It had been hard enough keeping his hands off her when they were at Caddo, but that last night in the motel had snapped his self-control. He’d spent too many hours with her pressed against his back, too many days watching those green-flecked brown eyes flash tornado signals at him whenever she felt vulnerable.

He raised his fist to knock on the door again, then let his arm fall. What was the point of apologizing? The last thing she wanted right now was to see any more of him.

He headed down the musty old hallway and up the stairs of this haunted house he hadn’t been able to stop himself from buying. The life he’d lived had given him more than enough emotional shit to deal with. He didn’t need more, especially not with the daughter of the fucking president of the United States.

He couldn’t get off this island fast enough.

LUCY AVOIDED PANDA THE NEXT morning by slipping out through the sliding doors in her bedroom onto the deck that led to the backyard. She rode her bike into town and had coffee and a muffin at one of the Painted Frog’s outside café tables. Other than some assessing glances at her hair and tattoo from a couple of teenage girls, no one paid any attention to her. The feeling of leaving Lucy Jorik behind was heady.

After she finished, she rode toward the north tip of the island. She loved the island’s shabby edges. This was no playground for the rich and famous. Plumbers and shoe salesmen came here. Kids who attended state colleges and families pushing babies in Walmart strollers. If Mat and Nealy hadn’t come into her life, a place like this would have been her fantasy vacation spot.

The Fourth of July was almost two weeks away, but boaters were already out on the water. She passed a farm, then a wooden shack with a hand-lettered sign advertising the BEST SMOKED WHITEFISH ON THE ISLAND. A small inland lake spiked with cattails lay on her left, a marsh spread to her right, with the bigger body of Lake Michigan beyond that. Gradually the hardwoods shading the road gave way to pine, and then the trees disappeared altogether as the road narrowed into the exposed point of the island.

A lighthouse rose from a bedrock landscape that had long ago been swept clean by glaciers. She abandoned her bike and picked her way along a path. She nodded at the lighthouse keeper tending some orange impatiens in wooden planters near the door. Beyond the building, a jetty jutted into the water. The lake was calm today, but she imagined this place during a storm, with waves crashing over the rocks.