life, doing whatever was necessary to survive. She was over him. As much as a woman could be after discovering true love didn’t exist. That forever and always meant never and not at all.

A popping sound made her jump, and she opened her eyes. The fountain pump had stalled. How much would a new pump cost her?

She took another drink and wiped water off her chin with her fist. Bob was with a water inspector near the fountain when a man shaped like a stack of three marshmallows tiptoed through construction debris. Once he reached the plank walkway that wound through the site, he yanked on his blue vest and straightened his white jacket over pleated pants.

Henry Portnoy, a.k.a. Senator Carina Prioleau’s campaign manager, headed Juliet’s way.

She hoped he had a check because Carina still owed her forty thousand dollars.

Henry reached her table and shook each shoe. “Juliet.” He waved to the fountain’s three-foot-tall round brick—and still dry—basin. “Senator Prioleau’s party is in six days.”

“The square will be finished when I get paid.”

“And the landscaping?” He picked up a cardboard rendition of the garden alley and fanned his face. “The senator expects perfection.”

“Did you see the expensive live oaks?” She pointed to forty eighteen-foot trees lining the square’s perimeter. “Once the crews finish the electrical work, we’ll plant fifty Crepe Myrtles, dozens of azaleas, and flowering shrubs. Then we’ll add annuals and mulch. It’ll be done on time as long as I’m paid.”

“And those heroin addicts who lived here. Won’t they come back?”

“The police assured me they’re doing everything they can to combat this heroin epidemic. Including taking addicts off the street and offering them treatment.” She tossed her water bottle into a nearby trash can. “The city is desperate to keep the epidemic contained.”

“But—”

“Liberty Square will be the square to rent for weddings and other celebrations. The city needs this revenue. The balance is due Wednesday. I have union workers to pay.”

“Except”—Henry’s teeth clacked like they often did—“the senator doesn’t want to be seen as throwing her wealth around. She wants to seem as one with the people.”

Juliet exhaled, lowering her shoulders. Carina could never be one with the people. And everyone knew it. “Her husband, Senator Wilkins, turned a parking garage back into an original garden square. Now that he’s dead, it’s his memorial.”

Henry shook his head. “The senator can’t pay until after the election.”

Juliet inhaled sharply. In November? By then she’d be bankrupt and living on the streets. Again. “We have a contract. I expect to be paid on Wednesday. If not, all work will be halted. There’ll be no party.” Playing chicken with a U. S. senator hadn’t been on her to-do list today, but neither had worrying about her ex-husband.

Henry pursed his lips, and she wanted to clamp them together with a binder clip. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wednesday, Henry.” She took the rendition out of his hand and tossed it onto the table covered in engineering drawings. “Or I shut the project down.” Extreme? Maybe. But if she didn’t come up with payroll by Wednesday night, the city would have something to say about it. And the city wouldn’t care about Carina’s desire to seem as one with the people.

Although Juliet sounded tough, she prayed such extreme measures wouldn’t be necessary. Vulnerability wasn’t a quality she could afford.

Rafe—and Nate Walker—had taught her that.

Henry left, and she rubbed the back of her neck. A jasmine-scented breeze lifted damp tendrils. She needed this job to be a success. Her future—as well as the jobs of her crew—depended on it.

Once Henry disappeared behind the orange-netted privacy fence hiding the construction from the tourists, she grabbed her hard hat and found Bob with the water inspector. Ten minutes later, after discussing how to run copper wire into a ten-foot-tall bronze winged horse, she went back to her worktable. Samantha had sent a text.

Someone’s looking for you. Tall. Hot. Eerie walk. Cool tats. Did I mention hot?

A jackhammer snagged bedrock, groaned, and backfired.

She gritted her teeth against the rising panic. She met with male clients all the time. And while Rafe might still be tall and handsome, he didn’t have an eerie walk. Whatever that meant.

What did he want?

While she waited for a reply, a workman passed with oleander bushes. She sent him to the west garden room. They couldn’t be planted near the doggy fountain. They were poisonous.

Samantha texted back.

To see you. No idea why. Told him you were at the work site. Hope that’s ok?

Juliet swallowed, only to taste the bitter dryness of concrete dust and mulch grit. She should’ve mentioned Rafe’s return to Samantha but was avoiding questions she had no answers to.

Ok. After this going to Prideaux House to meet Delacroix. Will stop at store then go set up for funeral. Want lunch?

Thanks but Pete is dropping off lunch. SYS.

Juliet sighed. Pete, Samantha’s newest boyfriend, worked at Rage of Angels club with Deke and probably sold this new heroin fueling the city’s epidemic on the side. Juliet didn’t like being judgy, but the guy carried serious muscle and, with his long black plaited hair, tribal tats, and gunmetal lip piercings, looked like he could bench-press her mulch truck.

Juliet took off her hard hat and threw it onto a newly installed iron bench. The man looking for her could’ve been anyone. That hot, panicky sensation returned, making her hands and legs tingle. Despite the sunshine, thunder clapped in the distance again. She gripped the edge of the table and stared at an invoice until the image blurred. She didn’t hate Rafe, she just had no reason to see him again. Their marriage had been a youthful mistake she’d put behind her.

Voices sounded from near the fountain, and she looked up. Bob and the water inspector were arguing again. Sighing, she slipped her phone in her pocket and went toward them…and stopped.

A man over six feet tall had come through the privacy fence and strode toward the fountain. She paused not just because he wore combat boots, low-riding jeans, and a black T-shirt that outlined his ridged stomach, wide shoulders, and tattooed arms. Not just because he reminded her of Michelangelo’s marble male studies exhibit that’d left her with pudding knees. Not just because he carried the aura of carved masculine perfection with ease.

She paused because his gait stole her breath. Elegant, even graceful, he moved with a determined purpose wrapped in fluid weightlessness. She wouldn’t call it eerie so much as powerful. It had to take enormous strength and self-control to move a body as large and muscular as his so…beautifully.

He spoke to Bob, who pointed toward her. The man nodded, shrugged on the leather biker jacket he carried, and turned. Oh God. His long stride ate up the plank walkway while she wiped her palms on her dress and inhaled deeply. In the space of her exhale, he stopped a few feet away. His brown-eyed gaze clasped onto hers with a longing that kept her still. His sheer size and the yearning in his eyes flooded her with the kind of heat that pooled low.

He was larger than she remembered. And the way he studied her, like she was the only thing in this world worth noticing, reminded her of everything they’d been to each other. Everything they’d once had in that forever-and-always kind of way. Which ended up being a total lie.

She had to remember that.

She swallowed. “Hello, Rafe.”

Seriously? The man had abandoned and betrayed her, and that’s all she could say? She couldn’t even keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Juliet.” It sounded like a prayer, and her breath hitched in the back of her throat. After eight years, she still remembered how her name resonated on his lips, how the word ended with his soft drawl instead of a sharp consonant.

She blinked while he took her hands and moved in. He brushed a kiss on her cheek, and his familiar musky scent teased her nose. She closed her eyes, and her eyelids burned. It was like the anger and sadness and disappointment that had lived inside her for so long were so deeply buried they couldn’t find their way out. She could only stand there, feel his lips on her face, and remember what used to be. Part of her—the traitorous part that exhaled when the kiss ended—was even relieved that he was still alive. For a few of the eight years he’d been away, she hadn’t been sure.

Could she be more pathetic? Probably not. Because she considered the possibility that if she kept her eyes shut, time wouldn’t only stop, it would swing back to the last hours they’d spent together. The last moment they’d been happy.

What is wrong with me?

She opened her eyes and used her fingers to wipe her cheeks. Her gaze darted around—to her worktable, the fountain over his shoulder, his dusty boots—until landing on the blue ribbon wrapped around his wrist under his jacket’s sleeve. She was over him. So why was this so hard? What was it about him that made her tremble, made her limbs feel heavy? She should be angry and dismissive, yet all she could do was ask, “What are you doing here?”

There were so many other questions loaded into that one: Why did you leave me? Where did you go? What were you doing? Do your tattoos mean what you said they mean? That prickly feeling rushed through her again, and she fisted her hands until her nails cut her palms.

His relentless gaze shone with unapologetic determination. A trait she remembered. “The army released me from prison.”

“For God’s sake, why?” She hadn’t meant to screech—and had, in fact, never screeched before—yet his flinch testified to her pitch and tone. She tucked a stray hair behind her ear and shook her head. Embarrassment sent a flush from her neck to her face.

“The army dropped the charges and let me go.” His voice was low and melodic. He even reached out to touch the strand that wouldn’t stay put and hung over her forehead. Except she turned until he lowered his hand. “I know seeing me must be…unsettling.”

Unsettling. Yes. That was a word she could support. She took two deep breaths before meeting the heat in his eyes. “I thought you had a life sentence.”

Or was that a lie too?

He shoved his hands in his front pockets. Despite his jacket, the movement only emphasized the width of his muscled chest. He was so much bigger than when he’d left. “One day I was in solitary confinement, the next I was free.”

She frowned. The whole thing sounded sketchy. “Do you know why? Or who orchestrated it?”

“No.”

She studied the handsome face she used to cup with her hands and caress at will. Square jaw framed by firm cheekbones and deep-brown eyes. Shorn hair with slashes for eyebrows. Lips that protected white teeth, one with a small chip from the time he fell out of the tree next to her balcony. The same face she’d once loved now had tiny lines around the eyes, a jagged scar on the forehead, and a darkness in its eyes. “So you came home?”

He stayed still under her visual assault, as if daring her to look at all of him. As if daring her to see the man who had supposedly gone AWOL to work as a gunrunning mercenary. As if daring her to ask the question they both knew she wanted to ask but was too afraid to.

“Yes.” He spoke softly, his words edged with steel. “I came home.”

With his obvious physical strength and don’t-screw-with-me-or-I’ll-kill-you attitude, he seemed capable of working for an arms dealer. Heck, he could even be an arms dealer. Yet he kept a polite distance between them and moved slightly so the shadow he cast kept the sun out of her eyes. Then there was his upper body, which shook as if the act of standing still in a garden, talking to her, required a tremendous amount of self-control.

Frustrated with her all-over-the-place emotions, she tucked back that damn stray hair again and walked toward the fountain. He fell into step next to her. “When are you leaving?”

“Depends.” The way that word rolled off his tongue, heavy and intense, loaded it with all sorts of meanings.

“On what?”

“On you.”

She stopped near Bob and faced Rafe. “You nuked my life, yet your decision depends on me?”

“Yes.” For the first time, his attention shifted from her to the horse rising out of the fountain four feet away. “Pegasus?” Memories of their childhood were evident in his half smile. “Our winged horse?”

She shrugged. If he wanted to play the deflection game, she would too. Because no matter what he said or did, she wasn’t going to allow him to mess up her life again. She was no longer the wounded bird he’d married. “Classical architecture is still around. Timeless beauty always trumps dead war heroes.”

When he turned to her again, his stare took in her clunky, steel-toed garden clogs and pink linen dress up to her hard hat–mussed hair. “It does indeed.”

She pressed her palms against her skirt. “What do you want.” No question mark. A direct statement requiring a direct answer.

His eyes narrowed. “To see you.”

“Why?” Her question sounded desperate, but she didn’t care. “It’s been eight years.”

He ran a hand over his head and glanced away. “Because it’s been eight years, and I need to make sure you’re okay.”

“I sent our divorce papers to you in Leavenworth.” She grabbed his leather-clad arm and forced him to look at her. “We’re not married anymore. I’m not your wife.”

“Juliet.” His voice was so broken she almost couldn’t hear the words. “No matter what the world says, and regardless of what you believe, you’ll always be my wife. Your safety always trumps everything.”

Thunder hit hard, much closer this time, and she wrapped her arms around herself. “What does that mean?”

“I’m here to protect you. And I’m not leaving until I do.”