LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE PARTY WAS in full swing. Vehicles, mostly expensive ones, lined both sides of the street. Slowing his SUV out front, Cedar could see the shadows of people milling around behind the sheer drapes that covered the massive windows. Men, women...indeterminate ages.

      He could almost hear the laughter and the conversation. Figured most of it would be sincere.

      Heather wouldn’t surround herself with fakes.

      In black jeans and a new button-down, black-and-white striped shirt, he started to feel underdressed. Thought about taking off.

      Judging by the quiet surrounding him outside, there were no other late arrivals. His entrance could cause a stir.

      She’d invited him to her engagement party.

      As someone who paid attention to people—although, admittedly, he’d used what he got to his own advantage—he was curious why his ex-lover and, he privately suspected, the one woman he’d ever loved, had issued that invitation. Curious enough to maneuver into a spot between two sparkling-clean SUVs and pocket his keys.

      He’d have stayed anyway, curious or not. His goal was atonement.

      It didn’t come easy.

      * * *

      “YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL...”

      In a figure-hugging, short black dress and matching wedge heels, with her blond hair in a sophisticated updo, Heather smiled as yet another of her parents’ friends spoke to her as she passed by on her way to somewhere else. She’d occasionally worn the dress clubbing in LA, but had little reason to put it on now that she was back in Santa Raquel full-time. She exchanged a few more pleasantries, acknowledging that, yes, her independent polygraph business of five years was thriving, and moved on.

      She was looking for Charles. She’d seen him a total of five minutes max since they’d arrived at her parents’ beachfront home, just down the road from Charles’s house—and ten minutes from her own beachside bungalow.

      Fifteen years her senior, her fiancé was handsome. Fit. A dentist who was actually popular with his patients. He had a way of putting people at ease. She’d known him since he’d moved into her parents’ neighborhood after his divorce ten years before; she’d been home visiting while on break from college. And she’d started dating him the previous summer, when they hooked up at a neighborhood Fourth of July bash she’d attended with her folks.

      Because she’d been too lame to have plans of her own.

      Or a date.

      She

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