Carolina Isle by Jude Deveraux Page B

the time she acts like she hates me. The stories I could tell you! Oh, well, where was I?”
    Sara narrowed her eyes at him. “Mr. Dunkirk,” she said stiffly.
    â€œOh, yeah. My best friend. Charley has a wife he pretends is a pest to him, but he’s mad about her. Former beauty queen.” He glanced at Sara. “She grew up in Arundel.”
    Sara said nothing. What could she say? Ask where the woman lived in town? If Ariel heard the address she’d know if the woman lived above or below the cotton mill.
    â€œAnyway, Charley came to me and said thathis wife, Katlyn, wanted him to buy an island off the coast of Arundel and he wanted
me
to take a look at it.”
    â€œWhy you?”
    â€œI have no idea. Charley didn’t know either. At first he thought Kat and I had something going on, but—”
    â€œYou wouldn’t do that to your best friend, would you?”
    â€œNot unless she—” R.J. was grinning, but at one look at Sara’s face, he stopped smiling. “Of course I wouldn’t. Code of honor, that sort of thing. Anyway, Charley told me that Kat wanted him to buy an island and open a resort on it. A rich resort. He said …”
    R.J. sat up a bit straighter and deepened his voice. When he spoke, he sounded very much like Mr. Dunkirk, but Sara as Ariel wasn’t supposed to know that, so she had to work to keep from laughing.
    â€œâ€˜No twenty-grand-a-year, Mom-and-Pop-with-the-kids place,’” R.J. said in Charley Dunkirk’s voice. “‘I want celebrities. Multimillionaires who crave privacy. This King’s Isle is the only island left that hasn’t already been exploited.It’s like the place has been left for me. It has flat land on one end that could be used for an airstrip. There’s no beach, but what’s a beach? Sand, right? So we bring in some sand.’ “
    Sara had to look away again to keep from laughing, but R.J. saw the muscle in her jaw twitching so he went on.
    â€œâ€˜I was thinking of an island in the Caribbean, but Kat wants North Carolina, so that’s what I’m gonna give her. Maybe she wants a business to run after I’m gone. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know why, but she wants
you
to go look at the place for me. You’ll do it?’”
    R.J. returned to his normal voice. “I told him I’d look at the island and that I’d even take my camera.”
    â€œâ€˜Vacation,’” R.J.-as-Charley said. “‘This could be a vacation for you. I’m gonna take one of those one of these days.’ Sure you are, I told him. We all are. One of these days.”
    Sara kept looking out the side window. She remembered the day she’d seen Mr. Dunkirk half carried out of R.J.’s office. She’d thought then that R.J. had made the old man drunk on purpose, but maybe Charley Dunkirk was just a drinker.
    â€œSo you agreed to help an old friend,” she said.
    â€œNot without doing a lot of research first. It took a lot of work.”
    Sara had a vivid vision of R.J. stretched out on the big leather couch in his office, his laptop on his chest. Lot of work, indeed! “Didn’t Sara write me about helping you find out about the island?”
    R.J. looked in the rearview mirror at David and Ariel, then lowered his voice. “Naw, she was too busy helping me tie up loose ends so I could go. I did the research by myself.”
    â€œAnd who said Hercules had a lot of tasks?”
    He laughed. “Yeah, okay, so I dump a lot into her capable hands, but I did find out about King’s Isle myself.”
    â€œAnd what did you discover?”
    â€œNothing that you, as a resident of Arundel, don’t know.”
    â€œIt’s always nice to hear an outsider’s point of view,” she said, smiling. “So enlighten me.”
    â€œIt’s a weird place.”
    â€œEveryone in Arundel knows that. But what makes it