Force of Nature

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “You didn’t finish…” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop himself. Because really, what difference did it make? Robin wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning anyway.

  “We didn’t really start, because he kind of passed out,” she explained. “Oops, it looks like I put his bathing suit on him backwards.”

  Indeed, she had.

  “I didn’t think it was very dignified for him to be, you know, just lying there naked, especially after taking the Viagra,” she continued.

  Certainly not as dignified as going up to someone’s room to have sex with them merely because they were a movie star and too drunk to care whom they were with.

  “Do you want me to fix it?” she asked as Jules moved Robin back and gently wiped off his face. “I mean, you probably don’t want to, and I don’t mind.” She laughed. “It’s not like I haven’t seen what’s under there.”

  “Please go,” Jules said.

  Yet still she lingered. “Will you…tell him I—”

  “I’ll tell him,” Jules said. “Believe me, I’ll tell him. Now get the fuck out of here before I call security.”

  She ran, inspired by both his words and tone, but he followed her to the door, making sure she was gone, locking the chain behind her.

  He made a quick circuit of the entire suite, checking behind the furniture and under the beds to make sure there were no other surprises.

  He’d had all he could handle tonight.

  He managed to pull Robin into the bathroom, where he stirred.

  “Dolph?” Robin’s speech was slurred, but it was clear he thought Jules was his assistant. “I’m okay, babe. You don’t need to…I just gotta…”

  There was no way he could lift himself off the floor, even to reach something as low as the toilet, so Jules dragged him into the shower, and let him empty his stomach over the drain in the tile floor.

  It was dawn before Robin stopped throwing up, and seven-thirty before the dry heaves finally ended. By eight, Jules had him cleaned up and tucked into bed, rolled carefully onto his stomach just in case he got sick again.

  He smoothed Robin’s hair back from his face, and just sat for a while, watching him as he slept.

  He looked peaceful. Angelic and deceptively innocent.

  He was, undoubtedly, the most beautiful man Jules had ever known. He was smart, too. And funny. And sweet, and kind, and sexy and…

  He was perfect in so many ways.

  Some of the time.

  “I can’t do this,” he told Robin, who, even if he could hear him, wouldn’t remember what he’d said.

  Heart in his throat, Jules kissed Robin on the forehead. And leaving his key card on the table next to the slip of paper with Yellow Bikini’s phone number, he locked the door behind him.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Ric woke up in a rush, sitting up in bed. “Lillian Lavelle,” he said. “Holy Christ.”

  “Wow.” Annie was already awake. Clearly, she’d been lying there, just watching him sleep. “Way to guarantee a sex-free morning. Wake up shouting the name of the ex–porn star you nearly drilled.” She pushed herself out of bed, walking naked across his room to his door to the bathroom, heavy on the attitude.

  She was kidding, but not entirely.

  “Wait,” Ric said, but she’d already closed the door behind her. So he shouted through it. “You’ve got to check out what my brain came up with while we were sleeping.”

  “Ignoring you!” Annie shouted back through the door.

  “I am definitely getting some. You’re going to be all over me when you hear this.”

  His cell phone was on his bedside table. He’d brought it upstairs with him the second time he and Annie had gone to bed. It was done charging, and he unplugged it and speed-dialed Jules.

  Who answered with a croak that might’ve been his name. “Cassidy.”

  Ric had clearly woken up the FBI agent.

  “Damn,” Ric said. “What time is it?”

  Jules sighed. “That better not be why you called me, Alvarado.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Good. It’s…” Jules laughed. “Ten. The scary thing is that I actually feel rested after my fifteen minutes of sleep. What’s going on?”

  “Last night,” Ric said, “Gordie Junior volunteered to get rid of Lillian’s body. Well, he didn’t know it was Lillian, of course, he thought it was some crazy ex-girlfriend of mine.”

  “Yes,” Jules said as Annie opened the bathroom door, wearing his robe, toothbrush in her mouth, so she could hear Ric better. Ric put his phone on speaker. “I was there.”

  “So today, you have to call Junior,” Ric said. “On my phone. I’m in a panic, so you’re the one who calls him—because, ready for this? I’ve killed her. You follow? You tell him I got a little too rough when I was asking her about the money she stole—remember, I told him—”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jules said. He was sounding far more awake now. “I know where you’re going with this, and it’s brilliant.”

  Ric looked at Annie. See? But she didn’t get it.

  “We’re calling for Junior’s help,” Ric continued, mostly to explain to Annie, “to get rid of the body. You tell him if he does this for us, you’ll lower the price for the Chadwick sex tape to four hundred thousand. He won’t say no, we’ll all bond, and he’ll have something on us to make us keep our end of the deal—”

  “And we’ll put a series of tracking devices inside the body,” Jules finished for him, “and find out where he dumps his victims—maybe stand a shot to recover Peggy Ryan.”

  Across the room, Annie was still frowning. “Where are you going to get a body?”

  “Can you get us one?” Ric asked Jules. “It’s got to be female and relatively young.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Jules said. “Stay put, all right? I’ll call you back, but be patient. This could take a while.”

  “Will do.” Ric hung up his phone and went into the bathroom, where Annie was finishing brushing her teeth.

  “What if he chops them into little pieces,” she asked as she dried her face on his towel. “Junior seemed so convinced that a body would never be found.”

  “I think Jules was taking that into consideration,” Ric told her, “when he said he’d put a series of tracking devices into the body.” He flushed the toilet.

  “God, that’s grim.”

  “Yeah.” Ric washed his hands and splashed water onto his face. Annie handed him his towel. “Thanks. It may not work, but if we had hard evidence that Gordie Junior was involved in the murder of a federal agent…Even just some DNA—bone fragments—I don’t know exactly how much they’d need. But if we could get it, Junior’d be looking at the death penalty, and he might be willing to make a deal—give up information that would help the FBI apprehend al-Hasan in exchange for a life sentence.” He grabbed the belt of the robe she was wearing and pulled her in for a kiss. “I thought it would be worth a shot.”

  “It is brilliant,” she agreed.

  Ric kissed her again. “Mmm.”

  Annie pulled back, unable to hide her smile.

  Damn, but he loved the color of her eyes, and the light and life that danced there. He loved the shape of her face, the curve of her smile, the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  “You owe me one heavy conversation,” she pointed out. “If you think you can trick me into forgetting—”

  “Can’t we have sex or breakfast first?” He kissed her, more deeply this time. “Or sex while we’re having breakfast…” He got the robe open, and he slid his hands inside against the softness of her body and the smoothness of her skin. “You …and waffles. Sweet.”

  Annie laughed as she kissed him back, but it was clear from her urgency that she was as aroused as he was. As usual, it didn’t take much to get them both revved up. Even last night, as tired as he’d been when they’d finally gone back to bed, he hadn’t been able to resist sliding into her sweet heat
, and rocking her until they’d both exploded.

  Still kissing her, Ric now lifted her onto the bathroom counter, pushing between her legs, pushing himself all the way inside of her. All the way.

  It felt unbelievably great, deliriously, staggeringly, astoundingly incredible, and as he moved inside of her he knew he was going to come right away, which was okay, because he’d be ready to go again in minutes, she turned him on that much and…

  He wasn’t wearing a condom.

  Ric realized it at the exact moment Annie did. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, as he froze, pushed deeply inside of her.

  “Ric?” she said. “We need to get—”

  “I know,” he said, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

  She looked at him, expectantly.

  He closed his eyes. “I’m afraid if I try to pull out, I’m going to come.”

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Don’t move,” he warned her.

  “I’m not.” But she started to laugh.

  “Don’t laugh!”

  “Picture me pregnant,” she told him. “Picture me—”

  “Don’t,” he cut her off. “That’s turning me on.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  And there they were, staring at each other. “Marry me,” Ric said. He just opened his mouth and the words came out.

  Annie laughed—just once. “You just want to come inside of me.”

  “Shit, yeah,” he said. “For the next fifty years.”

  She laughed again, but her smile faded as she looked into his eyes. “You don’t really mean it, do you?”

  “I do,” he whispered. “I love you, Annie.”

  She kissed him.

  And she came, too.

  Robin woke up with a headache that rated a solid ten on the hangover scale of agony.

  His room was dark, and the air conditioner was running, and he was actually in the bed instead of on the floor, lying in his own puke and filth.

  That was new. A ten on the agony scale was usually accompanied by disgust and utter humiliation.

  But he was clean, the sheets on the bed were clean, and he had no idea how he’d gotten here.

  There was a bottle of water on his bedside table, as if someone had placed it there just for him, and he opened it and took a cautious sip. When it didn’t come right back up, he drank some more, swishing it around the cotton of his mouth.

  Through a fog of disjointed pictures and sounds—a laughing man in a bathing suit; a stern-faced security guard, Time to move it upstairs, folks; a spilled bottle of Jack Daniel’s; a woman’s voice, We can fix that—Robin remembered Jules.

  In his limousine.

  It was distant, like a memory from years ago, or a dream.

  A really good dream.

  Jules. Kissing him. Go back to your hotel. I’ll come to you.

  What the fuck had happened between then and now?

  Robin swung his legs out of bed—no easy feat, considering his head was on the verge of imploding. The message light was blinking on his room phone, so he picked it up. Pushed the voice-mail button.

  “You have one hundred and seven new messages.”

  Jesus.

  Robin hung up, dropping the phone back into its cradle.

  Someone had plugged in his cell phone, which was still set on silent, and he checked to find that it, too, had over a hundred new voicemails. Forty new text messages. Two hundred and fifty missed calls.

  He scrolled through the list—most of them were from his sister, Jane; his agent, Don; and Dolphina—the most recent being two minutes ago.

  His manager had also called, along with a number of people from Riptide’s production and distribution companies.

  He’d even missed a few from his brother-in-law, who’d called him from overseas.

  Robin kept scrolling down—the bulk of the calls started at around ten o’clock this morning, his time. It was only when he got beyond that, that he found five missed calls in a row from Jules—starting shortly after one A.M., each spaced about thirty minutes apart.

  What had happened? Why did everyone have their panties in such a twist, trying so hard to reach him?

  Everyone but Jules, who’d dropped off the map.

  Who died? Jules’s voice echoed in his head and Robin’s memory shifted, but not enough for him to remember…what?

  Jules stumbling sightlessly for a seat, anguish and grief glazing his eyes.

  Someone had died.

  Fear filled Robin’s throat, throbbing in time with the pounding in his head.

  And when his cell phone lit up—its ring still silenced—and his caller ID told him it was his sister on the other end, he answered. “Jane?”

  “Robin, oh my God. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know.” He lowered the volume with one hand and grabbed his head with the other, to keep it from splitting in half. “Am I?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Where are you? Are you at least safe?”

  “I’m in my hotel room,” he told her. “Janey—”

  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “Who died?” he asked.

  “Who what?”

  “Someone died,” he told her. “I want to know who it is.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She’d started this conversation upset, and it was escalating. Her voice shook. “Is someone dead?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s try it this way. Are you alone?”

  He walked—carefully—into the empty living room. Where a spilled bottle of Jack Daniel’s stained the hotel carpeting. The other bedroom was empty, too. “Yes.”

  “So there’s no one in your room with you—”

  “That’s what I just told you,” he snapped, the act of which nearly sent him whimpering to the floor, to curl into a fetal position.

  “—either alive or dead?” Jane asked.

  “No,” he said. “Jesus! There are hundreds of messages on both my phones, you’ve been trying to reach me for hours while I was sleeping off a slightly exuberant night—”

  “A slightly exuberant night?” she repeated, her voice going up an octave and making his eyes tear. He held the phone away from his ear. “Do you have any idea what you did last night? Does a balance-beam routine on the rail of your twelfth-floor balcony ring any bells at all?”

  Robin looked out the sliders to the balcony. “Oh, shit,” he said as somewhere, way back, a shred of memory flashed. I’m the king of the world!

  “Someone uploaded digital video to YouTube,” his sister told him. “There are two different cell phone movies that hit the Web last night. One of them has you stripping to ‘Will It Go Round in Circles’ in some kind of, I don’t know, restaurant kitchen? The other has you stripping, too—except this time it’s full-frontal nudity. You can be thankful it’s low quality, but the audio track makes it clear what’s happening—or rather what’s not. Congratulations—one and a half million people and counting have now watched you not get it up. I’m so proud.”

  Robin sank onto the sofa. “Oh, shit. Who was I with?”

  “Some blonde,” Jane told him. “It was a woman, so congratulations again—your career’s not completely over. The rest of that one is seven minutes of the most terrifying footage I’ve ever seen. You’re partying, and I don’t know who all you’re with, but they are not your friends. You’re doing this crazy stuff—cartwheels into this pile of beach chairs, walking that railing, and…and…chugging a bottle of whiskey when you’re already too drunk to stand—and they’re cheering you on.” On the other end of the phone, Jane was apeshit. “I was sure you were dead, if not from a twelve-story fall, then from alcohol poisoning.”

  On the table next to the sofa was a note with a phone number. Call me if you want to hook up again. (Again?) It was signed Ashley.

  Next to it was Robin’s key card.

  The one he’d given to Ju
les. Right before Jules had walked into his hotel bar and found out from his boss and another friend that his significant other—Ben, the Marine—had been killed in Iraq.

  Who died?

  “Oh, shit,” Robin said again, past the misery that caught in his throat. “Oh, Janey, oh my God, I’ve really screwed everything up.”

  Annie stood in the shower, trying not to cry, letting the water drum down upon her head.

  “You okay in there?” Ric called.

  Oh, God. “Yeah,” Annie called back, making her voice sound cheerful. “Sorry, am I taking too long?”

  “No,” he said as she shut off the shower and squeegeed the water out of her hair. “I just…I know I surprised you. I kind of surprised myself.”

  She so didn’t want to talk about this. She reached out from the curtain for her towel. “Did Jules call back?”

  He helped her get it. “Not yet.”

  “The two men who were with him last night,” Annie said. “The shorter one was his boss, right?”

  “Max,” Ric said. “Dark hair, vaguely Indian American. India Indian.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Annie asked, wrapping the towel around her and pulling back the shower curtain.

  Ric was leaning in the open door—the one that led to his bedroom. He’d pulled on a pair of shorts, but that was it. It was a fashion statement that worked well with his six-pack. “I don’t know. The other guy wasn’t FBI. Sam. He works for some California-based private investigators—something called Troubleshooters Incorporated. Apparently it’s a big company, with lots of work—so much they can’t handle it all. He was trying to recruit us. You, actually.”

  Annie turned from brushing out her hair to look at him. His smile was rueful.

  “It definitely had more to do with you,” Ric admitted, “since all he’d seen me do was stand around with my thumb up my butt. I guess he figured if he could get you, he’d make do with me. I told him you had virtually no training, he said they’d take care of that. He left his card.”

  “Are you serious? That could be so great—”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that. I told him I’d tell you, so I had to tell you, but…” Ric shrugged. “I’m not interested.”