One Night At A Time

by Christa Conan

  “You’re making me nervous,” she said softly, her voice nearly inaudible.

  He arched an eyebrow, but made no move to offer her comfort. Because of her, some professional marksman had taken a shot at him. Not the ideal way to begin his long-awaited vacation. “Spill it, Arielle. Everything.”

  “I don’t exactly know where to start.”

  “The beginning generally works.”

  She gave a slight, nearly imperceptible nod.

  He drummed his fingers on a metal rail.

  “I know,” she admitted. “I have a hard time believing it myself.”

  “Rhone knew?”

  “Yes.”

  Doug silently cursed his friend. Rhone had dozens of competent, trustworthy contacts in the area. He had chosen Doug, even though he knew Doug’s intention of sailing away. This northerly course was definitely not the one he’d charted. And Rhone had known that, too. It spoke volumes about the kind of person Arielle was, the kind of regard in which the Mitchells obviously held her.

  But none of that mattered to him.

  “A couple of years ago, my brother, Danny, was in a motorcycle accident.”

  A grainy undercurrent of pain textured her voice, sending a shiver down Doug’s spine. He nodded, waiting with customary patience for her to continue.

  “And he didn’t die right away.”

  The lack of emotion in her tone bothered him more than the lacing of anguish had. She was reciting from memory, but shutting off the memories she drew from.

  “He lingered for months.” She twisted her hands. After letting a small breath out her pursed lips, she continued, “Respirators, IVs, monitors. He never regained consciousness. The worst part was watching how helpless he was, you know?”

  For a moment, through Arielle’s expression of despair, Doug did know. Better, he knew the pain of losing a loved one. With an effort that time had made easier, he shoved away his own memories and concentrated on Arielle’s words.

  “It was hard on my parents, watching their son lie there, never moving, never opening his eyes. We...” Her voice cracked, her words wavered. “We prayed. Begged. Pleaded.”

  “But he never got better?”

  She gulped, didn’t answer. Luminescent tears, evident in the moon’s glow and the yacht’s artificial light, pooled in her eyes. She needed to gather herself. Doug needed to escape. A woman’s tears were the one thing that struck raw terror in him.

  He jogged down the few stairs that led to the galley, grabbed a couple cans of sodas and returned to the deck. He popped the top on one, and offered it to her.

  “Thanks.”

  Her hand shook as she accepted it, her unnaturally cold fingers brushing his.

  Throughout his career, Doug had played the cat-and-mouse game of survival, cheating death, teasing it, testing it. And he’d played the game far too many times to count. He was intimately acquainted with adrenaline flow, along with its inevitable and often unwelcome ebb. The crash was the worst. But he knew how to deal with it. From the looks of his lovely passenger, though, she didn’t.

  She needed company, and his was the only available, much as he wished it otherwise.

  He drank from his own can and tried not to notice the way the scent of her just-showered freshness teased his long-neglected senses. The robe cinched at her small waist hung on her, too big, yet comforting. It was the same comfort he wanted to, but dared not, offer.

  Her blue eyes were open wide, exposing her inner emotions. She raised the aluminum to her lips and sipped.

  She looked delicate, fragile. Her complexion was milky white, her eyes appeared too big, too bright for her pale features. But he’d already learned what resided beneath that false surface. And it didn’t have a thing to do with delicate. Or fragile.

  Arielle Hale possessed an inner source of strength that he admired. She’d kept going after the attempt on her life, even finding a wry sense of humor. And the elementally male part of him couldn’t help but note the way she’d responded to his unplanned kiss. She’d remained calm, unblinking.

  A courage to match Rhone’s wife, Shannen’s, and a quality Doug had always said he wanted in a woman.

  Trouble was, he wasn’t in the market for a woman. Any woman. The only company he wanted was Destiny. She heeded his calls, responded to his whims. She went where he wanted, when he wanted. She was a caring mistress, an undemanding lover. What more could he want? Sure as hell not a wife.

  Still, he had Arielle aboard. And while she struggled to combat shock, he had an obligation to care for her, at least until he made the transfer already arranged with Brian. “You need to eat something.”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t.”

  With a shrug, he went belowdecks again and returned a little later with grapes, and sandwiches. Without a word, he offered one to her. Again she shook her head.

  “Eat, Arielle,” he instructed, the tone leaving no room for argument. “This interrogation isn’t over. I’m far from finished with you.”

  She placed her cola can in a recessed holder and wrapped her hands across her upper body, absently massaging her shoulders.

  “You need your strength, if you’re going to be any good to me or yourself.” He took a couple of bites, then nodded toward the other sandwich.

  With obvious reluctance, she unfolded her arms, reached for the food and took several small, unenthusiastic bites. “You live like this,” she stated flatly.

  He popped a couple of grapes into his mouth. Then he met her intense gaze. She wasn’t talking about the boat or the impromptu meal. She was talking about the events that had transpired, the way he kept a wary eye on the coast, the sky, the water. “Yeah,” he said. “It pays my bills.”

  “Does it ever get to you?”

  Doug gave a wry smile. How long had she been with him? A few hours? And she was already asking questions he’d spent years dodging. He nodded, then responded honestly, “Not enough to quit.”

  She placed the remains of her dinner on a paper plate and shook her head at his offer of fruit. “I guess I’m grateful.”

  He hadn’t told her he’d already planned a rendezvous with Brian, plotted it while she freshened up in the shower. Doug sensed that she wouldn’t like to know that fact, so he kept it to himself for now. Later was soon enough to see that wild panic fill her gaze again.

  “You were telling me about your brother,” he prompted, when she allowed time to drift between them and his questions.

  A detached expression flirted, then settled on her features. He recognized the tactic. Distance yourself from the pain. That way it didn’t catch you, haunt you.

  Right.

  Didn’t work that way. When you least expected it, it returned tenfold, crept up, stole over you. Doug shook his head. It wasn’t his own pain he was interested in, it was hers.

  “Danny stayed alive for about nine months.”

  Silence dragged.

  “It was devastating.” Her voice was hollow and soft, making him strain to hear. “Emotionally, as well as financially.”

  He nodded and waited.

  “My parents have never quite recovered.”

  From the looks of her, neither had Arielle. “He was your only sibling?”

  That brought a ghost of a smile. But it didn’t linger, and he experienced a frisson of gratitude. Her smile had the power to undo him. Doug definitely didn’t care for that.

  “Danny was two years older than me. And he made no bones about the fact he wanted a brother, not a sissy girl, around the house.”

  Doug would have been grateful for any company, anyone to share the burden of being an only child who just couldn’t heal the hole in his parents’ relationship.

  “Around the time he was fifteen, he decided having a kid sister wasn’t so awful after all. When I was sixteen, he taught me to drive, how to drag race. Chaperoned my dates, and asked to be introduced to the women in my college classes.” She paused. Her tone took on the subtle, grating nuances of the pain she no lon
ger attempted to tamp down. “He was always a little reckless. Boys will be boys, as my dad used to say. But Danny couldn’t argue with the wheels of a tractor-trailer.”

  Doug winced. He’d seen enough destruction to clearly picture what it had looked like.

  “In the end, he lost the battle.”

  Waves slapped against the hull, and he saw her shiver. Doug opened a storage compartment and grabbed a blanket. He shook it out, then closed the distance to his companion and draped it around her hunched shoulders. The breeze from the ocean fanned upward in cool crests, but he’d have bet her chill came from the inside. From the adrenaline crash, from her memories, from her loss.

  She whispered her thanks, and he experienced a pang of remorse for being the one to force her to remember the pain. But what had to be done, had to be done. Lives depended on it, including her own.

  “My parents had mortgaged their home to the hilt, praying for a miracle that never happened. I took out a loan to pay for his casket.” A wayward tear slipped down her cheek.

  Doug fought to suppress the urge to wipe the moisture away. Oddly, though, he had no desire to turn his back on her.

  “A loan, if you can believe that.”

  She gulped. No matter how hard he tried, Doug was unable to completely distance himself from the effects of her heart-wrenchingly real words. He’d thought himself past such mundane thoughts, but he wasn’t. Doug wasn’t sure he liked the realization. To occupy his hands, resisting the urge to reach for her, to give her the comfort she so desperately cried out for, he took a long drag from his soda, draining the bottom.

  He crushed the can in one hand.

  Arielle Hale was a client. And technically she wasn’t even his client. Emotional detachment was a necessity—especially since he wouldn’t see her after tomorrow.

  “As Danny wasted away, so did Mom and Dad. I watched their decline. In a different way, it...it matched his.” She drew a shallow breath. “They’re not the same people anymore. Mom takes medication for her heart and high blood pressure. Dad seems to be stuck somewhere in the past. And the darnedest thing, these should be their golden years.”

  Her expression took on a faraway air. Doug realized she was no longer looking at him, but somewhere in the future.

  “They dreamed of taking a Caribbean cruise. They saved for twenty years for their second honeymoon.

  “They’re both still working, Mom part-time at the grocery store, and Dad’s struggling to put tiny metal pieces together on an assembly line he should have left years ago.”

  She leveled a compassionate stare on Doug. For a moment, for a brief, foolish moment, he wondered what it might be like to be the recipient of that depth of emotion. Before allowing the image to shape and form, he shook his head, scattering the teasing thought to the chilly breeze.

  “They have nothing, nothing to call their own. Not even dreams. Can you imagine, all those years of marriage and nothing to show for it?

  “I swore I’d never put my parents through that kind of pain. I vowed I’d do anything—anything—to avoid it.”

  “So why...?”

  To her credit, Arielle tipped back her chin, didn’t flinch from the inevitable. “Why did I hire someone to murder me?”

  He was glad she’d said it. Suddenly he didn’t think he could have. The question seemed to burn a metallic taste into his mouth.

  “I’ve watched my parents be destroyed by a medical crisis.” Her lips twisted in a way that didn’t reflect amusement.

  Doug nodded encouragement. She had his total, undivided attention. No other woman had ever so completely captivated him. Her voice was rich in texture and substance, reminding him of a trade wind, carrying him to paradise.

  She fingered back strands of now dry hair errantly tossed by the breeze. “I decided to take out an insurance policy.”

  Doug recoiled.

  Seemingly sensing his instant distance, she shook her head. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  He arched a brow.

  “I wouldn’t, couldn’t, hire a hit just for the money. I wanted an insurance policy so my parents wouldn’t be burdened a second time if something horrible happened to me.”

  He forced himself to draw from the well of patience he’d filled through the years.

  “Before they would issue a policy, the insurance company required a complete physical examination, lab work, everything. They needed to rule out preexisting conditions.”

  Somehow, he liked this direction of conversation even less.

  With determination, if not volume, she continued, “They ran all kinds of tests, asked every conceivable question. I admitted I’d been having headaches. I thought they were stress-related, but the doctor ordered an MRL...”

  She trailed off, stared out to sea, then went on once more. “My doctor’s office informed me they believed I had glioblastoma multiforma.”

  Doug frowned. “Had what?”

  “It’s a kind of brain tumor. Very distinctive on an MRI, not much chance of the radiologist missing the diagnosis. I went to the library at the medical school.”

  He had no trouble believing that.

  “It was inoperable, they’d told me. There has been some minimal success with chemotherapy, but...” Her voice had dropped to a tortured whisper. “I couldn’t bear to think of my parents being forced to watch me go through that, only to have me eventually die.”

  “So you took matters into your own hands?”

  “No, not initially. I went through denial. Couldn’t believe I was living on borrowed time. But even as I tried to convince myself, I knew the headaches were real. Still, though, I triple-checked with the doctor’s office, hoping against hope that the results would change overnight.”

  “They didn’t.”

  “I didn’t want to believe life was so cruel as to do that to our family a second time.” She sipped again from the can, seeming to find strength somewhere at the bottom. “Yet results were results. I called three times. And I received the same-answer each time. They would be scheduling me for more tests. Dr. Hatcher said we’d talk about treatment options at that time, too. And she said I’d probably be referred to the Brain Tumor Center in Massachusetts. Away from my family. With history repeating itself.”

  A picture started to form in Doug’s eye, that of a terrified schoolteacher, lonely and wanting to protect others from pain, fighting for her survival. He didn’t like the image.

  Not one damn bit.

  “Dr. Hatcher calmly assured me she’d do everything possible....”

  “You panicked.”

  “That’s the best way to put it.” She snuggled deeper into the blanket and drew her knees to her chest. “I thought about my parents, their financial situation, their mental state. They’d crumble.”

  He wondered why she hadn’t.

  “I took the afternoon off from school, wandered around, numb. All the awful feelings that surrounded Danny’s death seemed to be clawing at me. I felt helpless. Confused.”

  There was something about her, something that compelled Doug to want to fold her in the protective circle of his arms and keep her there, keep her safe.

  And that was the only course of action not possible. The idea of her vitality, her loveliness, eaten away by some horrible thing he’d never heard of sent a spike of heated, angry disbelief through him.

  “I...” She stopped, swallowed, fidgeted. Stalled. “I bought a magazine, one of the military ones. But not one about our armed services.”

  Doug’s jaw tightened. He knew the type of publication. On the fringes, they pedaled destruction, distrust, and even death.

  “I’m not proud of it,” she said softly. “But I wrote to a post office box and received instructions two days later.”

  Arielle shuddered and he inhaled the fear she felt.

  “I had to take money to a hotel. It was horrible. Dirty and dingy. I could feel him staring at me through that hole in the door.

  “Dr. Hatcher called a couple of days ago. Sa
id she had wonderful news, though she deeply regretted the horrible anxiety she’d put me through.”

  He waited.

  “Seems there was a mix-up.”

  “But how...what?”

  “Human error. Apparently the slides were mislabeled. However unforgivable, it happens.”

  “And the headaches?”

  “Stress.”

  Big surprise.

  Doug cursed again—a single, succinct word.

  She was struggling for her survival.

  Arielle faced a bright future, she was going to live, have a long, healthy life, maybe have a few kids of her own...if Doug could get her into safe hands.

  “When I realized I was no longer going to die, I went back to the hotel. I knocked and knocked. There was no answer. I checked with the manager, he said no one had been in that room for weeks.”

  “He lied?”

  She shrugged, strands of hair flirting with her face, framing the features with filtered moonlight.

  “We have to find him.” Doug’s hand curled into a fist as he silently cursed the inaction, the fact that he was running instead of fighting. “Stop him.”

  “That’s why I came to you.”

  Doug stood, impatience and frustration lancing through him. With a few quick strides, he dwarfed the distance between them, curling his fingers into her shoulder. “Can you describe anything about him?”

  “Describe...?”

  “The man you contacted. Height, weight, hair, any distinguishing marks that will help us find him.”

  He saw her hand tighten on the can. As he held her firmly, his mind raced.

  “How tall was he?”

  He heard the shallowness of her breaths. “I don’t know,” she began, then blinked when he glared. “He only opened the door as far as the safety chain allowed. All I really saw was his arm. It was tanned, with dark hair.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He promised he’d do the job right, that I was to be alone as much as possible. I gave him my schedule, but he swore he wouldn’t harm me at school, that he’d leave all the students alone. And he said he’d do it quickly, that he’d do what it took.”