Lynnette Kent - The Third Mrs. Mitchell

Why couldn’t he have been asleep when the Porsche passed through?

Pete shook off the feeling of dread creeping up his spine. “Well, it looks to me like you’re in kind of a hurry to get there. Speed limit’s sixty on this stretch of road, you know.”

Mary Rose bit her bottom lip, which was frosted with the same pink as her fingernails. “I guess I wasn’t watching the speedometer. I’ll slow down from now on. I promise.”

“I hope so.” Pete turned toward the cruiser again. “You get back in the car. I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”

Standard procedure didn’t use up much brain space, which was good because Pete registered a definite lack of available cells at the moment. Working on autopilot, he wrote up the ticket, logged in the information and ran a check on Mary Rose’s license. There were no outstanding violations on her record, which probably meant she’d talked the other suckers who pulled her over out of writing her up. Maybe she took off her sunglasses for them.

When he handed the citation through the Porsche’s window, Mary Rose gazed up at him, her mouth open in surprise. “You’re giving me a ticket?”

“You can contest the charge in court. There’s a trial date on the sheet. If you fail to appear, your plea of guilty will be assumed and you’ll be expected to pay the full fine.”

“But…” She pressed her lips together for a second, then relaxed them into a sweet, coaxing curve he remembered all too well. “Come on, Pete. There’s no traffic. I wasn’t hurting anybody. Can’t you let this one go?”

He wasn’t even tempted. “Sorry. You keep it under the speed limit from now on, all right?” Tipping his hat, he stepped back, needing to get away. Fast. “Good seeing you again, Mary Rose. Take care.”

Mary Rose watched through the rearview mirror as Pete Mitchell returned to his car. The man was still seriously gorgeous, being possessed of wide shoulders, narrow hips and a tight butt, plus those light gray, dark lashed eyes gleaming like polished pewter in his tanned face. When they were together all those years ago, he’d worn his black hair pulled back in a short ponytail, but the regulation highway-patrol buzz cut wasn’t bad at all. A little austere, maybe, but Pete had always been a straight-arrow kind of guy at heart.

That was why he’d married her in the first place, right? You got a girl in trouble, you took responsibility. If you were lucky, she lost the baby and set you free.

Her ex-husband had been nothing but lucky.

Blowing an irritated breath off her lower lip, Mary Rose put the car in gear, checked for traffic and eased into the sparse flow. Pete followed in his cruiser; while she kept the needle carefully set at sixty, he breezed past her with a wave.

“Oh, of course.” She hit the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Mr. Big Shot doesn’t have to obey the speed limit.” She threw him a furious glance as he took the next exit, once again vanishing from her life.

Or maybe not. He had grown up in New Skye, graduated in the same class with her older sister, Kate. Did he still live there? What were the chances she might see him again while she was in town?

Mary Rose shuddered at the thought, tempted to turn around and head straight back to Charleston, damn the speed limit.

But running away was not an option. Kate was in deep trouble. She sounded more desperate with every phone call.

And not even the possibility of another encounter with the man she’d never quite managed to forget was going to keep Mary Rose from standing by her sister during the worst days of her life.

Fifteen minutes after leaving her ex-husband behind, Mary Rose took the interstate exit for the town of New Skye, North Carolina. She hadn’t been home for at least six years; her final Christmas in college had been her last visit, despite her parents’ repeated invitations. Nobody climbed the ladder of success in the business world by indulging themselves with extended vacations. This was the first time since graduate school she’d taken off more than five business days in a row.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if she never saw her family. They all spent a week together in the condo at the beach every summer and a week skiing in Colorado every January. She talked to her parents once a week and chatted with Kate and her kids whenever either of them had a spare hour or so. That was as much family togetherness as Mary Rose, personally, could stand.

So now she studied her hometown with interest as she drove through. The outskirts of New Skye—with its service stations and fast-food restaurants, the water-treatment plant, the police academy, the firefighters’ training tower—could have been any small town in the Southeast. Plenty of asphalt, few trees and the flat Sand-hills landscape did little to invite a traveler to linger longer than it took to get a tank of gas.

But then she turned off the commercial strip to drive slowly along Main Street, toward Courthouse Circle. This wasn’t the dead downtown scene she remembered from her high-school years. On each side of the newly bricked street, antique shops, coffee bars and cafés inhabited what had once been empty storefronts, or worse, bars and pickup joints. The old movie house had been renovated and was showing an art film she’d seen advertised recently in New York. Huge pots of pansies and daffodils punctuated the sidewalks underneath newly-leafing pear trees.

Mary Rose clicked her tongue in amazement. New Skye had certainly changed for the better in her absence.

She was glad to see that some things remained the same, like the Victorian elegance of the county courthouse, standing tall on its island of bright green grass. Traffic circled around the red brick, white-columned building, one of the oldest in town—the fire of 1876 had destroyed all of the business district except the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the courthouse and the Velvet Rose Tavern. Thankfully, the Velvet Rose had succumbed to its own fire only a couple of decades later. The downtown branch of the public library—still functioning, still imposing with its white marble—had been built in its place.

On the far side of Courthouse Circle, Main Street followed a single hill rising up out of the flat terrain. On top were some of New Skye’s finest residences, built mostly in the early 1900s, though a few dated back to before “The War.” Mary Rose doubted that the folks in Charleston, where an old building might claim construction in 1725, would be terribly impressed with New Skye’s “historic district.” Looking at the area with a fresh perspective, though, she thought the wide porches, fancy columns and wrought-iron fences were charming.

Kate’s home was one of the largest and grandest on The Hill. A semicircular porch graced the front of the three-story white house; the magnolias flanking either side of the brick walk must have been fifty feet tall and a hundred years old. Thankful to be done with driving, Mary Rose parked at the curb and got out, stretching her arms above her head.

As she started across the grass, the front door opened and her sister stepped onto the porch, looking for all the world like a Southern belle from the distant past. A cloud of soft dark curls framed her oval face and graceful neck. She was tall and slender…alarmingly so.

“Have you forgotten how to fry chicken and cook gravy?” Mary Rose took hold of her sister with a tight hug. “You’re skinny as a rail.”

Kate pulled back to laugh at her. “Says the woman who weighs all of a hundred pounds.”

“One thirty-five, as a matter of fact. I’ve developed a passion for frappuccino with my morning bagel.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’ve got a café here on The Hill that makes them perfectly. Come into the house.” They stepped out of warm spring sunlight into the cool, gleaming perfection of Kate’s home.