LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      “NO TAKERS FOR the Nocturnal Turtle Tour?” asked Isla MacLeay as she scrubbed at her face, hoping her father couldn’t see that it was, as it had been for the past three days, stained with tears.

      “Not tonight. I thought we had some takers, but...” Her father looked out at the huge expanse of beach before them. “I guess getting the sanctuary established is going to be a bit more of a task than I thought. Here you are, lassie.”

      She felt one of her father’s soft cotton handkerchiefs brush against her hand. She took it with a smile she knew didn’t reach her eyes as her heart cinched tight. It was the second time this week he’d acted like a “real dad.”

      If getting dumped a week before her wedding was all it took to get his attention, she would’ve faked a wedding years ago.

      Before her father had found her she’d been sitting against a palm tree, next to the little tote bag that held her diary and her increasingly eclectic pen collection, almost enjoying quietly sniffling away as silvery moonlight bathed the idyllic crescent of beach, where palm leaves murmured in the light breeze as the warm Caribbean sea lapped and teased at the pure white sand.

      She’d come a long way from her little Scottish home in Loch Craggen, but tonight the beach had been as far as she’d been prepared to go.

      She had kissed her father goodnight when he’d pulled out yet another one of his huge folders full of plans for the El Valderon Turtle Sanctuary and, not being sleepy, had strolled to the beach for a bit of a sob, leaving the low-slung buildings of the sanctuary behind her, and losing herself to the beautiful cove which they surrounded.

      The billowing foam arcing atop the waves surging in from the Caribbean Sea reminded her of a delicate glass of fizz, just about to overflow. Not that she was used to champagne being popped and poured at the drop of a hat. Her fiancé—her ex-fiancé—hadn’t really been one to plump for that sort of thing. Not for her, anyway.

      Remembering his words had fresh tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. Just in case she hadn’t understood what “I’ve fallen in love with someone else” meant...he’d gone on to make it plain as day.

       “How could I marry you? It wouldn’t be fair. To either of us. Sorry, babes. Now that I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of life off Craggen it’s plain as day. I’m a world traveler. And, as much as it pains me to say it, you’re a boring, rule-abiding, science nerd. It’s just not my scene, darlin’. Ciao!”

       Ciao?

      The man had only flown to Italy once. He’d not even left the airport and now he was fluent?

      Pffft. That showed her for falling for pretty words and a handsome face. She saw it now. Plain as the hand in front of her face. Kyle had only wanted someone reliable until something better came along. The next man she met and fell for would be a nerd through and through.

       “There’s nothing wrong with being reliable as a millstone.”

      When her grandmother had said it, it had sounded like a good thing.

      When Kyle had said it she’d instantly heard the bell toll for the end of their marriage plans.

      She couldn’t help but wonder how others might have reacted—what people who were perky flight attendants in Europe might have been inclined to say.

      Not that she’d met Kyle’s new girlfriend. Girlfriend! But the rumor mill ran stronger than the mountain rivers that flowed into the inky depths of Loch Craggen. Apparently the new girlfriend was absolutely adorable and soooo sophisticated.

      What was wrong with corduroy skirts, woolly tights and hand-knitted jumpers? It was cold in Loch Craggen. Even in August.

      Which was precisely why she had packed just about nothing appropriate for her last-minute trip El Valderon. Was there anything appropriate, apart from mourning clothes? She wasn’t mourning Kyle, exactly. But she did feel she was mourning the loss of something intangible. Either way, she needed new clothes and had promised to take herself shopping. One of these days.

       Pop! Pop! Pop!

      Startled into the present, she stared with her father out into the inky darkness as the moon slid behind a cloud.

      “What was that?”

      Despite the late-night tropical heat, goose bumps rippled up Isla’s arms, then shot down her back.

      It wasn’t a sudden chill she felt.

      It was fear.

      She pressed her fingers to her eyes, gave them a quick rub, then pinged them open, forcing herself to adjust to the inky darkness.

      “Dad?” She couldn’t see him. He’d been right beside her a second ago!

      Fear clashed with an age-old anger. Had he run off toward the danger, instead of staying with her when she truly needed him?

      She squinted out into the darkness.

      The gunfire sounded again.

      “Dad? Daddy! Are you all right?”

      Where was he?

      Her heart pounded against her chest. Isla hadn’t called her father “daddy” in years. Decades, even. At thirty-one years old she was a grown woman. A doctor. But fear had a way of reducing a girl to her essential self. A little girl who’d come halfway round the world to seek solace from her father when her heart had been smashed into a thousand little pieces.

      None of that mattered now.

      An anguished male scream broke through the roar of blood in her head as rapid-fire Spanish was lobbed from one end of the cove to the other.

      She didn’t have to be a doctor to know the sound of pain, but she was thanking heaven that she was. It narrowed her focus. Pushed away the fear. Gave her something to do: help.

      She spun round and saw a young man clutching his shoulder. Her heart lurched into her throat. She saw blood pouring between his fingers. Oh no. He’d been hit.

      Everything slowed down, as if she were in a frame-by-frame film sequence.

      The atmosphere at the oceanside cove had flipped from tranquil to chaotic in little more than the blink of an eye. One minute she’d been quietly sobbing her heart out about her wreck of a life and the next... Gunfire and shouting erupted from each of the two heavily armed groups facing off against each other.

      So these were the men her father had said “might bear a bit of a grudge” against the sanctuary.

      The man stumbling toward her must have been caught in the crossfire between The El Valderon Turtle Sanctuary’s security guards and the tattooed, slick-haired members of Noche Blanca—the ragtag but reportedly vicious, mafia-type

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