Knox's Heatwave (Coastline Kings MC #4)

Prologue

Mila

The brief came in a manila folder, which should have been my first warning.

Nobody used paper anymore. Roland Calder did. He liked the weight of things in a person's hands, liked the small ceremony of sliding a folder across a glass table and watching them open it. It made the work feel inevitable. Like it had already happened and you were only being shown the proof.

I'd worked for him four times before that morning.

Each time the folder had been a little thicker, the table a little higher up some glass tower, the view behind his head a little more expensive.

He collected coastlines the way other men collect watches, and he'd learned that I was the instrument that wound them.

We were not friends. We were not even, in any sense that would have comforted my mother, colleagues.

We were two people who had found a use for each other and had the manners not to pretend it was more than that.

His office that day was forty floors above a harbor of its own — a real one, gray and industrial, cranes instead of churches — and he'd positioned the chair so I'd have to look at it while we talked. Roland never wasted a sightline.

"Cala Sirena," he said. "Ever heard of it?"

"No."

"Good. Neither has anyone else. That's the point."

I opened the folder. Aerial photographs, mostly. A crescent of coastline somewhere on the underside of Italy, all white cliff and blue water and a harbor full of boats so small they looked like seeds spilled across the bay.

Pretty. I'd seen a hundred pretty places get flattened into parking and infinity pools, and I'd written the words that helped do it.

"There's a working harbor," Calder said, tapping the photo. "Fishing fleet. A few dive operations. Some bar that's been there since the war. The land underneath all of it is worth more than the entire town has earned in a century."

"And you want it."

"I want the assessment that lets me want it.

" He smiled. Calder had a good smile, expensive and even, the kind that had been corrected into existence over years.

"The council's split. Half of them see the money.

The other half have grandparents buried up the hill and feelings about it.

They've agreed to commission an independent report.

Tourism viability, community impact, the whole tasteful package.

Whatever it concludes, both sides have agreed to abide by it. "

"Independent," I repeated.

"That's where you come in." He leaned back. "You have a reputation, Mila. The byline that doesn't take sides. The woman who tells the hard truth about charming little places that have outlived their usefulness. They'll trust you because you're not me."

I didn't answer right away.

I leafed through the rest of the folder instead.

A demographic breakdown. A fuel-cost table.

A survey of the council members with little notes beside each name in Calder's hand — amenable, sentimental, owns property on the bluff.

He'd done his homework. He always did. That was the thing people got wrong about Roland Calder: they thought he was lazy because he was rich.

He was the least lazy man I'd ever worked for.

"You've already mapped the votes," I said.

"I map everything." He folded his hands.

"What I can't map is which way a town leans when a stranger walks its streets and asks it questions.

That's a thing only a person can do. A person they'll talk to.

A person they'll trust." He tilted his head.

"You're that person, or you wouldn't be sitting in my office. "

"Flattery's expensive in your hands," I said. "What does it cost me."

"Nothing you weren't already going to spend.

" He almost smiled. "Three weeks. Your honest read.

And the particular gift you have, which is that you can stand in the most beautiful place on earth and still see the arithmetic underneath it.

Most people can't. Most people get there and the view does their thinking for them.

" He let that land. "I'm hiring the one person the view has never once persuaded. "

I should tell you who I was, sitting in that office.

I was thirty-four and I was good at exactly one thing, and it was this.

I wrote about places. I wrote about whether a coastline should keep its fishermen or trade them for a resort, whether a mountain village was a heritage site or just a slow-motion failure with a nice view.

I told the truth as I saw it, and I saw it cold.

That was the part people got wrong about me. They thought Calder bought me. He didn't. He hired me because the truth, more often than not, agreed with him. Charming places die. They die whether or not you build the resort. The resort just makes the dying profitable.

I'd grown up in a town like Cala Sirena.

Different sea, same idea. A harbor full of men who fixed nets and complained about the catch and called it a life.

My father was one of them. He spent forty years romancing a way of living that was already dead, and he handed me the bill for that romance, and I paid it in full before I was twenty.

There was no money. That's the part the postcards leave out.

There was a house that leaned toward the water and a boat that ate every spare coin and a mother who took in laundry and a father who could read the weather off the surface of the sea but could not, to save his life, read a bank statement.

We were rich in things that don't spend.

Sunsets. Stories. A name everyone on the dock knew and nobody beyond it had ever heard.

I learned early that charm is what a place offers you instead of a future, and I learned to want the future more.

So no. I didn't go soft over white cliffs and little blue boats. I'd watched what those places do to the people who can't bring themselves to leave.

"You file the report," Calder said. "Honest, thorough, every box ticked.

If it lands where I think it'll land, the council green-lights the development and you've done nothing but tell the truth.

If it doesn't —" he spread his hands, magnanimous "— then I've misjudged the place, and I'll thank you for saving me a fortune. "

"You don't believe that."

"Not for a second. But I admire how it sounds."

"There's one thing in the file that isn't in the file," I said.

"The reason you're using paper. The reason you flew me here in person instead of emailing a brief like a normal man.

" I closed the folder and set my hand flat on it.

"There's something about this place that's harder than the others. What is it."

Calder's smile didn't change, which is how I knew I'd hit the bone.

"A motorcycle club," he said, after a moment.

"Thirty years on that coast. Bar, garage, fishing co-op, half the town's loyalty.

The council half-fears them and half-relies on them.

They've stopped two developments before mine, dead, and I never could prove how.

" He let the words sit. "They won't show up in your survey as a problem.

They'll show up as charm. That's their whole trick.

They'll be helpful. They'll be hospitable.

And somewhere in all that hospitality your report will quietly come out their way and you won't even feel it happen. "

He slid one more photograph across the glass.

Not aerial, this one. Ground level, taken with a long lens — a row of men outside a bar, leather and forearms and easy postures, the kind of photograph a man takes of people he intends to defeat.

I didn't pick it up. I'd learned not to handle the things Calder wanted me handling.

"Which one's the problem?" I asked.

"All of them. None of them. That's the trouble." He tapped the glass beside a figure half-turned from the camera, laughing at something out of frame. "But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the one who looks like he isn't trying. They always send the one who looks like he isn't trying."

"It won't happen to me."

"No," he agreed. "That's why I'm using paper. So you'll remember, when they're smiling at you, that I told you first."

"When do I leave?"

He'd already booked the flight. Of course he had.

The thing they don't tell you about arriving somewhere beautiful is how much it feels like an ambush.

I came down the coast road in a hired car with the windows open because the air conditioning had given up an hour outside Naples, and the heat poured in like something liquid.

It was the second week of July and the radio had been saying ondata di calore in a tone of mild alarm — a heatwave, the worst in a decade, settling over the south like a hand pressed flat against the land.

I didn't care about the heat. I cared about the road.

It clung to the cliff the way a thought clings to the edge of a dream, all switchbacks and blind corners and drops that fell straight into a sea so blue it looked fake.

Lemon trees in terraced rows. Bougainvillea spilling magenta over walls the color of old bone.

Every turn was a postcard, and I hated each one a little, because I knew what the postcards cost.

A scooter passed me on a blind bend, a boy and a girl on it, no helmets, her arms around his waist and her head thrown back laughing.

They cut the corner like they were immortal.

I gripped the wheel and let them go and thought, the way I always think when I watch people be young in beautiful places: they have no idea yet what it takes from you.