Sail With Me: A With Me in Seattle Universe Novel

by Jen Talty

  “Fair enough.” She headed down toward her cabin she shared with Milia now that Kim had left the ship, only Darcie didn’t want to go there. She stopped at the crew mess for a quick snack. She pulled open every cabinet three times, and the only thing that was even remotely appealing was the bag of Oreo cookies.

  Well, that would go right to her hips.

  Who cared? She pulled them from the cabinet and ripped them open just as Milia appeared. “Preston finally went to bed.”

  “He was pretty hammered.”

  “I bet he sleeps until noon.” Milia pulled out the milk and poured two glasses.

  Having girl-bonding time was the last thing Darcie wanted. “Preston might be a nasty drunk, but he bounces back quickly.”

  “He and Reid were going at it pretty good after dinner. Something about a girl. Erin?”

  “I heard part of it.” Darcie didn’t want to gossip about Reid’s past, or his late girlfriend, with the chief stew. “It’s best to just leave that one alone.”

  Holding her phone up, she found the text thread with Jagar. “I’m sorry. I need to talk with my brother.”

  “No worries. I’ll just take these to our room. See you in a bit.” Milia snagged a few more treats and scurried off down the tight hallway.

  Darcie hadn’t been lying when she said she needed to have a chat with her brother, but she just didn’t want to listen to Milia anymore.

  Darcie: Why did you visit Reid this morning?

  Might as well go right for the jugular—no need to beat around the bush.

  Jagar: Because my wife told me I should.

  Darcie: Really? You’re going to toss Callie under the bus?

  Jagar: Are you going to yell at a pregnant lady?

  Darcie: Tell me what’s really going on. And for the record. I know Preston is coming for him. He told me. I can also see how scared he is, I just don’t know what he’s really afraid of or what he’s really doing about it.

  Jagar: I don’t either. He just emailed me some information that I’m sharing with Matt and Asher. I’m working on it. I promise you.

  Darcie: What do I need to do?

  Jagar: Just keep an eye out and do your job. Let me do mine.

  Darcie: Why do I get the impression that you know more than I do?

  Jagar: Because I do. And I can’t tell you what I know.

  Darcie: Why not?

  Jagar: Two reasons. One of them is I’m putting myself in a bad spot, so I’m protecting myself. The second reason is I’m protecting you.

  Darcie had had enough of texting. She hit the call button.

  Jagar picked up on the first ring. “I wondered how long that would take.”

  “You know how much I hate it when you of all people pull that shit, shielding me from the big bad world. I’m a grown-up. I don’t need my big brother deciding what—”

  “I’m safeguarding you from being involved in something illegal, okay?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jagar.” She took a cookie and dunked it into her milk and then stuffed the whole thing into her mouth. The white liquid dribbled down her chin. She chewed and chewed, trying not to choke. “Why would I be breaking the law?”

  “We can’t talk about this. You just have to trust me.”

  “I still love him,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to. I’ve tried not to.”

  “I know how impossible that is to do,” Jagar said.

  “He’s different.”

  “So are you.”

  “I’m worried about whatever is going on with him and Preston. You have to tell me.”

  “I can’t, and I won’t. Not yet anyway.”

  “If you won’t, I’ll go to the source.” She didn’t give her brother a chance to argue or even say goodbye. She tapped the red button on the screen and tucked her cell into her pocket, leaving the milk and cookies behind.

  On her tiptoes, she made her way to the guest cabins and found the one on the starboard side. She raised her hand to knock, but the door opened.

  Reid stretched out his arm and yanked her into the room. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She fell back onto the bed and blinked. “You told me to come for a visit.” She bent her knees up and rested her head in the palm of her hand, smiling seductively.

  “Jagar just called me. You did not come here for a booty call.”

  “Maybe my brother shouldn’t tell me that one of you might be doing something illegal.”

  “Fuck.” He held up the phone and tapped the screen. “Your brother is on speaker. What the hell did you tell her?”

  “Enough to get her into your room because this is bullshit,” Jagar said. “The only way this works is if she knows because we can’t bring Jim in on it.”

  “Why not?” Reid sat down on the edge of the bed. “An hour ago, you agreed Jim would be the best bet.”

  “Nope. He’s a fucking big risk, that’s what he is,” Jagar said.

  “Wait a second.” Darcie ran her hand through her hair, finding a decent strand and twisting it between her fingers. She shifted, tucking a foot under her butt. “You two have been conspiring and not talking to me?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Reid said. “But Preston and I had words after dinner, so I needed to get into the system.”

  “We have your ghost or whatever internet connection all set up.”

  “That’s only part of the problem and all that really does is allow me to work without Preston, or anyone on this ship, know that I’m doing it because no one can see that connection but me. However, I’ve been so out of touch with the company, I don’t know who I can trust. And if I were to start looking at emails, even ones that are left on the server that I have access to, Preston would be notified. And then I figured he would know that I was on to him.”

  “That’s when I remembered that our cousin Sally just got a job working—”

  Darcie interrupted her brother. “Sally’s a hacker.”

  “She’s an ethical hacker,” Jagar said.

  “And I hired her to do a sweep of the system by seeing how easy it would be to hack into it and get rid of the warnings,” Reid said.

  “That’s sneaky,” Darcie said, totally impressed, which she shouldn’t be. “What did you find out?”

  “Sally is getting all that information to Reid. I will only get involved if necessary,” Jagar said. “And I didn’t want you involved. I shouldn’t even be this close at this point. While there isn’t anything illegal about what Reid has done so far, I’m about to do something that is crossing a line.”

  “Don’t do it if you’re not comfortable.” Reid took her hand, pressing his lips to her skin. “You’ve done more than enough.”

  “Well, there was one thing that came up when Sally first got into the system that got her attention and got her flagging me. It was an email address for one of the anonymous tips about you jumping off Deception Pass.”

  “Did it come from my company?” Reid asked.

  “No. But someone is communicating with Preston. Sally didn’t mean to read the email, but once she did, she had to send it to me. Now, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

  “What did the email say?” Darcie asked. “And who was it from?”

  “It says: I agree with the new plan. I’ve already sent out the rumors. It won’t matter how it happens, we will be able to create enough speculation that we’ll be covered. And it was sent from The Weatherby.”

  Darcie jumped to her feet. “What?”

  “Someone on that yacht is communicating with the ouside world and setting this up. And from what little detective work I’ve done so far,” Jagar said, “all fingers point to Jim.”

  Reid reached out and curled his fingers around Darcie’s forearms. “Stop pacing.” When she got angry, she was like a raging inferno blazing out of control with no water source in sight.

  “How the hell can you be so calm?” she asked.

  “Tr
ust me, I’m not. But until I sort through all the information that your cousin was able to get me, and we figure out if Jim is actually part of this conspiracy, there isn’t much we can do.”

  “How could you go to my brother behind my back?”

  “I didn’t,” Reid said. “I haven’t seen you to tell you what I did.”

  “Would you have told me?”

  “I don’t know.” Reid let out a long breath. “If I had found out about Captain Jim before you, I might have kept that to myself until this was over.”

  “At least you’re being honest.”

  He cupped her cheeks. “I don’t want you in the middle of this. I’m shocked your brother sent you here knowing Jim might be involved. And I’m beginning to think Preston is dangerous. I mean, deadly dangerous. And that scares me.”

  “Did you ever think I might be able to help, and Jagar knows it?” she said with an arched brow and the corner of her mouth tipped upward.

  “That doesn’t mean any of you need to put your careers on—”

  “Would you just shut up?” She raised up on tiptoe and pressed her mouth to Reid’s lips. It wasn’t a long kiss, or a passionate one.

  But it was a powerful one, and it told him that he’d better listen to the woman in his arms or else he might not get a second chance.

  Ever.

  “I want to see that email that Jim supposedly sent.” She held onto his wrists. “I know his personal email. I also know how he writes. Actually, I want to see every email that you have from that address.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Reid said.

  “Why not? And if you say you’re trying to protect me, I’ll knee you.”

  He cringed. “Is it so bad to want to make sure nothing bad happens to you?”

  “No. I think it’s sweet. But it doesn’t change anything. Now, I’ll go get my computer.”

  “No need.” He’d lost his fucking mind. He should be telling her to go back to her cabin and let him deal with his problems. Only Jagar, for some godforsaken reason, had pushed her right into the fire. “I’ve got a tablet that will let you look at everything.”

  “Everything?” she asked.

  “Yes. You might as well help me sort all the data.”

  “That sounds really fucking boring,” she said. “How does a thrill seeker cope with that?”

  “It’s rough. But we manage.” He handed her his tablet. “And it will probably take all night. I haven’t paid much attention to the business since we broke up. The last two months, I wrapped up a deal with a thrill-seeking company in Colorado. Preston thought it would be good for me to focus on one small project while I got my shit together, and I agreed.”

  She fluffed the pillow and sat cross-legged on the bed with the tablet resting on her bare thighs.

  He groaned. Deciding he needed to keep a little distance, he set up his computer at the desk.

  “Oh no,” she mumbled.

  “What is it?”

  She tapped the screen. “That’s an email Jim uses for personal use. He’s got a few of them.”

  “Are you sure? Does he use it to communicate with you?”

  She shook her head. “It’s his Netflix and Hulu email.”

  “Text your brother and tell him you think it’s him. If he got more than one anonymous tip about me from that email, maybe he can use that to prove it belongs to Jim.”

  “All right,” she said. “Random question, but did Preston pick the project in Colorado, or did you?”

  “He did, but I was happy to do it. I knew the people that owned the company, and the travel back and forth wasn’t too bad.” He pulled up the mirror server. Sally was still populating all the work emails. If anyone had anything personal, well then, too bad for them. If anyone had sent anything and deleted it, a copy would be kept for six months. All contracts that had not expired would be in the proper folders. Ones that had not been executed could be anywhere, knowing Preston.

  Reid would focus only on Hans, manufacturing, and the fire suit. He’d also have to look for any patents that were pending and a few other things, but that would take longer than all night.

  “You didn’t find it strange that he put you on a project that required you to go to where Erin died.”

  His fingers hovered over the keyboard. His jaw slackened. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I heard what he said to you earlier, and for the record, it was a shitty thing to say.”

  “I thought so, too.” Reid turned. “But I’m used to that from Preston, especially when he gets drunk and starts going off about Erin. It’s his way of coping. He did lose his sister, and he is hurting, too. And don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you being here is a reminder she’s not.”

  “I don’t take offense to that,” Darcie said as her fingers pressed the screen.

  “You were right about how I used Erin as an emotional shield when things got a little too heavy with us, and I got scared. In the beginning.”

  “I’m the one who put Erin between us,” Darcie said.

  “You did like to bring her up at the weirdest times. Why would you do that?”

  “Because I wanted to understand you better. You could be so intense at times, and she obviously meant the world to you. But you and Preston never talked about her, and I thought that was weird.”

  “Preston and I do have an oddball dynamic.”

  “That part of the relationship was way past being quirky,” Darcie said. “You loved Erin.”

  Reid tapped his chest. “I did. I do.”

  “He was your best friend, and yet the two of you can’t share the one thing that bonds you together in the tightest of ways. That always frightened me.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you met my family?” she asked with a raised brow. “You can’t be an outsider when you date a Bowie. That’s only reserved for the baby of the family.”

  “Stop. You’re not an outsider in your family.” He snagged a piece of paper and tossed it. She had this horrible habit of withdrawing from her family. The first time he’d seen her do it, he’d worried that Darcie might have some of the same problems Erin had. But over time, he learned that Darcie’s only issue was that she was too hard on herself and took everything everyone said to heart. “Why do you always have to do that?”

  “I don’t know. Probably because I’m avoiding them. However, we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you and Preston and how you never talked about Erin, and that bothered me. Did it bother Preston? Her family?” Darcie set the tablet aside and sat up a little taller, twirling her hair around her finger.

  “No. They’re the ones that refused to discuss her, and I had to learn to live with the fact that I couldn’t save her. No one could, and that was a demon I didn’t know how to live with. I used to feel guilty about loving you, as if I shouldn’t. And when we got serious, I got scared because I started to want all those things I told myself I’d never have after Erin died. It freaked me out a bit, and now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I can see how I made you feel as if you were in her shadow.”

  “You never made me feel that way. I said that because I wanted to hurt you and because Preston put in my head,” she said. “There’s something I never told you about Preston from when we were dating.” She plopped her thumb between her teeth and chewed on her nail.

  “I don’t like the sound of that.” He wadded up another piece of paper. This time it landed right on her nose. He winked.

  “He told me about Erin before you did. And he told me about how you blamed yourself for her death.”

  “I did torture myself with that for a long time. But as I told you, Erin was bipolar and suffered from severe depression. She tried to cover it, and when she was younger, she did so pretty well. But near the end, she was just all over the place.”

  “Preston would tell me when the two of you would go on some of your thrill-seeking adventures that you would go off by yourself and sometimes carry off some crazy stun
t. He showed me videos of you doing some stupid things.”

  Reid laughed. “I’m sure those images were from when I was young, like in my early twenties. Maybe from even before I met him and Erin.”

  “Maybe. But he said you were the one with the death wish, not him. He made himself out to be the one who always had to keep you in check.”

  “That’s funny because I’m a safety nut with a checklist.”

  “But I believed him at first.”

  “I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said, glancing at the screen. Sixty-eight percent left to go.

  “Preston would tell me he often worried because you always said it should have been you and not Erin who died. But he told me that sometimes you’d get really drunk and say how you wished you could join her.”

  “I think that’s pretty normal, and I probably said that in the first month or two after she passed, but I didn’t say it regularly.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Preston told me you’d never be able to get over Erin’s death. That if I looked close enough, you had constant reminders of her everywhere.”

  “I didn’t realize you and Preston spent that much time together.” Fuck. He did have reminders of Erin all over his world. They had a product named The Erin. And out of respect for her family, who he saw often, he had pictures of her in his house. He did nothing to erase her from his life.

  “We didn’t. He would whisper these little jabs in my ear when we were together, or I’d get a text occasionally.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I wanted to believe that Preston was just heartbroken about his sister. I know how I would feel if I lost one of my siblings. Just thinking about it makes my eyes burn.” She lifted her shirt, unfortunately—or fortunately—showing off a black lacy bra and dabbed above her cheeks. “By the time we were at the end of our relationship, Preston had me believing I was just a fill-in for his sister.”

  “Oh, Darcie.” He pushed his chair back and sprawled out on the bed. “Erin was the first woman I ever loved, but I never meant for her to be a comparison stick for you and me. I’m sorry that you were made to feel that way. I can’t believe Preston did that to you, especially when he knows why I kept all those keepsakes of Erin.”