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Chapter One
Kyra pressed her hips against the railing, leaning as far as was safe, and tipped her ear. Low tones of male voices, one soft and melodic, the other louder, huskier, and cheerier, drifted up the stairs from the kitchen below, but she couldn’t make out their words. A rumbling sound drowned out their voices, or they stopped talking.
“Shit.” She’d hoped to have been out of the house before they came home. She back stepped into her bedroom and did a sweep for her purse. “Shit,” Kyra said it louder this time. It was in the kitchen, on the counter, next to the men she was avoiding, but she couldn’t wait for them to leave. She was already late.
Dread made her palms slick. She drew in a steadying breath, smoothed the skirt of her sundress, and forced her lips upward into the simulation of the smile she’d been practicing these past four months.
“Hey,” Kyra said as she stepped into the kitchen. Her nonchalance was fake, made worse by her awkward, tight-fingered wave. The rumbling stopped.
Tarek jumped off the barstool and turned his bare back to her. Kyra froze. Her smile wavered and collapsed. Not fast enough, she dropped her hand and averted her gaze to the floor, the ceiling, the counter, anywhere but at the mangled mess of angry scars on his back, where the bullet had decimated flesh and bone. He yanked on a threadbare Boston University T-shirt.
She replaced her smile. It felt precarious and wobbly. She tried to keep her expression neutral, tried to hide how much Tarek’s injuries affected her. She was doing a poor job. Tarek’s fists were clenched in the hem of his shirt when he finally turned around. The slightest hint of color stained the tops of his cheeks. Kyra doubled her effort on her smile, forcing her lips wider, showing more teeth. She probably looked deranged.
“Hiya, Kay.” Tarek’s live-in rehab therapist, Miles’s, grin was friendly and unforced. He set the massage gun down on the counter. If he was fazed by the palpable tension between his patient and Kyra, he didn’t show it. “We were working out a little kink.” He pointed to his lats, then to Tar. “How’s it going?”
“Great.” She played her turn in the game they’d been at for months. Kyra and Miles made polite, inane small talk, and Tarek ignored them. They spoke around him as if he weren’t there, and they never, ever acknowledged his injury or his rehabilitation progress. The whole thing drove her mad.
Tarek sat back down, a nonverbal cue that he was ready to be acknowledged, and Kyra peered at him from under her eyelashes while she fumbled with her purse. They’d come from the gym, and he was still in his workout clothes, his hair damp from the pool. It’d been a while since he’d cut it, and it was long, shaggy, leaning toward unkempt. She wasn’t allowed to ask him about it, or, gods forbid, tell him she liked it. She scrambled for a safe, neutral topic, but she was so tired of the charade. And suddenly, she was angry.
She abandoned her rummaging and looked at Tarek, straight into his lovely pine-green eyes, and asked, “How was swimming?”
Miles sucked in a breath through his teeth, and he took a tiny step back.
Tarek stared at her. A muscle in his jaw ticked. He shrugged, his right shoulder rising higher than his left.
“It went pretty well,” Miles answered, his gaze pinging between Tarek and Kyra.
Tarek snorted and stood. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Wait, Tarek?” Kyra swallowed and smoothed her skirt against her thighs.
Before his injury, Tarek had told her about the Independence Day festivities. He’d told her about many of the events that made summer on Martha’s Vineyard so special. They were going to experience them all together, but then he’d been shot and all their plans had gone to shit.
She tugged at her skirt. “Tonight’s the parade. Chase reserved a mooring in the harbor to watch the fireworks.” She cringed at the quaver in her voice. “Did you want to come?”
“No, thank you.”
Kyra drew back. His tone was so cold. “Well, if you don’t want to go, we could…” But Tarek was already gone. She stared after him until she heard the door to the spare bedroom click shut.
Her cheeks burned with mortification. As if Tarek’s rejection wasn’t humiliating enough, Miles had witnessed the whole miserable exchange.
“Don’t take it personally,” he said after a few silent seconds. His mouth hitched to the side. “Collins is in a bad mood. He overextended today.”
“He’s hurt?” Worry replaced the sour burn of embarrassment.
After the most recent surgery, the doctors were optimistic Tarek would regain full shoulder mobility. Eventually. He needed a long period of rehab and physical therapy. They cautioned that if he pushed himself too hard, he could do irreversible damage.
“Nah,” Miles said. “Nothing that bad. He’ll be sore for a few days. We’ll RICE tonight and tomorrow. Then he can try again.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive, Kay. He’ll be fine.”
“Thank you. I really don’t know how we’ll survive without you.” This was Miles’s last week with them.
“Don’t worry. I’ve set Tarek up with a schedule. He knows the exercises. We’ve narrowed it down to three trainers at the YMCA who can help him if he needs it. As long as he’s consistent, he’ll get better. You guys’ll be fine.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him. Miles had not only been Tarek’s physical therapist, but he’d also been a good-natured buffer between Kyra’s uncertainty and Tarek’s irritability. Miles’s gentle cajoling coaxed Tarek from his foul moods. His reassurances kept Kyra from giving up entirely.
“I hope so.” Her gaze flickered to the oven clock. “Ugh. I’m late.” She picked up her bag. “I’m meeting Grace and Charlie in town.” She paused. “Oh, I didn’t ask. I’m so sorry. Did you want to come? To the parade, I mean? And the fireworks after?”
He grinned. “No, thanks. Tonight’s the last night of bowling league. Evans is picking me up in an hour. If we get our win in early, we might stop by, but I live in DC, you know.” He smirked. “No one does the Fourth like DC.”
“No, I suppose not. Good luck.”
“We don’t need it. Evans and I are ringers.”
This time, Kyra’s smile was genuine. She loved that the jolly physical therapist had befriended Officer Mark Evans, the island’s equally good-natured health and safety services liaison.
He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Have fun tonight.”
Kyra refreshed Cronkite’s water and added a few fresh kibbles to his nearly full bowl. The soft plunk of dried meat chunks hitting the porcelain brought the great white terror trotting into the kitchen. She scooped him up and buried her face in the extra-soft fur at his neck. He let her snuggle him, and she even felt a reluctant purr.
She glanced at the ceiling, to the guest room above. “Don’t let him sulk too long,” she whispered and set the cat down. “I’ll be home in a few hours.”
With a final scratch, Kyra left the cat and headed toward the garage. It was pitch-black inside, and she patted the wall for the light switch. It took a few tries to find it.
Along with her father’s former study, Kyra considered the garage Tarek’s domain. Since moving in, Tar had changed the space, and his presence was felt in the items on the shelves, the machines and equipment stored against the walls, and his untouched, shiny-new Land Cruiser parked in the closer of the two bays.
For most of her adult life, Kyra had rented flats in big cities. When she inherited the house from her father, she’d found the idea of home ownership and the responsibilities that came with it daunting, but to her surprise and delight, Tarek had been enthusiastic about the prospect of improvement projects, particularly outside. He’d spent weekends going through everything in the garage. He’d had plans for the front and back yards—wisteria for the pergola, raised beds for herbs and vegetables—but with his injury, he never got the chance, and Kyra had hired gardeners.
She crossed the garage to her most recent impulse purchase, a mint-green beach cruiser with whitewall tires and a wicker basket on the handlebars.
The island didn’t restrict the number of cars that came over from the mainland, and as a result, traffic, especially during the summer season, could be brutal. One afternoon in late June, she’d been sitting at the triangle, stuck in post-ferry Friday traffic, and a group of girls on bikes flew past her. Three blocks and thirty minutes later, she’d spotted the rom-com cute bicycle in a shop window and bought it on the spot.
She ran her hand over the cool metal of the handlebars and stuffed her bag into the basket. She opened and closed her left hand, stretching and flexing the tendons and ligaments. The night she and Chase saved Tarek, she’d cut herself. It’d been deep enough to warrant surgery, and it still felt tight sometimes. She worked out the kink, then she hit the button to open the garage and walked her bike out to the street.
Kyra’s house was hidden deep in the woods between Crackatuxet Cove and Edgartown Great Pond. It took a few twists and turns to reach the main street, and from there, it was four miles to downtown Edgartown through the Katama Plains. When she’d first visited the island, the house had been nearly impossible to find, and she’d wondered why her father had chosen it for his retirement home. But after living on island for nearly a year, she’d grown to love that her house was remote enough to be private, but close enough to easily join civilization.
The bike path along Herring Creek Road was hot. The tops of Kyra’s shoulders baked in the late afternoon sun, and the back of her neck prickled with sweat. She experimented with her speed. If she pedaled fast, the breeze lifted her hair from her sweaty neck, but it was enough cardio to cause the rest of her body to overheat. She slowed, and her head and shoulders suffered under the sun’s assault. Kyra settled for something in between. It was a worst-of-both-worlds situation. She was too hot and too slow, and yet she was still faster than the cars idling on the road beside her, and it was somewhat satisfying zipping past them.
Behind her, a motor’s growl increased to a rumbling roar as it drew closer. Cars honked. A few people hollered obscenities that had Kyra biting on her grin. Martha’s Vineyard was a part of Massachusetts, after all, and its residents were quintessential, surly New Englanders.
Two motorcycles, one bright red, the other black, raced up the street, and she pulled to the side of the bike path. The riders’ clothes flapped in the wind as they wove between cars and sped up on the wrong side of the road. Kyra wondered if she shouldn’t have bought a scooter instead.
End of Excerpt
