The fact she’d put her life on hold to care for her orphaned niece was laudable, but at the same time put her strictly out of bounds.

Ryan wasn’t looking for that level of complexity or intimacy in his relationships.

He’d had his fill of parenthood at an age when most kids had barely discovered the meaning of sex.

Without the plea from Brittany asking him to check on her friend, he would have stayed the hell away from her, and now that he had the facts, he was starting to wish he had.

He understood her situation better than she could possibly have imagined, which made the power of the sexual connection an inconvenience he was determined to ignore.

A woman with a child was not part of his game plan, and the fact that the child wasn’t biologically hers made no difference. White knight was a role he avoided, right along with women who made noises about weddings and settling down.

Juliet Fox.

Brittany obviously hadn’t mentioned his past. If Emily had known the truth, she definitely would have closed the door in his face.

With a soft curse he turned to his laptop and hit a couple of keys.

He started by searching the internet. He knew where to look to get the information he needed, and once he’d found everything he could without going deeper he reached for his phone and made one call.

“Larry?”

“Hey, stranger.”

He could imagine his old colleague and adversary hunched over his untidy desk with papers overflowing over every square inch of space. “Slow news day?”

“Why would you care about the news? I thought you’d retired, yacht boy.”

“I have, but the paper I saw today was enough to send a person to sleep. Lana Fox on the front page. What’s that about?”

“Why do you care? Not exactly your area of interest, and anyway, last time I heard, all you read was tide tables. Are you thinking of coming back to the real world?”

“No. I’m just curious.”

“Curious is one step from coming out of retirement.”

“I’m not retired. I changed direction.” Ryan picked up his beer, blocked out images that still kept him awake at night and stared at the information on his computer screen. “Tell me what you know about her.”

“Lana Fox? She’s dead.”

“Yeah, I got that part. I was hoping for a little more depth.”

“Depth and Lana Fox aren’t words that sit comfortably together. What do I know? Total wacko. How she managed to hold it together in front of a camera, no one knows. Rumor has it they were threatening to fire her from her last film because she lost so many days on set.”

Ryan stretched out his legs and stared out to sea. “The paper mentioned a kid.” A kid she’d left in the care of an aunt she’d never met.