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happiest man on Earth!”
    “It could be, Angel; if you trust me
to love you enough.”
    “I can’t bring you into my troubles,
Tess. You don’t know what could happen!”
    “What kind of troubles?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “But you’re a beach bum, aren’t you?
You fish, you ride bikes. Or are you a drug smuggler?”
    He laughed. “No, not by a long shot,
though that kind of life might have been preferable to what I am.”
    “So what exactly are you?”
    “I’m an investigator. I was hired to
watch Patrick Mercer.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s been implicated in a nasty
murder, Tess.”
    She sat up abruptly.
    “No, I don’t believe it! He’s like a
dream father, taking me in unconditionally. And he adores my mom. You must be
mistaken.”
    He stood, began to dress. “I knew I
shouldn’t have told you. But I guess it’s for the best. Things might start
getting dangerous. Make up some excuse and fly back to wherever you came from.”
    “Don’t you want to see me again? You
said there’d be a next time.”
    He pulled her up, kissed her hard.
“Oh there’ll be a next time all right. It’s taking every bit of willpower I
have to keep from throwing you back down on that cot right now! I love you,
Tess! I have since that first day on the beach. I never thought it’d happen
that fast for a guy like me. I’ve been around, had lots of women, I won’t lie
to you about it. But you did something to me. All I can think of is how I can
make it work with us. But you’re his kid, and I’m sworn to bring him down. That
makes it complicated.”
    “I can be strong for you, Angel.”
    “With no regrets, ever?”
    “Not one.”
    “What about your family?”
    “I love my mom. If Patrick is
dangerous like you say I don’t want her marrying him. I’ll have to talk her out
of it somehow. Are you certain he killed somebody? Do you have proof?”
    “I have implications, and
circumstances and a whole lot of intuition.”
    “That isn’t telling me anything
solid.”
    “I know. Tess, when I fell in love
with you, that first day, on the beach, I was afraid then, and always, that you
couldn’t accept me the way I am. I threw mixed signals at you, and I’m sorry
for that. I only wanted you to love me. All that talk about hating the rich …
well, I do. When I was small my parents went on a photographic safari in Africa with a bunch of shallow, so-called
friends. They stepped into a poachers’ camp and were murdered. Their friends
ran off, didn’t even think about trying to save them! I hated my rich parents,
for dying young and leaving me. I hated their rich friends, because they couldn’t
be trusted to help them. I was filled with anger and frustration and misery. My
only pleasures were fishing and riding my bike. But I found I needed something
to do, something with a purpose, so I became an investigator. I left the
running of my parents’ company to my uncles but they’re all a bunch of sly
dogs. I have to watch their every move, or they’d steal the company out from
under me.”
    “Would that be so bad? You don’t need
it. Why don’t you sell it?”
    “It was my dad’s.”
    “Is that the only reason you keep
it?”
    “Yeah, it is. I guess I will sell it.
We could live off the profits for fifty years!”
    “But what about my dad? Angel, I want
to prove you wrong about Patrick. How do I go about it?”
    “Find out who killed his assistant.”
    “Tell me everything you do know.”
    “Well, her name was Gayle Stewart.
She’d been his personal assistant for ten years, privy to all his secrets. He
was alone with her in the pool room of the Shell House during one of those wild
parties of his in December. Somehow Gayle managed to fall off the edge of the
empty pool and cracked her sweet neck. He says he wasn’t there when she fell,
that he came in and found her dead. But she had bruises on her body from a
beating. There were rumors that they were lovers, had been for a long time but
he was openly seeking a