by Alison Kent
He couldn’t let this estrangement with his brother go on. Things needed to be set to rights—the way they’d been when the two of them, along with Ray’s two frat brothers, had boarded the schooner to celebrate Ray finishing up his Master’s thesis all those months—correction, all those years back.
Damn, but that had been a long time ago. A lifetime ago. Patrick grabbed his cell phone and dialed Ray’s.
“Ray Coffey,” his brother answered on the third ring.
“It’s Patrick.”
“Hey. What’s up?” His tone was wary, distant.
“You busy?” Patrick held his breath.
“Not too. Why?”
“Meet me somewhere?”
“Where?”
“FBI office?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Ten minutes.” He was all business. “I’ll be out front.” Ray clicked off.
Patrick did the same. It was a start.
7
EXITING THE FBI OFFICES with Ray at his side, Patrick shoved his sunglasses into place. An hour spent going over his suspicions had brought him no closer to any sort of usable truth.
The feds had received a tip that Dega had been seen in New Orleans four months ago, but a tip was all they had. That lack of detail didn’t do a lot to make Patrick feel better. Especially since they hadn’t been forthcoming with the info until he’d shown up in person to ask.
Discovering the extent of their silence hadn’t sat well with Ray at all. He’d paced Agent McCandliss’s office, furious with a system he blamed for making Patrick a target by failing to get Dega off the street.
Seeing his brother’s distress, Patrick had been the one to decide it was time to go. And now they were heading to their respective vehicles out in the parking lot.
Until today, Patrick hadn’t shared the investigation’s details with anyone. Now he wondered if handling things totally on his own wouldn’t have been for the best. He’d known Ray blamed himself for the disastrous vacation.
What Patrick hadn’t known, however, was how deeply his brother’s guilt ran. Feeling waves of unhealthy emotion pulse even now from Ray’s body, Patrick reached over and slapped him on the back.
“C’mon. I want to show you something.” He led the way to where his El Camino sat parked one row away from Ray’s crew-cab dual-axle pickup. He unlocked and opened the driver’s-side door, gestured for his brother to slide behind the wheel and give the girl a go.
Ray simply stood and stared. “What the hell is this?”
Patrick shrugged. “My feet were hurting.”
“Your feet were hurting.”
“Yep.”
“So you bought a classic muscle car.”
“Yep.”
“Dude, you are some kind of out of control.” Shaking his head, Ray gave a low chuckle, one just loud enough to cause the closest heads to turn before he ducked inside to check out the tucked-and-rolled leather interior.
Patrick had watched the same reaction happen whenever they spent time in public together. He saw it now, just as he’d seen it thirty minutes before when they’d entered the FBI offices. People looked, as if knowing that Ray was a true American hero. Funny thing, the choking sort of pride Patrick felt at sharing that same blood.
With a long appreciative whistle, Ray got out, slammed the door and circled the car, running his hand over the smooth hood, where blue flames licked over the bright red paint. “I guess this means you don’t hold it against me for getting rid of your Bronco.”
“Are you kidding? You would’ve spent a small fortune keeping the gas from gelling and the tires from going to rot on that thing.” Patrick shook his head. “You were right to get rid of it. It was turning into a real piece anyway.”
“Too many trips between here and College Station, maybe? Waiting till the last minute to head back to campus all those Sunday nights?” Ray smiled wryly.
“Business administration. What a waste of four years.”
“You got your degree. That’s not a waste.”
“Lot of good it’s doing me.” Patrick snorted. “Since I’d tagged after you to A&M anyway, I should’ve gone on to firefighting school. Done something more productive.”
He wanted to laugh at the irony. On that fateful day three years ago they’d been drawn to the pirates’ powerboat by the crew’s frantic signals and what looked like a hell of a fire. The smoke billowing out of the hold ended up being a controlled burn in an oil drum.
Patrick cringed, realizing what Ray must’ve been dealing with all this time. A trained emergency responder, and he’d still been had. Patrick tried to think of a change of subject that wouldn’t be too obvious, but Ray’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“You went to A&M because I did?” he asked, his voice raspy and gruff.
“You kidding? I could’ve slacked off anywhere. Knowing you were there to kick my ass if I flunked out was the only reason I stuck it out.” A truth as real as it got. “I was a screwup, but you didn’t quit on me. Ever.”
Ray bit off a sharp curse and looked away. “Right. That’s why the minute I moved back into the house I got rid of your stuff. Even after Mom and Dad had left everything in place all that time.”
Patrick pressed his lips together, stared at the bright chrome of the El Camino’s grill. “Ray, this beating-yourself-up business is really getting on my nerves.”
He huffed. “So you’ve said more than a few times.”
“Think about it, man. Can you see me fitting in with the crap I used to have? High school team pictures? Championship trophies? All those baseball caps?”
A corner of Ray’s mouth lifted as he glanced back in Patrick’s direction. “Uh, no. But I did keep most of the caps.”
“Good. Use them. I never expected my room to end up being a shrine.” Thinking about it now, he decided it was past time for another trip to Arizona to see their folks. “I understand it. It’s just…weird.”
Ray shook his head, leaned his butt on the car and crossed his arms over his chest. “Mom and Dad couldn’t deal, imagining what you were going through. If you were even alive to go through anything. The room gave them…hope, I guess.” He shrugged with uncertainty. “A sense of things being normal. As if you’d bust through the door any minute with half your moron buddies in tow.”
Normal. Patrick wasn’t even sure he knew what that meant. “You know, I haven’t looked up a single one of those jerks since I’ve been back.”
“And you say I can’t let it go.”
Patrick’s shrug was less about uncertainty and more about facing what he’d spent too long avoiding. “I guess we both have our demons. I’m just not liking the way they’ve gotten wedged between us.”
Ray dragged both hands down his face in an expression of weary exhaustion and shoved away from the car. “Yeah. I know. I’m glad you called.”
“Me, too,” Patrick said, and meant it. “I just want you to be aware of anything should it go down.”
Ray’s head came up. “You think that’s going to happen? I mean, I know Agent McCandliss says he’s doing what he can. But it bugs the crap outta me that he doesn’t have a better handle on Dega’s whereabouts.”
Patrick wasn’t going to argue with that. He simply nodded. “It’ll happen. I don’t know when or where, or what he wants from me. But there’s obviously something.”
“Hmm. Soledad, maybe? She was Dega’s girlfriend, right? Could he think she spilled her guts while winding that snake around your leg or something?”
Thinking about Soledad…Patrick took a deep breath and shoved it out, turning to lean across the roof of his car. He drummed his thumbs on the warm metal, admitting that he’d used her, plain and simple, while she’d claimed to have fallen in love. He’d felt alive when with her, had needed to hold on to that fleeting sensation to make it from day to day. He’d feared that, otherwise, he’d rot like the tires on his Bronco.
What he’d never considered was that she’d been using him, as well. T
hat he’d been her tool of revenge against Dega. And that she’d been willing to give up her life to bring the bastard down. “If she shared details, they slid into one ear and out the other.”
“Nothing about offshore accounts, contacts in the States? An address? A phone number? Anything, a hint even, that might give us a clue as to where he’s holed up?”
“Believe me,” Patrick said, shaking his head. “I’ve thought back over everything.” Thought back too much, remembered details better left buried. “Mostly she talked about her own life, how she’d come to end up with Dega.”
Ray adjusted his sunglasses, rubbed at his eyes beneath. “There’s gotta be something—”
“I’ve tried, Ray. I swear I’ve tried.” Patrick shrugged. “Nothing’s making sense.”
Ray was quiet after that for several long seconds, finally blowing out a long breath as if admitting defeat. Then he cleared his throat, his tone softer as he asked, “What about you and Poe?”
Poe. Every time Patrick heard Annabel’s nickname, he had to stop and wonder what Edgar Allan Poe fan had come up with it. Didn’t they know Poe had written the poem “Annabel Lee” for his dead wife? Creepy. The name, not the woman. “What about us?”
“Are the two of you making sense?”
“Today? Yeah. It’s interesting. Tomorrow?” He shrugged again, saying nothing about their New Year’s Eve bargain to part ways. “Who the hell knows?”
“Hmm.”
This time he turned his back to the car in order to face his brother. “You got something to say?”
Ray dug into his pocket for his truck keys. “Just that Sydney’s worried about you both. Says it’s like putting a lamb in a lion’s cage. Only the lamb thinks it’s a lion, too, which will only prolong the inevitable slaughter.”
Patrick raised his brows. “That’s quite a theory.”
“Yeah, well, Sydney’s quite a woman.” Ray pulled out his keys, his expression a bit awed. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure. I tend to agree with her most of the time.”
“And this time?”
“This time I agree that it’s a good analogy, but disagree with who she thinks the lamb is.” Ray’s dark eyes clouded with concern. “Be careful, little brother.”
Well, hell. Guess that answered that. “I do a fairly decent job of taking care of myself. One good thing I brought home from the island experience.”
Ray let out a long string of pretty nasty curses, but Patrick interrupted him before he could go off on one of his guilt trips. “Look, forget it. Annabel’s fine. And I’m obviously doing a lot better than you are.”
It took Ray a lot longer to come back. When he did, his voice was low and raw. “I have a hard time thinking of what you went through as a vacation.”
Patrick scuffed a boot across the pavement, looking down because it was easier than facing his brother’s heartache. “If I blow it off, it’s not to make it easier on you. It’s to make it bearable for me. It’s the way I deal.” He forced up his gaze, his throat tight. “You gotta let me deal, Ray.”
“I know, it’s just…” He rubbed again at his eyes. “You shouldn’t have to deal. The whole thing never should’ve happened.”
“Yeah? So? People shouldn’t die in fires, either, but it happens. You don’t save them all…am I right?”
Ray’s sudden pallor and grim mouth was answer enough.
“The point is,” Patrick continued, “if you focused on the victims you’ve lost in the past instead of the people who need rescuing today, you wouldn’t save anyone, bro. Much less have a wall full of commendation awards.”
“Yeah, I’m a regular hero,” Ray said bitterly. “Everyone thinks so.”
“Everyone knows so,” Patrick corrected. “Especially me. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got some pretty huge fires to put out now. So, are you gonna help me here, hero, or milk the martyr thing till we’re all ready to burn you at the stake?”
Ray snorted, his eyes suspiciously bright. “Asshole.”
“Dickhead,” Patrick retorted, the response as affectionate as it was automatic.
Bouncing his keys in one hand, Ray glanced beyond Patrick’s shoulder. “When we got to the place Dega told us to pick you up? I wasn’t surprised you weren’t there. I knew I wasn’t going to see you again, no matter what twenty-four hour bullshit he fed us about letting you go. Watching that powerboat speed away was about the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Yeah. I didn’t even want to think about what must’ve been going on in your head then.” Patrick swallowed hard. “That was the toughest part, you know. Being pretty much okay all that time, but dealing with you and the parents not knowing.”
The silence grew thick and awkward, a nostalgic fog of emotion that had them stepping back and clearing their throats and sharing a profound sense of kinship and relief.
Ray was the first to recover. “Look,” he said gruffly. “You even see a shadow you think might be Dega, you call me. Day or night, I don’t care. You call the feds first, but then you call me.”
Patrick nodded. “Will do,” he answered, watching his brother nod curtly before turning to walk off.
And then there was nothing more to do but dry his own eyes and head back to Annabel’s loft, a cage that seemed more welcoming than the house in which he’d grown up.
Whether that made him the lion or the lamb was anyone’s guess. Patrick sure as hell didn’t know.
PATRICK DIDN’T RETURN to the loft for hours. Annabel half expected him not to show at all after exposing himself as he had. He’d revealed more today than he had during their past seven weeks together, and no doubt regretted every word.
Especially the admission of holding tight to his past.
It was obscenely tragic, yes, and a past she would never expect him to forget. But he’d told her not to try to make things easier on him. She couldn’t help but take that to mean that he wasn’t willing to move on. And she had always been about moving on, doubly so these days.
In fact, she’d spent the quiet evening online exploring career opportunities on job-search Web sites. She’d managed, as well, to get a peek at the workings of the crime labs in several cities via newsgroups and message boards where professionals shared stories and discussed the methodology of forensics.
Unfortunately, a peek was all she’d gotten, as her concentration skills were shot. No matter that she’d convinced herself Patrick would distract her from deciding what direction best suited her future, she was rapidly becoming her own worst enemy in that regard. Too often she caught herself wondering what he would think about leaving Houston should work in her new field take her out of state.
The third or fourth time she’d entertained such aberrant thoughts, she’d admitted it was time for sleep. Her loss of focus, she’d decided, had to be directly related to this afternoon’s lunch and the revelations he’d finally made about his rescue and Soledad’s death.
How he’d lived with that for so long, carried it for all these months…
The longer she’d spent dwelling on his memories, the colder her skin had become. Rather than heading straight to bed, she had ended up soaking in a hot tub of bubbles, seeking warmth and a release of the tension keeping her wound tight. Finally she’d slept, waking hours later to the grinding slide of the elevator grate as he’d opened it.
She’d lain still, her heart in her throat, listening for his movements. A ridiculous endeavor, as he made no sound at all. Obviously she had dozed off again, because when he finally entered the bedroom and slid into bed, she woke suddenly, her breath caught as she settled into the heat of his body.
Telling Chloe that a relationship with Patrick was unhealthy had been the clearest truth Annabel could speak. She could support him, encourage him. What she couldn’t do was fix him. He had to not only admit to his demons but be willing to fix himself. So why did that proven truth now seem murky, when nothing about their situation had changed?
Nothing but Patrick’s willingness to open up
in the bright light of day.
In the time they’d been together, he’d grown from a bitterly recalcitrant ass to a man with a depth of character she couldn’t help but admire. A depth that few men ten years older yet knew. A character that showed more promise than that of any man whose path she had crossed.
She loathed tears, her own more than anyone’s, but was unable to stop them from spilling between her tightly closed lids. She shed enough tears to wet her pillow and to cause her to sniff. And not a soft unobtrusive sniff, but a ridiculously loud and unladylike snort.
“Are you crying?” Patrick asked, his voice low yet not a whisper.
Feeling morosely unable to cope with emotions she didn’t understand, she simply shook her head. She hated the sense of having no self-control, after priding herself for so many years on that very thing. And then she sniffed again.
“You are crying.” His hand, which had been resting on the curve of her hip, moved to her middle. He splayed his fingers beneath her breasts and waited. “I can feel it. You’re crying.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, inched away. He pulled her right back.
“Annabel?”
“Yes, Patrick?” Her voice hardly quavered.
He growled beneath his breath. “Don’t be an uppity snot with me. What the hell is going on?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to sleep.”
This time his growl was loud and seemed to rumble through his limbs as well as his torso. He moved so fast she had no time to consider a defense, finding herself pinned on her back to the mattress, his weight and his very strong arms holding her in place.
“I do mind. Tell me what’s going on.”
The room was dark, the only illumination that of the moon shining between slats of the miniblinds. She hadn’t closed them fully once she’d given up her vigil of watching for him to return.
