Page 3 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

Then I left on the first ferry off Lopez Island the next morning.

I never came back.

Until now.

Chapter one

The Reluctant Return

Ethan

The ferry's horn blared as it approached Lopez Island, and I tightened my grip on my leather briefcase. I'd managed to avoid this place for twenty years, and now I was sailing straight back into it like the past two decades of distance meant nothing.

The salt air hit me first—sharp and familiar in a way that made my chest constrict. Then the sight of the San Juan Islands rising from the grey-blue water, their tree-covered slopes unchanged, eternal. Lopez Island sat among them like a secret, small and unassuming. People moved there when they wanted to disappear.

By thirty-eight, I'd built myself into everything I wasn't as a teenager: a successful lawyer with a corner office in Seattle, impeccable suits that cost more than my mother's monthly rent used to, and a reputation for being coldly efficient. Clients paid premium rates for Ethan Caldwell's expertise because I closed deals, managed risk, and never let emotion cloud my judgment.

Which made this assignment particularly ironic.

I straightened my charcoal suit jacket as the ferry docked, ignoring the excited chatter of tourists around me with their hiking boots and cameras. They saw Lopez Island as a charming weekend getaway, I saw it as a forty-eight-hour assignment.

Get in. Assess the properties. Provide the investment group with a clean legal strategy. Get out.

Simple. Professional. Nothing personal.

The lie tasted bitter even as I told it to myself.

I sat in my new Mercedes SUV—sleek black GLE, still smelling of leather and that scent of expensive German engineering—and watched other vehicles file off the ferry ahead of me. My hands gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white, as families in minivans and couples in Subarus drove past, eager to start their island adventures.

The ferry worker—a weathered man in his sixties wearing a fluorescent vest—motioned impatiently for me to drive off. "Let's go! You're holding up the line!"

I forced my hands to relax, shifted into drive, and guided the Mercedes down the ramp onto Lopez Island soil. The SUV's suspension absorbed the transition smoothly, a stark contrast to my old rust-bucket Honda that I thought was going to fall apart with every bump.

Everything about me was different now. Better. More successful.

So why did I feel like that angry eighteen-year-old again, hands shaking as I gripped a steering wheel and contemplated running?

The island hadn't changed. Same small-town charm, same unhurried pace, same friendly waves from locals who recognized the ferry passengers as either neighbors or tourists. I kept my head down and my sunglasses on as I drove through the small-town center, the Mercedes drawing a few curious glances from islanders used to more practical vehicles.

No one recognized me. Why would they? The angry eighteen-year-old with too-long hair and a chip on his shoulder bore little resemblance to the polished attorney in Italian leather shoes driving an eighty-thousand-dollar SUV. Even my mother barely recognized me on occasion when I visited Florida.

"You're so careful now," she'd said last Christmas, watching me organize the dinner table with efficiency. "Like you're afraid if you let go for one second, everything will fall apart."

"That's called being responsible, Mom."

"That's called still running," she'd replied, but she'd smiled when she said it. Sarah Caldwell had earned the right to call her son out on his nonsense. She'd worked three jobs to keep us afloat after my father left, and she'd never once made me feel like I was the reason things were hard.

I owed her everything. Which was why I'd spent twenty years building a career that could give her the retirement she deserved—her and Paul, the good man who’d married her ten years ago and had treated her like she was precious ever since.

This deal was just another step in maintaining that life. The investment group paid well, and my cut would fund another year of my mother's comfortable retirement.

Forty-eight hours. Just forty-eight hours.

Richard Sterling's law office sat on the main street, sandwiched between a café and a bookstore. The building was older than I remembered, or maybe I was just noticing details I'd been too angry to see at eighteen. The weathered wood siding, the hand-painted sign, the window boxes with flowers that someone actually tended.

It looked like a place where people practiced law because they cared about their neighbors, not because they were chasing billable hours.

I parked the Mercedes in front of the office, noting how out of place it looked among the pickup trucks and aging sedans. I grabbed my briefcase and pushed open the door. A bell chimed.