by Alison Kent
He returned the plug to the socket and let the Gorgonzola and mayo mix while he toasted a slice of brown bread before removing the single serving of tenderloin from the oven.
With Annabel looking on silently, he spread a diamond of toast with the Gorgonzola mayonnaise and layered the shaved beef on top. He handed her the open-face cocktail sandwich, but refused to let go until she looked up, and he knew he had her attention.
One timely pause and he stated the one single truth she needed to hear. “If it’s who I think it is, then he’s here to kill me.”
CHLOE ZUNIGA PULLED her lime-green VW Beetle into the parking lot of Three Mings. For a very long moment she seriously considered blowing off her appointment with Devon Lee and simply stuffing her face with General Tso’s chicken.
Fighting with Eric always made her want to eat. And not eat normally, but enough to drown her sorrows in pools and puddles of sugar and salt and vats of liquid chocolate. Alcohol, thank goodness, she only used when she partied. Alcohol was all about fun, and fun was not at all what she was having today.
Hell, who was she kidding? she mused, slamming the car door and adjusting her sunglasses in the glare of the winter sun. She hadn’t experienced fun in weeks. It was getting so bad that she hated going to the office. All the newlywed, affianced and bloated pregnancy bliss was getting on her nerves.
Especially since Eric refused to talk about their own relationship, where it was headed, where they might want to take it, where he saw them a year, five, ten from now.
He accused her of being desperate and swept up in the lives of her girlfriends. He said her obsession with marriage and babies wasn’t about their life together at all, but a case of self-inflicted peer pressure.
He didn’t know shit about what he was saying, and she wasn’t going to apologize for slipping into her recently broken potty-mouth habit. Her desires were not a part of the gIRL-gEAR partners’ trend-setting reputation. She loved Eric and wanted to make a life with him.
And until recently, until he’d started working so many hours and coming home long after she was asleep, she’d thought he felt the same.
But since she knew food wasn’t going to do anything but kindle her heartburn, she headed for the stairs to the gallery and her appointment with Poe’s brother, unable to deny the thrill of anticipation where indigestion had once burned.
Devon Lee was a hell of a sexy man. He was a bit taller than Poe, with more of a sense of humor twinkling in his eyes. His Asian-American features were sharply defined, and Chloe couldn’t help but wonder about the root of the Caucasian half of his genes.
She climbed the stairs slowly, doing her best to rein in the runaway emotion she had no business entertaining. She was here for Poe, to give her friend a hand salvaging the party, and that was it. Whether or not Poe’s brother revved Chloe’s motor was not for consideration.
Even so, when she stepped through the front door of the gallery, she could think of nothing but the unexpected sizzle of her last encounter with Devon and the trouble she’d had getting him out of her mind since.
Yet the simplicity of the gallery’s rooms was calming. She found herself unwinding, felt the upheaval that had unbalanced her since she’d left home this morning leveling out. She breathed deeply, inhaled a potpourri of aromas. Her stress ebbed to the point where she hardly remembered the source.
All she knew was serenity and, eyes closed, she smiled.
“It’s nice to see my patrons benefiting from the gallery’s ambience.”
She couldn’t help it; she shivered from the soothing sound of Devon’s voice. “Benefiting? How so?”
“Your shoulders are nowhere as tight as they were when you first came in.”
At the interesting revelation that she hadn’t been alone in her musings, she turned to him and asked, “Are you in the habit of stalking your visitors?”
He shook his head. “Not stalking. Observing.”
“A student of human nature?”
He inclined his head. His dark eyes twinkled. “I managed to get you up here to see my etchings, didn’t I?”
No. She was not going to fall for his charm, or the flirtatious banter she missed now that Eric rarely smiled anymore.
“Actually, I think I’m here to photograph your main room.” She held up her digital camera. “My fiancé—” wouldn’t Eric the commitment-phobe just cringe if he heard that “—owns a bar and will be supplying the tables and linens for your New Year’s Eve showing. I want to give him a visual of the layout.”
This time Devon gave a slight bow. “Then I owe him, and you, my thanks.”
Chloe took a minute to study Poe’s brother, willing her pulse to calm. There was no reason his simple expression of gratitude should cause such a frisson of awareness to tickle her skin.
But it did.
“Just don’t fool yourself into thinking this is about the goodness of my heart or anything.” What it was about was not having to spend New Year’s Eve at Haydon’s Half-Time while Eric played hotshot host to the sports groupies who couldn’t get enough of ESPN. Or of him.
Devon laughed at that, the sound deep and almost musical. “Of course not. It’s simply you helping Annabel and my reaping the benefits, for which I am eternally grateful.”
Chloe nodded, still feeling Devon’s laugh where she hadn’t felt anything now in weeks. “Just so we’re clear.”
He gestured for her to precede him down the hallway toward the main room. She did, listening to his quiet steps behind her. Observing, indeed. This was stalking, plain and simple. No other explanation existed for the tremor traveling the length of her spine.
But there was, her former bad girl self insisted. A very logical, very obvious and very sexual reason. Being emotionally committed to Eric did not mean the death of her body.
When she turned the fourth corner in the gallery’s maze of hallways, she found herself facing an alcove where a woman of Middle Eastern descent sat flipping through what appeared to be a binder of tattoo designs.
Curiosity had Chloe hesitating just long enough for Devon to take the cue. “Mina Sayid? Chloe Zuniga.”
Mina glanced up, then stood and smiled, meeting Chloe halfway as she entered the alcove. “Welcome to my tiny corner of Devon’s world.”
Chloe returned the other woman’s handshake and smile, taking in Mina’s Birkenstocks, jeans and long-sleeved slate-blue thermal top. The outfit seemed incongruous with the ruby embedded between her arched brows, black as her waist-length hair, yet somehow worked.
And then Chloe saw the artist’s henna-stained palms, taking one hand in her own and studying the intricate design. “One of my co-workers wears Mehndi art like this. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
“Mina is one of the city’s best,” Devon said, moving to stand at Chloe’s shoulder. “She has quite the clientele for both her henna art and her tattoo designs.”
Chloe met the other woman’s soft gaze and smiled. “Pencil me into your appointment book. I’ve been lusting for weeks over the work Macy had done.”
“I can pencil you in right now if you’d like.” Mina swept her arm toward her empty studio. “I had an unexpected cancellation, and the rest of my afternoon is free.”
Chloe quickly considered what remained on her own calendar for the day. Oh, right. Nothing. Eric was hosting a Houston Texans night at the bar and had been quite clear that it would be the wee hours before he made it home.
She didn’t mind that so much as she minded that he hadn’t asked her to come with him. In the past, he’d always had.
She wondered if Devon would be spending the rest of the afternoon at the gallery. She wondered why she even cared, just knew that she did. Decision made, Chloe nodded at Mina. “Let me do what I need to do here with Devon, then we’ll talk.”
Devon crossed his arms and leaned back against the alcove’s wall. “Her work doesn’t come cheap.”
“Devon!” Mina cried.
Chloe glanced from Devon to Mina and back, more certa
in than ever of her choice. “Believe me, sugar. I’m worth it.”
And after a long hot moment, Devon replied, “So we shall see.”
6
ON MONDAY AT NOON, Annabel walked out of the Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center into the bright December sunlight, wishing more than anything for a hot shower and copious suds.
The tour, both fascinating and informative, left behind a definite ick factor along with a sense of exhilaration. Even now, reaching into her bag for her sunglasses, she knew that her heart had never beat with this sort of excitement in response to her work at gIRL-gEAR.
Listening to the coroner and forensic sculptor discuss reconstructing and identifying recently discovered skeletal remains was akin to coming home. A strange thought, since neither Annabel nor her brother had ever experienced the true meaning of the term.
Most of their childhood had been spent living with their maternal grandmother in her Tacoma, Washington, duplex until she’d finally moved them to Houston. She was the caretaker of choice when their mother went running after whichever man had most recently walked out, certain she knew what had gone wrong and how to win this one back.
Annabel had figured out by the time she was ten years old that her mother would always return alone. Whether or not she would return at all had become a running bet between Annabel and Devon by the time they reached their teens.
Neither had any idea if they’d ever met their father, though doubted they shared their paternity. Devon had an easygoing nature in contrast to Annabel’s prickly personality. Since they had grown up in the same environment, he teasingly attributed their differences to the quality of the donated sperm.
After losing count of the number of men who had come into their lives and stayed through Easter or Thanksgiving, but never both, Annabel had very dramatically decided not to risk making their mother’s bad relationship choices. On her twenty-first birthday, she’d quit dating.
Instead, she began taking lovers who would please her physically, but not require that she involve her emotions. Emotions meant putting her heart on the line, to be swept away and then summarily squashed when she burned the toast, or was late to pick up the dry cleaning, or gained too many pounds.
She was much too smart for that.
On her thirtieth birthday, alone with Jose Cuervo and chocolate chip cookies, she’d had an enlightening epiphany before nausea struck. All those years during which she’d thought sophisticated wisdom had kept her detached and uninvolved, she’d simply been incapable of falling in love.
She could lust her brains out with the best of ’em, but losing her heart was not—and never would be—an issue. She was immune. Superior, yet somehow…deficient.
Or so she’d thought until the night Patrick Coffey dragged her out of Paddington’s Ford and branded her with the heat of his body and the fire of his mouth. She’d responded instantly, shockingly, every cell, nerve and emotion fully engaged.
Crossing the parking lot now, she settled her sunglasses in place and fished her keys from her bag. She hated these juvenile emotions. Expectations were a ridiculous drain; one was better off managing independently rather than looking to another for fulfillment.
Jerry Maguire had it all wrong. No one person could complete another.
She didn’t buy for a minute the happily-ever-after of her six gIRL-gEAR partners. Chloe made for a perfect example. Their wake-up calls would come soon enough, a call she would never have reason to anticipate as long as she stopped flirting with an attachment sure to cause her immeasurable grief. And doing so with a man who defined instability.
Though, even as she made the accusation, she doubted the accuracy. There were moments when she saw Patrick with the clarity of a diamond. Unfortunately, she mused wryly, most of the time she saw a thug.
Squealing tires brought her head up in time to see, hear and feel a souped-up muscle car roar into the parking lot. She frowned as the classic El Camino pulled in next to her Jaguar, with none other than the thug himself behind the wheel. She stood with her keys in her hand and remained unsmiling—not an easy task when Patrick looked like hell on wheels and she knew him so very intimately.
Her stomach fluttered as if defying her efforts at staying unattached, uninvolved. Even her hands trembled, holding her keys as she was, and she clenched her fists tighter. It was her knees, however, that gave her the most trouble. She took a step in reverse, backing smoothly into her car door, telling herself she was simply moving out of harm’s way.
Patrick cut the engine, turned to her and grinned the biggest, baddest grin she’d ever seen spread over his face. The silver hoop in his ear twinkled, as did his eyes when he pulled his sunglasses from his gorgeous face. But it was his expression of boyish delight that was her undoing. This was what he’d looked like before something—or someone—had robbed him of his innocence, Annabel thought dazedly.
She drew in a breath that took far too much effort, and gestured toward his vehicle. “What is this?”
“My car.” He climbed out and slammed the heavy door against the equally heavy frame. “Don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
“Thank God for that,” she said, recognizing, as she did, that no other car would fit him. They shared a definite bring-it-on attitude. “You’ve had this in storage all this time?”
He shook his head, ran his palm lovingly across the bright red roof. “Bought it this morning. Got tired of hitching in your cat there.”
She ground her teeth until her molars ached. “You just went out on the spur of the moment and bought a classic El Camino.”
“Totally restored. A beaut, isn’t she?”
A smile pulled at her pursed lips. “And I’m sure you’ve given her a name?”
That devil’s grin again. “I was thinking of calling her Annie. She’s sleek, sexy—” he waggled his brows “—and hot under the hood.”
Oh, but he was cute. She folded her arms and strove to look stern. “Where did you get the money?”
“Same place I got the money to buy you, sister.”
Hel-lo. “I would like to know.” Patrick made no effort at finding work, yet never lacked for obscene amounts of cash.
His grin vanished, replaced by a slow-growing wariness. “Why?”
“Fine.” She turned back to the task of unlocking her car door. His suspicion shouldn’t have hurt. She hated that it did. “Don’t answer me. God forbid I know anything personal about the man who’s sleeping with me.”
Two more weeks—no, less than that. Ten more days and he would be out of her life. She could easily replace him in her bed; she needed him for nothing. Nothing, she insisted, infuriated at the sudden sting of tears.
“I’m sorry, Annabel.” His fingers kneaded her neck, rattling her further when she needed to remain cool and detached. When she didn’t answer, he lifted his hand. “Every penny I have is on the up and up. Trust me.”
Her chest constricted. She whipped her gaze to his. “How can I possibly trust you, Patrick, when you still don’t trust me?”
He remained unmoving, unsmiling, poised as if on a precipice between saving himself and sharing what might be enough for her to take him down. When he glanced away, over and beyond the roof of her car, she knew he’d made his decision. Still, his expression remained grim.
“The money is mine, free and clear. There was a bounty on Russell Dega’s band of pirates.” Patrick narrowed his mouth, looked toward her, then away. “I would’ve split it with the gang’s informant. But she didn’t make it out alive.”
Oh God. God. Intuition told Annabel this was the reason for his lost innocence, the crux of his anger and pent-up pain. He was hurt, dammit, but she did not know how to offer comfort. Sex wouldn’t repair any of Patrick’s damage. Or any of her own.
Her heart began to race; her breathing quickened. Her world turned upside down with the force of what she felt. And so she did the only thing that seemed right. She turned to him and slipped her arms around his rib cage, pressing her palms to the cente
r of his back between his T-shirt and jacket. Her cheek she pressed over his heart, which lurched and began to beat as rapidly as hers.
She heard a strangled noise echo in his throat as his arms went around her. They stood like that for two minutes at least, unmoving, focused and close. She was aware of him in ways she’d never before taken time to examine, ways that were physical yet went beyond.
Today she wore flats. Patrick, as always, wore biker boots, putting the top of her head just under his chin. He rested there, so that she felt the grinding force of his jaw. She felt, as well, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed the rest of the sound she was sure she hadn’t been meant to hear.
A part of her wanted to ask what had happened, who had been the informant and how she had died. But a less munificent part didn’t want to know anything about any other woman who’d shared his affections. Annabel knew this one had in extraordinary circumstances, and her own jealous thoughts made her feel very small.
She tightened her hold, nearly able to number Patrick’s ribs. He was that lean, that spare and hungry, given to no excesses other than the occasional drink and his performance in bed. She knew with clear certainty that he hadn’t been this way…before. That he’d been a party boy, rowdy and as benign then as he was dangerous now.
And so, as clear as she’d just been with herself about not prying, she went ahead and did. “Tell me about her.”
A laugh that was sarcastic rather than joyous rumbled in his chest. “Seven weeks and you’re finally asking for details.”
She’d always been curious; she knew no one who wasn’t. But until now, until this moment, she hadn’t been sure she wanted the responsibility of safekeeping his secrets or sharing his pain. Now she had no choice.
Rejecting his tentative trust would kill the last trace of the boy inside him, and that she couldn’t do.
She breathed deeply, drawing in his warmth and the heady scent of wildness he exuded. “Tell me about her,” she said with more conviction. “I want to know everything.”
