by Alison Kent
THEY ENDED UP SITTING across from one another at Mission Burrito on Alabama, sharing a black-bean-and-chicken burrito dripping with salsa.
Talking softly over a front porch corner table made more sense than having this conversation in the middle of a busy medical center parking lot, even though Patrick could’ve stood with Annabel tucked close to his body the rest of the day.
Thing was, he hadn’t wanted to risk giving anyone watching the bright idea of getting to him through someone he held close. And he couldn’t imagine feeling closer to anyone than he had to Annabel then, holding her in his arms and hearing her ask him about Soledad.
He’d been home eighteen months, and Annabel was the first person bold enough or brave enough to want the specifics of his captivity. Ray had insisted Patrick take his time, talk when he was ready. Sydney had followed Ray’s lead, though hadn’t quite managed to hide her expressions of curiosity or pity.
The pity was what drove Patrick crazy, inciting the temper he’d spent three years in the islands controlling by walking away. His obvious hostility, even in absentia, completed the huge cause-and-effect circle that kept everyone at a big fat arm’s length.
And now Annabel wanted to know about Soledad.
Annabel, being Annabel, had opened her half of the burrito and was eating the chicken, rice, beans and vegetables with fork and spoon. His longneck dangling from his fingers, Patrick sat and watched her dainty destruction of her food in the basket. She looked up and caught him staring with what felt like a ridiculously goofy grin on his face.
“You find me amusing?”
“Not so much amusing as a contradiction. You eat with much more gusto in private.”
“In private you’ve usually worn me out and left me starving.”
“Good to know you enjoy my work.”
She balanced her fork on the edge of the burrito basket and blotted her mouth with a napkin before she answered. “I know this is going to come as a shock, but I enjoy you, Patrick. Your work, as you put it, is simply a part of who you are.”
He brought his bottle to his mouth because he wasn’t sure he could say anything, what with the way his throat felt so tight. Getting down the beer he’d just swallowed was going to be hard enough.
He was glad when he saw Annabel prepare to go on without waiting for him to reply. Even if he’d been able to speak, he’d yet to come up with anything to say. She enjoyed him, and that was more than anyone had offered in the way of accepting him for who he was now—not for who he’d once been.
“That said,” she began, all uppity and prim, “we’re at different places in our lives. Or maybe we’re even at cross-purposes. I’m not sure. All I know is that I’ve reached the point where I have to move forward to get what I want, and that means leaving the past behind.”
“gIRL-gEAR?”
“If necessary.”
“Me?”
“Ditto.”
He swirled the liquid remaining in the dark amber bottle. “And your closets? Are you cleaning out the skeletons?”
“I don’t have skeletons.” She threaded her fingers through the handle of the frosted mug holding her frozen margarita.
“We all have skeletons, Annabel.” He narrowed his gaze and focused, determined to see every nuance of her expression as he told her his truth. “Mine died because I wasn’t fast enough on my feet to save her. Her name was Soledad. She’d once been Russell Dega’s mistress. And the night before she lost her life she told me that she loved me.”
Annabel swallowed hard; he watched her work the knot from her throat, watched her pulse beat there in the hollow. “The informant?”
He nodded.
“What happened?”
He shook his head. “Tit for tat, sweetheart. Skeleton for skeleton.”
She reached for her fork and went back to picking through her rice and beans. After several seconds of doing nothing but moving food left to right, she calmly replaced her fork on the basket’s edge. “My mother.”
Now, this was interesting. “A living skeleton?”
“I don’t know. Neither Devon nor I have heard from her in years.” Annabel brought her straw to her mouth and sipped, then grimaced. “God, this is vile.”
“The drink or the conversation?”
“Both, actually.”
“Then bottoms up.” He lifted his beer. “You’re not yet numb enough to face the bones or the bad booze.”
“Is that why you drink as much as you do? To face the bones?”
What should he tell her? The truth? That he rarely felt the effects of alcohol, but keeping a bottle in his hand gave him a reason to explain away his behavior? “I’ll quit drinking if you’ll quit looking down your nose when you talk to me.”
She started to do it again—to stick her nose in the air and cut him off at the knees. But she stopped, stared into the drink she hated and shook her head. “I practiced that move for years to get it right. It seemed such an adult way to distance myself from unpleasantries.”
What was wrong with this picture? “What was so unpleasant that you couldn’t even be a kid?”
She sipped more of her margarita, frowned and swallowed. “Dealing with my mother. She knew absolutely nothing about nurturing relationships. Not with her children, nor with the men who came and went. She couldn’t even take care of herself. I don’t know how she ever thought she could care for me and Devon.”
“You and Devon. You took care of each other?”
Annabel shook her head, but it wasn’t an answer. She was simply cutting off his question. “Skeleton for skeleton, Patrick. Your turn.”
Back to Soledad. Blurting the truth out quickly seemed the road best traveled. “Once Dega got tired of keeping me on his boat and threatening to toss me overboard, he dumped me off at the island where his operations were based. A commune of sorts. Or a survivalist camp, though with all the modern amenities. He gave me to Soledad.”
“As a gift?”
He shrugged, having no idea what instructions Dega had given. “More or less to do with as she saw fit.”
“And what did she find fit to do with you?”
Patrick continued to slosh the beer in his bottle from side to side. “She used me as a canvas, for one thing.”
“The tattoo?”
Nodding, he upended and drained the longneck.
“That had to have taken—”
“Forever,” he answered, finishing her sentence. “Didn’t much matter. I wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, if not for Soledad, I’m pretty damn sure I’d be rotting on the island in a shallow grave.”
Annabel gasped. “What?”
Patrick snorted. “Dega didn’t have any use for me, which he made perfectly clear more than a few times. Soledad was the one who wanted to keep me around. I was her entertainment, I suppose.”
“Wait a minute. Slow down or I’ll never catch up.” Annabel held up one hand. “Dega giving you to this woman implies she had his trust. Yet she was the FBI informant?”
“She contacted them on a trip to Key West to pick up ink and needles her father sent her from Miami. A post office box, illegal as hell to ship that stuff, I’m sure.” He upended the bottle and pulled at the last of his beer. “At least that’s the best I can figure. She’d made the run a couple of weeks before the raid.”
“So Dega did trust her. Enough to let her off the island, right?”
Patrick nodded. “After I was rescued, I found out during debriefing that she’d refused to tell them where I was until they agreed to pay me the bounty if anything happened to her.”
“But the feds let her go—”
Patrick cut her off when he realized the scales weren’t tipping his way. “Nope. No more. Time to offer up some tit for that tat, sister.”
Annabel rolled her eyes, picked up her mug, then frowned when she reached the end of her margarita with an unladylike slurp from her straw. “I don’t really have anything else to tell. My mother was classic bipolar, but refused medication or couns
eling. It was always about the next man. He would be the one who would see beyond her illness to her true self, who would understand her, who would fall for her madly and never leave her side.”
“And when he did?”
“Then she left Devon and me with our grandmother and went after him.” Annabel grew melancholy, her face darkening, her brows lowered. “Devon ended up dating every woman who crossed his path, looking for whatever it is motherless boys are missing, I suppose.”
“And you?” Patrick asked, because he was much more interested in how—and why—Annabel had become the woman she was.
“I swore never to be used by a man. Any relationship I was in, I would be the one doing the using.”
“Whew. That’s good to know. I was beginning to take it personally.”
“It’s not about you at all. It’s about me. About the child I once was who thought all men would eventually leave, and the decision I made not to ever let that happen.” She sighed. “That’s why I’m having such a hard time with this.”
“This?” His heart blipped. “You mean this this? You and me?”
She nodded, her eyes filled with sadness and regret. Unlike any woman he’d ever known, Annabel was always in charge of her emotions. So now, sensing her struggle with her usual control sent him climbing another few knots up that dangling remnant of hope.
“If it helps, I’m not having it much better.” He toyed with his empty bottle. “I never thought we’d be together beyond that first night.”
One of Annabel’s brows arched. “You put up a lot of money for no guarantees.”
He shrugged. “A donation to a good cause.”
“But why me?”
What should he tell her? That she had reminded him of Soledad, and he’d been looking for a connection to the one good part of the last three years? Three years that seemed to have wiped out every single one that had passed before?
He barely remembered who he used to be. “It was the way you always looked at me. Like you saw right through my bullshit.”
“I did. I still do.”
He ignored her halfhearted smirk. “And you never back off or turn away. I don’t frighten you.”
“Are you trying to frighten people, Patrick?”
He shook his head. “There’s a big part of my old life I’d like to have back, you know? The part where I was treated like everyone around me.”
“You don’t make that easy to do.”
“And that’s the new me that I don’t want to change. I have less patience with the seven sins than I once did. Living shackled to a palm tree or a truck fender for three years gives one a new outlook on gluttony and sloth.”
“You were kept bound for three years?” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, no louder than the breeze rustling tree leaves overhead.
He shrugged. “Off and on. Depended whether the extra manpower was needed. Unloading the day’s haul. Digging an irrigation trench. And then there were the days Soledad was in the mood to cook and needed a hand. Or was feeling more artistic and needed a leg.”
At that, Annabel smiled. “How long did the tattoo take?”
“A good couple of years. But it wasn’t like she worked on it daily.” He paused to think back on the moods that had driven Soledad to ink. “She’d add to it usually after Dega had gathered up a load to take to the States to be fenced.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Sure.” Here was where he felt the need to tread lightly, not wanting Annabel to come away from the conversation thinking he’d simply used her to replace Soledad. Maybe in the beginning. The very beginning. But not now. Not any longer.
Not since that first night…. “It was a long three years,” he said gruffly.
“What happened to her?”
“We were fishing off the end of the pier, soaking up rum and the sun. The drinking had started the night before. Dega and most of the men had long since passed out. But I’ve got this tolerance problem. I just don’t get drunk.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Yeah, well, I try. It’s not like I don’t try.” And it wasn’t like he didn’t wish he could obliterate so many of his thoughts with a bottle of Jack. “Soledad and I were just goofing around, beyond tired but both sober. She was giving me a hard time about being such a piss poor fisherman. She wouldn’t let me go to bed until I caught our breakfast.”
He remembered laughing. God, but he remembered laughing. It was the one thing that stuck with him most about that morning, he realized, rubbing a hand over his face. Drunk on the realization that he was alive and, for the moment, free.
In a warped sort of fantasy, he’d pretended he and Soledad were vacationing, teasing and flirting, surrounded by beautiful blue water and early morning skies. It was at that moment that he’d known he’d be okay. That he had what it took to survive.
“Patrick?”
He glanced back up at Annabel, blinked burning eyes and turned his head as a sporty sedan pulled out of the parking lot. Watching the car was a legitimate distraction, giving him the time he needed to pull himself together.
“Sorry,” he said finally, clearing his throat. “I haven’t thought about it in a while.” A lie, because he thought about it daily. “And I sure as hell haven’t talked about it to anyone.” That was the absolute truth, and a conscious decision. At least until Annabel’s interest had him upending the well.
“I was bitching about our lack of luck when this speedboat blasted into the cove and straight to the dock, waking up every one of Dega’s men. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the center of an AK-47 firestorm. I’ve yet to see a movie get it right.”
The remembered sounds assaulted him as if he were back on that dock, flat on his belly, his hands over his head. He’d inched toward Soledad; she’d given him a wry grin and a ridiculous thumbs-up while lying in a mirror position.
He’d heard his name shouted over a bullhorn, seen flak jackets emblazoned with the letters FBI, others with the words United States Coast Guard, and he’d known. Soledad had given him up to the authorities and, in the process, spat in the face of Russell Dega.
Patrick couldn’t say another word. He could hardly breathe. When Annabel reached across the table to wipe the tears spilling from the corners of his eyes, he flinched and grabbed her wrist, wanting her to see, needing her to know. The truth. All of it.
“Don’t try to make this easier on me. It will never be easy. It will never go away. Every day I hear Dega yelling out and see Soledad getting to her feet, using herself as a shield so I could make a running dive for the boat. And then he shot her. He just…shot her.
“She went off the side of the pier and floated there.” Facedown. Skirt billowing. He remembered too many details. “And then the boat was too far away for me to see anything more. The feds came in after that. Cleaned out the operation. Rounded up the bad guys. All but Dega. I found that out during my debriefing, too.”
“And now you think he’s here.”
Patrick nodded, reaching down and finding the same inner strength that had served him so well. “He’s here.”
“Why would he come after you now? It would seem to serve him better to disappear off the radar.”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find my way back to that island if I tried. I have no idea where I was. What I know is that I’m not taking a chance with you. The cigarette butts weren’t a coincidence, and nothing you say will change my mind about that.”
“I believe you,” she said softly, and Patrick’s world ceased to spin on its axis, coming to a stop so that nothing existed but her words. She believed in him.
And that belief, that faith, was going to see him through.
PATRICK WAS NOT GOING TO let Russell Dega steal away another minute of his life. Nor would the bastard ruin the lives of those Patrick held close. It wasn’t going to happen, not as long as he had the strength to breathe.
He and Annabel had left Mission Burrito’s patio sober in mind and in body, and silent
ly headed for their cars. He’d walked her past his El Camino to her Jag, where they’d stood for several minutes, unspeaking and in each other’s arms. He’d longed to kiss her, wanted more than anything to kiss her, to press his body to hers and never let her go.
Instead, he’d watched her get into the Jag and pull out of the narrow parking lot, wishing he could follow her home and take her to bed. Their lunch had brought a turning point of sorts, one he longed to hold on to, driven to keep that connection alive.
In the end, he’d let her go home alone. He’d had to. Just as he’d had to wait for her to drive away before he was able to bend down and retrieve the cigarette butt from the pavement beneath his car door. He couldn’t believe it. He’d been sitting there telling Annabel the story of Dega with the bastard a hundred feet away.
Third time being the charm and all, Patrick wasn’t taking chances that he could handle Dega on his own. With all three butts now in a Baggie in his pocket, he shoved his sunshades into place, dropped down behind the wheel and put the car into gear.
It was time he made a visit to the FBI.
During his time spent with her, he’d learned that she’d once been Dega’s mistress. Even after their falling out over Dega’s treatment of the sailors he victimized, Soledad remained in an almost matriarchal position over the camp. Which was why Patrick had never understood her interest in him.
It certainly hadn’t been about taking him protectively under her wing, though she had been the one to teach him to cook. Neither had it been about her acting as a shield between the two men. From day one, Soledad’s interest had been purely about enjoying Patrick’s company. As if he’d brought into her life an excitement that had been missing.
He still choked up when he thought of all she’d done for him, from making his captivity bearable, to teaching him more than he’d ever thought to learn about women, and then to giving up her life. He wasn’t sure he would’ve done the same for her.
He’d do it for Annabel in a heartbeat.
And he’d do it for Ray.
Downshifting for a red light, Patrick couldn’t tell if the rumbling in his chest was adrenaline or the roar from the glass pack modification to the El Camino’s muffler. The thought of anything happening to his brother after the way Ray, with Sydney’s father’s help, had brought Patrick home caused no small measure of terror to flush away his more mellow thoughts of Annabel.
