Christine Flynn - Hot August Nights

Staying out of the limelight seemed impossible for Ashley, too. Just trying to avoid it had caused her problems enough. She’d tried lying low a few years ago and speculation had ranged from her being ill to her being a recluse. She’d had no problem overlooking the tabloid’s claims that she’d been abducted by aliens, but her mother had finally made her face the fact that their family would never have the privacy others had. Unless she wanted to live her life in total seclusion, her only defense would be to hold her head high and give the world as little as possible to criticize.

She would do her best to do just that. But she couldn’t help feeling a disaster coming on with the building thing. It seemed to her that the only positive in the situation was that what she would do would be for a very good cause. That, and now that she had his check, there was no imaginable reason for her to have to deal with Matt again.

Or so she thought until she came across his name two weeks later in a volunteer packet Shelter’s home office had mailed her. The sponsor material she had seen for the fund-raiser hadn’t listed Callaway Construction among its benefactors. She was almost certain of it. But right on the back of the single-page brochure that listed the basics for each volunteer, listed under project management was Callaway Construction, Matthew J. Callaway, President.

The connection certainly explained his presence at the auction. It did nothing, however, to ease the trepidation she felt about what she had to do.

Preferring to be optimistic, she told herself the disquieting little discovery had no effect one way or the other on her. Her own father had his name on dozens of companies. Some of which he rarely set foot in. He made the decisions, but other people did the actual work. When she arrived in Florida, Matt would be off building major real-estate developments in Newport News, Atlanta or somewhere equally distant.

That logic stayed with her until the second week of August when she stepped off a chartered plane at the landing strip outside the little backwater town of Gray Lake, Florida. She’d barely glanced through the heat waves rising from the tarmac when she saw him standing, arms crossed, beside a big, bull-nosed silver pickup truck.

Converging ahead of him were three reporters and a camera crew.

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