A Rare Chance Read Online Free

location, to be able to afford her fourth-floor condominium with roof rights. She liked her life in Boston. She didn’t need to be looking over her shoulder for a couple of ex-detectives.
    She still had the cookie bag with Cam Yeager’s phone number and address in her leather tote.
    She slowed. Two people were standing on the front stoop. An old man and a honey-haired woman.
    Gabriella held her breath.
    Scag and Lizzie. Tony Scagliotti and Lizzie Fairfax. Her father and her best friend. She hadn’t seen either of them in a year. That they’d pick today of all days to show up was somehow inevitable. And undoubtedly, Gabriella thought, not good news.

Chapter
Two
    G abriella had to invite them upstairs to her apartment. If Pete Darrow were skulking about out on Marlborough, she didn’t want him to see them and report back to Titus and Joshua Reading until she had more information. She’d promised the Readings she was through with Tony Scagliotti. He wouldn’t come back to haunt her, embarrass her, or spirit her off to faraway places in search of rare and endangered orchids. He had his life. She had hers. That was that.
    Except, of course, that wasn’t that. Scag was still Scag, and graceful exits weren’t his style. Deep down, Gabriella had known he would turn up again. It had been like that her whole life. He would go away; he would come back. Before she had died, her mother, who had been a talented Cape Cod florist he’d never married, had helped her to accept Scag for who he was, even as she’d encouraged her only child not to be like him. He was a world-renowned expert on orchids, an eccentric, opinionated crusader on their behalf More than thirty thousand species of orchids existed, and Tony Scagliotti had devoted his life to seeing them all, discovering new species, protecting those that were rare and endangered. It didn’t matter where an orchid was: war zones, crocodile-infested swamps, isolated mountaintops, other people’s land. If it intrigued him, he would go.
    For two years, Gabriella had gone with him.
    Now she breezed on ahead of him and, as a result, didn’t really notice his limp until they’d reached her fourth-floor apartment. He carried a cane, but she’d assumed it was an affectation. Tony Scagliotti in the big city, back on his home turf, playing the dapper old man. But when she pushed open her apartment door and let him go past her, she saw he was stooped, his face gray and wracked with pain.
    â€œScag?”
    He grunted. “Yeah?”
    Gabriella swallowed, studying him as he hobbled into her apartment. His dark, full-of-the-devil eyes had gone yellow and watery. He was a wiry man, not tall, with iron-gray hair and ageless features. He was seventy-five but could pass for sixty or ninety, depending on what windmills he happened to be tilting at.
    It looked as if lately they’d been nasty windmills.
    Lizzie Fairfax eased in behind him, her natural elegance in no way undermined by her attire of jeans and expensive cowboy boots. “He hurt himself last week. In Ecuador. He had an accident.”
    Scag swung around, irritated. “I fell out of a goddamned tree. Lizzie here had me dragged out of the hospital and flown up to Miami. She insisted I come up to Boston to recuperate.” He collapsed onto Gabriella’s overstuffed sofa. “Couple weeks, I’ll be fit as a fiddle.”
    Lizzie’s eyes met Gabriella’s, just for an instant. It was enough. Scag was underplaying his injury. He was hurt worse than he wanted to admit, at least to his only daughter. Gabriella suppressed a wave of worry, frustration, anger, fear—the same furious mix of emotions that always assaulted her when she was around her father.
    â€œWe got here on Tuesday,” Lizzie said. “I’m staying at my parents’ place. Scag’s rented a room in Cambridge.”
    In other words, he wouldn’t be mooching off his