Cynthia Thomason - An Unlikely Match

The next owners, the Holcombs, had intended to keep the place running. But apparently they’d lost interest rather quickly and had given up any thoughts of managing the establishment. To Jack’s knowledge, no one had stayed in Dolphin Run since the late sixties. Perhaps it had even been that long since anyone had stepped inside the place. Who knew what creatures had taken up residence without humans to shoo them away.

“There it is,” Claire said, pointing to an overgrown thicket of shrubs and trees gone wild from lack of attention.

Jack slowed and stared at majestic cedars, live oaks dripping with moss and more varieties of palms than he’d known existed. He couldn’t detect either a building or an iron fence through the blanket of dense limbs and drooping fronds. “Looks like my first order of business is to hire a new gardener for this place,” he said.

“Hmmm…” Claire leaned forward to get a better perspective. “I think the main gate is just ahead about a hundred yards.”

Jack turned into what was left of a concrete drive and steered over cracked cement and washed-out roadbed until he reached the gate, which was obscured by forces of nature determined to undermine its existence. He stopped the car.

Claire looked up through the windshield at branches sweeping the Escalade’s pristine paint job. “I know it’s none of my business,” she said. “And I know I asked you this before, but now that I’m here, I can’t help wondering again why a man like Archie Anderson, who could buy any glamorous property on the planet, would want Dolphin Run.”

Jack reached into his pocket for the ring of keys Lucy had given him at the realty office. “Believe me,” he said, “I wondered that very thing myself.” He draped his arm over the steering wheel and tried to determine where the lock might be hidden in the thick greenery draping the fence. “He vaguely told me he wants it for both business purposes and personal reasons. I suppose he’ll tell me more when he thinks I need to know. But right now my job is to make this place like a mini fortress, and that’s what I intend to do.”

Claire swatted at an insect that had flown in the window. “As you know, Mr. Hogan, that’s what bothers me. I hope you’re not thinking you can make changes in Heron Point to suit the whims of one man. Tell me. What is your boss so afraid of?”

Jack spared her a quick glance as he pulled on the door handle and then let his gaze linger. The prim and proper mayor sure looked sexy raking her slim fingers through a tangled mass of sunstruck hair. And then he forced his mind to his mission. He doubted that she would appreciate knowing he was evaluating her sex appeal, especially when she was so busy expressing how serious she was about protecting her town’s status quo. He smiled to himself. In their own ways, both he and the mayor were in the protection business.

“People, Claire,” he said, responding to her question. “Archie Anderson is afraid of everybody he doesn’t know and half of those he does. I suppose it’s a curse of being excessively wealthy. If you don’t watch your back all the time, you’d better have someone around who watches it for you.” He got out of the car but leaned back in the window. “That’s what he hired me to do.”

She got out, walked to the gate and began helping him clear away vegetation so they could locate the lock. “Well, I think that’s sad,” she said. “A man lives his whole life being afraid of his own shadow for no reason—”

“Oh, he’s got reason,” Jack interrupted her. Having uncovered the rusted lock, he stuck the key into the hole. “On average, Anderson gets a half-dozen credible threats a month. All it takes is for one of them to be real and successful, like when Archie’s ten-year-old son was kidnapped twenty-two years ago.”

He heard her gasp as he turned the key. The giant gate swung inward, pulling twisted vines from their tenuous strongholds. Jack swept his arm toward the car as if he were a maître d’at one of New York’s finest restaurants. “Shall we drive in, Claire?”

CLAIRE DIDN’T REMEMBER walking back to Jack’s vehicle, but somehow she ended up in the passenger seat again. Kidnapped! Just the mention of the word was enough to send any mother into an emotional nosedive. And, in Claire’s case, to make her feel like a fool. What right did she have to criticize Archie Anderson for the way he chose to live his life? She, the mayor of one of the most liberal-thinking communities in the state, if not the country, ought to have known better than to prejudge anyone. What had her father always said? “You can’t know a man until you walk a mile in his shoes.” That old axiom had never made more sense to Claire than it did now.

Hogan got behind the wheel and looked over at her. “Are you all right?”

She turned to him. “I had no idea.”

“What? The kidnapping? Of course you didn’t. How could you?”

She fumbled for words. “It must have been in the papers. I mean, Archie Anderson. Everybody’s heard of him. Something like this must have been big news.”

“It was twenty-two years ago. How old were you then, Claire? Ten?”

Actually she had been thirteen, and Hogan had a point. She had been more interested in ballet slippers than newspapers at that time in her life, and anyway, she would never have noticed a news article about a Manhattan man whose son had been kidnapped.

“Besides,” Hogan continued, “Archie wasn’t the headliner he is today. And he used his influence to keep the story out of the press. He didn’t want to give another crazed opportunist any ideas.”

“I can understand that,” Claire said.

“And maybe now you can understand Anderson’s motives a little better, too. Like you said, everybody’s heard of him, and that’s a big part of the reason he needs protection.” Hogan steered the big vehicle through the gate. “You’d be surprised how many celebrities and corporate bigwigs have people just like me on the payroll.”

“And politicians, too, I suppose,” she said.

“Absolutely. After my Secret Service training, I spent most of my career in Washington, D.C., protecting some political heavyweights, including the president.”

“You were on the president’s security team?”

“For a while.”

Claire decided that Archie Anderson had a security expert who came well qualified. Discovering that Jack had worked in powerful circles, she realized they had that in common. When she’d been a rookie in the public-relations department of Dade County government, she’d mingled with some pretty influential political figures, though none of them could compare to the president of the United States. And none of them had impressed her like Roman Betancourt, whose arresting good looks and charming personality had given him celebrity status in Miami.

A Cuban immigrant who came to South Florida when he was only a boy, Roman rose quickly to the ranks of the privileged and respected in the Latin community. He put himself through school at the University of Miami, and then, with determination and an uncanny ability to recognize a successful business opportunity before anyone else, he amassed a chain of lumberyards and acquired his contractor’s license. When persuaded by powerful compatriots to run for state senator, Roman campaigned with panache and won in a landslide.

It was during his second term in office, when Roman was forty-six years old, and recently divorced, that Claire, then twenty-four, was introduced to him. Claire’s assignment was to plan the details of Roman’s appearances at a series of political and social events in conjunction with the gubernatorial race. And, as Claire recalled now, the rest of the story was the stuff of dreams. She and Roman married a few months later, and she became stepmother to his teenaged son, Carlos.