Now That I've Found You (New York Sullivans #1)(7)

She also needed to take a shower, put on some dry clothes, and eat something. A little sleep would probably do her a world of good. But first, she needed to get out of Montauk and find a new town to hide out in. One where gorgeous men in general-store parking lots didn’t make her heart race even when she knew better.

But when she pushed her foot down harder on the gas pedal, her car suddenly began to make noises. Really bad, loud noises.

This couldn’t be happening.

Her car couldn’t actually be breaking down on top of everything else, could it?





Chapter Four





The woman from the cliffs had peeled out of the parking lot in her beat-up old car faster than she should have. Drake didn’t know her—didn’t even know her name—but he was worried nonetheless.

He’d seen that kind of bleak look before. Whenever his mother’s name came up, even after all these years, all the color would drain from his father’s face. Thirty years after her disappearance and death, William Sullivan’s pain hadn’t dimmed.

Likewise, whatever had happened had obviously hurt this woman deeply. Especially considering how spooked she’d seemed by every word out of Drake’s mouth.

He’d never thought he would see her again, never thought he’d get to drink her in up close, never thought he’d have a chance to memorize the perfect, exotic planes of her face. He’d already done more than he should have by sketching her, then had left his cottage to make sure he didn’t give in to the pull to bring her to life on a canvas. But now...

Now the itch to paint her had spun into deep desire. The kind of urgent drive to paint that an artist waited his whole life to feel.

Drake didn’t realize he was still holding the woman’s apples and cookie until the cookie crumbled in his fist. Wet dough and chocolate chips were smushed between his fingers as he walked over to the garbage can by the front door and threw the cookie away. After he let the rain wash away the crumbs on his hands, he dropped an apple into each pocket and finally headed inside.

“Drake, sweetie, we haven’t seen you all week.”

Mona Agnew had manned the general store’s till for the past thirty years, ever since she and her husband had opened the doors. Despite the fact that she was a tad on the nosy side—particularly when it came to his love life—he far preferred shopping here to the new chain grocery store just up the road. Drake had always appreciated places with some life to them, which was why the old hunting cabin at Montauk Point suited him perfectly.

“How are you, Mona?”

“Just fine. I’ve saved one of those fresh-baked apple pies you like so much. Why don’t you take care of your shopping while I get it out of the back for you?”

He grabbed a hand basket and was picking up his usual chicken and veggies when his gaze caught on a magazine cover. Stopping dead, he put down the basket and grabbed the glossy magazine, hardly able to believe his eyes.

The girl from the cliffs was on the cover.

In most ways she barely looked like the woman wearing tons of mascara and blood-red lipstick and dripping with jewelry—but he’d just stared into those eyes and he couldn’t be mistaken.

As much as he sometimes wished he could, he didn’t live under a rock, so he knew the Bouchards were the reality TV family on the networks these days. He’d never seen their show, however, and had never met any of them in person either. Not until—the magazine said her name was Rosalind, which didn’t seem quite right, though he couldn’t pinpoint why—Rosalind showed up out of the blue on the cliffs this morning.

His gut clenched as the headline finally registered. America’s Favorite Bad Girl: Nude Photo Scandal? Or Another Brilliant Business Move for the Bouchards?

Was that why she’d been crying? Why she’d hurled her phone over the edge? Why she looked so bleak?

He’d never taken naked pictures on his phone, but he knew plenty of people did it. Had some sexy photos she’d taken for a boyfriend been hacked into and broadcast for the whole world to see?

Drake had enough brushes with fame—and enough famous relatives—to know there was likely less than ten percent truth to anything written in this magazine. But where he’d just barely managed to keep from painting her, now there was no way he could stop himself from flipping open the magazine and reading the article.

It took less than a paragraph to make him angry. According to the article, someone on one of her TV crews had secretly placed cameras throughout her hotel room on location in the Virgin Islands—and then the scumbag had sold them for an “unverified but hefty” sum to the worst gossip site on the Web, which had then resold the pictures everywhere possible. Evidently, her family was “furious” and “working to prosecute the man who took and sold the pictures, to the furthest extent of the law.” Rosalind was “recuperating from the shock” and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Recuperating? Like hell she was. She was sobbing and shivering on a clifftop fifteen hundred miles from Miami.

In this magazine, the stolen pictures had been reprinted with red stars over the most private parts of Rosalind’s body, but they didn’t really hide anything.

And Drake hated himself for looking.

He slapped the magazine shut and shoved it into the back of the stand behind an issue of Log Home. But her beautiful face—and barely covered body—was on the covers of half a dozen others.