San Francisco Lost: San Francisco Trilogy: Part Two

by Lila Dubois

  “Good.”

  “Would you like me to come with you, Mr. Nolen?” Tim asked.

  “No.”

  “I need to make you aware that my employees will not aid you in the commission of a crime.”

  “I’m not planning to commit a crime.”

  Tim nodded once. “That’s all I need to hear.” He looked at his employee, who got into the driver’s seat.

  James climbed into the back seat of the black SUV. He’d slept on the plane, though not for more than a few hours at a time. It had been a grueling day of travel and his mood was appropriately dark. He stared out the window, forcing himself not to think about what he’d say to her. He’d already rehearsed several speeches, and developing yet another scenario wasn’t going to help.

  It took nearly an hour for them to get from the small private airport he’d been forced to use to the island.

  What had been a quiet and secluded place was now a busy construction site. James’s driver had to pull to the side of the twisting road, two wheels on the vegetation, to let a caravan of three heavily loaded dump trucks rumble up to the high point of the island where they could merge onto the bridge. Once they’d passed, the driver whipped onto the gravel road once more.

  “She’s still here,” the man called back. “We have someone watching the site, in case she left.”

  “Good.”

  They rounded a curve and James saw the warehouse, or what was left of it. Half of the structure was gone, though the steel frame remained, like the exposed bones of some great beast. It looked like they were closing down for the day, men carrying tools towards trucks, bulldozers being pulled off to the side and parked. James’s heart started to pound.

  The driver found a place to park behind a large dumpster and stopped the car. “Would you like me to keep it running?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone.

  “No need.” James climbed out, aware of the driver’s watchful gaze.

  The driver wasn’t the only one looking at him as he made his way across what had once been relatively flat gravel, but was now furrowed by large tire tracks. He circled a lock box, which he knew was for keeping valuable scrap. He wasn’t exactly a construction expert, but he’d bought, demolished, and then rebuilt enough buildings to know what he was looking at here.

  There were two people standing not far from the bin, both wearing hard hats and high-visibility vests. One of them had dark hair that had been coiled into a bun at the back of her head and stuck though the straps on the back of her hard hat so it wouldn’t interfere with the function of the protective gear.

  Even in the bulky garments, with her back to him, he knew her.

  Christiana.

  His heart leapt when he saw her, and he once more damned himself for being a fool.

  Her companion turned as he was speaking, enough to catch sight of James. He stopped midword and frowned. “Hey, buddy,” he called out. “This is a construction zone. You need to get out of here.”

  Christiana turned to see who her companion was yelling at. She froze, and even in the shadow of her helmet, he saw her face go pale.

  That’s right. I found you. I caught you.

  He kept his own expression aloof.

  She took a half step toward him, her lips parting. Then she did something he did not expect. She thrust the heavy clipboard she held at the man beside her and ran to James.

  He blinked in shock a second before she threw her arms around him, pressing herself against him so tightly that whatever hard implements she carried in her vest pockets and belt dug into his skin.

  Shock gave way to sweet relief and he wrapped his arms around her. The yellow helmet she wore prevented him from laying his cheek on her hair, so he did what he could and held her tight.

  None of the scenarios he’d imagined started like this, but as she trembled in his arms, he realized he didn’t care about anything but the fact that she was safe, and he was holding her.

  Christiana was well aware that this couldn’t be real. A chunk of concrete had probably fallen on her head, and she was now in a coma, making this a delusion. She didn’t care. It felt real. He felt real.

  “James,” she whispered against his shoulder. “James.”

  “Christiana,” he murmured in reply. His arms were tight around her, and she felt happy. More than that. Happy was too pale a word. She felt whole.

  Then his arms loosened. “Though I hear you go by Chris.”

  Chris. He’d just called her Chris. This wasn’t a delusion. This was real.

  Oh, God. This was actually happening. James had found her—at work.

  She jerked back, looking up at him in dawning horror.

  James quirked a brow, and a shiver of remembered pleasure raced through her. She had to look away.

  “Hey, Chris, you know this dude?” Gerald walked up, suspicion lacing his voice.

  “Um, yeah.” She didn’t dare look at her coworker. “Can you take my board back to the office? I’m going to head out.”

  “Uh, sure.” Gerald wandered away, leaving her standing alone before James. They weren’t exactly alone. There were still people milling around the site, though it was shutting down for the day.

  “James, I…”

  He raised that eyebrow again.

  “You’re here,” she finished lamely.

  “Yes, I am.”

  She fumbled for her pockets. “Let me order a ride. We need to leave the site.”

  “I have a car waiting.”

  “Oh.” Of course, he had a car waiting. He was a billionaire.

  And she was wearing her work uniform and a hard hat.

  “Shall we?” James gestured with a regal motion of his hand. Regal was an all-too-fitting description, since he was royalty. For one split second, she’d forgotten everything and had been overwhelmed with happiness and relief at seeing him.

  She walked the direction he indicated, catching sight of a black SUV with tinted windows. As she approached, the car started. She reached for the door handle, her hand colliding with James’s. She jerked back and he opened the door for her.

  She climbed in, wincing as she sat on her abused backside. She glanced at the driver, who briefly met her gaze in the rearview mirror, then looked forward once more.

  James opened the other door and climbed in, taking the seat beside her.

  Christiana reached up and took off her hard hat, tugging her bun out from between the back straps. She turned the hat over in her hands, then told herself to stop fidgeting and placed it on her lap. The car turned around, heading up the road towards the bridge.

  She laid her hands one atop the other on the crown of her helmet, and stared at her short, practical nails.

  There were a million things she wanted to say, and dozens of emotions were rolling through her, making her slightly nauseous. The car merged onto the bridge. She glanced out her window. It was a lovely day—the sun sparkled on the water, and traffic was moving at a remarkably good pace.

  The silence was too much.

  “I’m sorry.” That was the best place to start. “I’m so sorry, James.”

  “And what are you sorry for?” he asked in a cool voice.

  She flinched. “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

  “Which lie in particular?”

  “Please don’t,” she said softly. “If you’re here, then you know… you know what I lied about.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  Anger spiked though her. “Hear what?” She turned to face him. “You want to hear how I stumbled onto the setup for the party and snuck around, then lost my freaking mind and decided to pretend I was one of you?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  She gestured at herself. “I was inspecting the building pre-demo.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s my job.”

  “The host of the event arranged with the leader of your organization to make sure that the building wasn’t inspected until after the event.”

 
; “This might surprise you, but I’m not on a first-name basis with the director of Caltrans. I must have missed that memo.”

  James blinked, and some of his cold mask slipped. “Simple as that? You never got any sort of orders to delay the inspection?”

  She shrugged. “No one said anything to me about when I was supposed to inspect. I only knew the starting demo date.”

  He barked out a laugh. “Well, Lillian will be relieved, and maybe the club won’t have to disband.”

  “What?” she asked in shock.

  “When I asked about you yesterday, and it came out that there was no new member in San Francisco, no member named Christiana at all, well, that meant there had been a critical security breach.”

  Christiana felt the blood drain from her face. “Oh, God, I didn’t think of that.”

  James’s jaw muscle flexed. “And what did you think, Christiana? You had no plans of meeting me in Luxembourg. What did you think I would do? What did you think would happen?”

  He looked… hurt.

  “James.” She reached for him, but he caught her wrist, holding her for a moment and releasing her. She turned in her seat, wanting to face him, but forgot about her battered ass and thighs. A fresh stab of pain startled a little hissing sound out of her.

  James glanced at her wrist. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No, no. You were… you were wonderful, James.” Christiana sighed, laying her hands on her helmet once more. “I was inspecting the building, and I found the false wall. I kicked a hole in it—”

  A startled laugh escaped James. “You kicked a hole in it?” The laughter faded. “And no one noticed?”

  “It was the wall that was covered with velvet drapes. On the second floor. Do you remember?” When he nodded, she continued, “I started looking around and then I…” This was the hard part of her story, because it seemed so ridiculously silly after the fact. “It was like I’d stumbled into this magical world. I was Alice, falling down the rabbit hole, into a world where everything was different and new and interesting. I was looking around and I heard someone coming. I should have confronted them, but instead I hid. It snowballed from there.”

  They rode in silence for what felt like an hour but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

  “When you were looking around, did you recognize the equipment, the furniture? Did you know what sort of place that was?”

  Christiana nodded.

  “So, you are at least an experienced BDSM player.”

  “Um, well…”

  James narrowed his eyes. “Christiana.”

  “I read a lot,” she mumbled.

  James blew out a long, slow breath. “Are you telling me that our time together was your first-ever BDSM experience?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d said our time together. Hope sprouted in her, and she squashed it ruthlessly.

  James started to mutter in another language, the volume rising with each word until he was yelling at her.

  Christiana pressed her lips together and pulled at her ear, waiting for him to finish. She wasn’t scared or upset that he was yelling, though by any reasonable standard she should have been.

  Finally, he stopped, took a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly.

  “In with the good air, out with the bad,” she said.

  He burst out laughing.

  The car stopped.

  She hadn’t been paying any attention to where they were going, and it was her turn to take a deep breath when she realized they had pulled up outside her apartment. She hadn’t registered that they’d headed east on the bridge, across the bay to Oakland, rather than west into the city.

  James leaned toward the silent driver. “Where are we?”

  “Uh, at her place. I assumed that’s where you wanted to go.” He twisted in the seat to look back at them. “We can go somewhere else.”

  James looked out the window, his face unreadable. “No, this is good. Thank you.”

  “Would you like me to wait?”

  “No need. I’ll call my usual car service when I’m ready.” James got out.

  They were going into her apartment? Oh, God, this was her worst nightmare. Well, maybe not her worst nightmare, since she’d once considered bringing him here as part of her confession, but Prince James seeing her shitty little apartment was near the top of the list of things she didn’t want to happen. She couldn’t just stay in the car, though.

  Christiana opened the door and climbed out, muttering a quick thanks to the driver. James was already there, waiting for her. He extended his hand and Christiana stared at it. He was just being polite, she realized. All those gallant gestures, they were just part of who he was—they didn’t really mean anything to him, at least not the way they had to her.

  She passed him her hard hat rather than taking his hand. He blinked but accepted it, while she unzipped an interior pocket on her vest and took out her keys. They walked up the creaky exterior iron stairs, then along the open-air walkway that had a thrilling view of the driveway that ran alongside the building, giving access to the parking spaces below. Her hands shook when she put the key in the door, and it took her a minute to get the finicky thing to open. Through it all, James said nothing.

  She’d left the curtains open, so the apartment was filled with late afternoon light. She’d opted to live close to work in a not-so-great area, and to spend more than she should in order to have her own space. Normally coming home to her little place made her happy, but now all she could see was how cramped and small the space was, how nothing she owned matched though each piece was nice by her standards and carefully maintained. She set her keys in the bowl on the corner of her kitchen counter, then undid the Velcro on her vest, taking it off before folding it and draping it on the back of a rickety chair that had been handmade by her great-grandfather in Mexico and carried across the border.

  She heard the door close. Without turning, she asked, “Are you here to threaten me so I won’t say anything? Blackmail me to keep quiet?”

  “In part,” he said simply. “I need to tell Lillian what I find out about you. Lillian is the—”

  “I know who she is. I heard her; saw her. That’s why I knew there were clothes I could borrow.”

  “Borrow?” There was sardonic amusement in the word.

  Christiana turned. “What are you going to tell her?”

  “She already knows most of it. Did you leave a car from your job overnight at the warehouse?”

  She nodded. “That first night, yes.”

  “Lillian was worried about it, but didn’t investigate until I asked her about you and we realized there was an outsider at the San Francisco event. It only took her a matter of hours to track down the name of the inspecting engineer.”

  An outsider. That’s who she was. “Then she knows it all.”

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  Her bike hung on a wall rack by the door since she’d had too many bikes stolen for her to be willing to risk leaving it outside. It made the entrance to the apartment cramped and a bit hazardous. He skirted it neatly, stepping deeper into her space.

  James set her hard hat on the counter by her key bowl. He looked wonderful, just as handsome as she remembered, wearing a pair of crisp gray slacks and a white shirt. And here he was, in her little apartment.

  “She doesn’t?” Christiana asked.

  “No.” James wandered past her, to the living room window. He looked out, beyond the security bars. “I don’t fully understand why you lied. Why you pretended to be a member.”

  Christiana shrugged. “I told you, I felt like—”

  “Alice through the looking glass,” he cut in. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Because this wasn’t just sneaking into some elegant party.” He turned from the window, pausing for a moment to look at the cluster of photographs she’d framed and hung on the wall. They were all photos she’d taken—close-ups of weathered wood and bits of rusted ironwork, stained concrete and long shadows. “You
said you recognized the equipment. You knew what the St. Andrew’s Cross was.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That means you’re interested in BDSM. Knowledgeable.” He stepped closer. “You wanted to see Masters and submissives play.”

  Her breath was coming faster and she felt flushed. “Yes.”

  “Because it’s something that fascinates you. You might not have done it before, but you thought about submitting. Is that what you fantasize about at night?”

  “I was just going to look, just that first night,” she whispered. “I just wanted to see it, for real. Not porn. Not just reading about it. I wasn’t going to do anything. And I would never tell anyone.”

  “But you did ‘do’ something. With me.” He was now only two feet away, his dark gaze boring into hers.

  “I’m so sorry, James. I wanted to tell you…”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Christiana let out an unamused chuckle. “You know why? Because that last night, after, when I was getting dressed and ready to leave, there were two women talking about private jets and half-million-dollar cars. I knew that place had to be something only for rich people, but I didn’t realize how rich.”

  “You didn’t tell me… because you assumed, I was rich?” He sounded incredulous.

  “Don’t be obtuse,” she snapped. “I’m not like you. I’ve never even been to Europe, and you were talking about meeting me in Luxembourg. Even if I wanted to, even if I had spent more money than I should getting there, I’m not a member. I would have had no idea how to find you. The only way I was able to come the second and third nights was by jumping in cars with other members. I just lied my way into getting a ride. I’m not a member of your fancy club, and more importantly, I never will be.”

  James’s face revealed nothing. “You could have told me you wouldn’t be there. You lied plenty; you could have lied and said you weren’t able to attend.” He bit off the last word, his jaw muscle flexing. “I waited for you,” he ground out. “I thought something terrible had happened.”

  Christiana closed her eyes and a tear leaked out from between her lashes. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I hoped you would just shrug and find someone else.”