by Alison Kent
The FBI steganographer had nearly burst out of his pants with excitement at seeing Soledad’s intricately primitive encryption. He’d been the last, thank God, in a long line of feds today to pick and paw at Patrick’s leg. If Patrick had been subjected to one more analysis or examination or hand on his ass, he swore he would’ve come unglued.
Annabel had kept him from bolting. She’d done nothing more than be there for him, even if he’d only seen her in passing as he’d been escorted and wheeled from room to room, from ass-grabber to ass-grabber. He’d known then that his brother would go ballistic at being left out of the fun. Calling Ray any earlier wouldn’t have done any good.
But now, yeah, Ray deserved his answers.
Patrick pushed up to his one good foot and shook his pant legs back into place. It was time. Time to come clean, to tell his brother and their respective women his torrid tropical tales. He grabbed his crutches and, with one last look around his father’s study, hobbled out to the kitchen.
Sydney and Ray started talking to him at once. Annabel just looked up and smiled, a smile that Patrick swore made his heart stop beating. Her eyes warmed. Her expression softened.
If he hadn’t been such a cynical bastard, he would’ve sworn what he was seeing was a reflection of the consuming emotion that left him unable to breathe.
Leaning heavily on both crutches, he held up a hand to stop the flood of questions. “I’ll answer everything, anything, I promise. But can we please eat first? Annabel’s been keeping me on a short leash and hasn’t fed me a thing all day.”
DURING A DINNER THAT nobody but Patrick really seemed interested in eating, Annabel listened to him describe to his brother Luc Beacon’s suspicions about the strangely symbolic patterns in the tattoo, and the hours spent with the FBI that followed.
Not surprisingly, Ray hadn’t eaten but half of his man-size burger with bacon and cheese. His attention was fixed on his brother. “It was not a pleasant return to Barbados without you, I can tell you that. I kicked my own ass repeatedly for ever letting Dega take you off the schooner, and then I went after everyone else at least twice.”
Patrick dragged a home-style fry through the pool of ketchup on his plate. “I’m surprised you made it home in one piece without sinking the schooner in the process.” He glanced briefly at Annabel, winked and smiled. “Ray hasn’t always been the rational man you see before you today.”
Sydney sputtered. “Who says he’s rational now?”
“And that’s why I have you, cupcake,” Ray mocked. “To keep my Dr. Jekyll from turning into Mr. Hyde.”
“What I’m trying to do is keep you from going after Dega. I don’t care what you say. You cannot bring him down on your own, Ray.” Though her eyes were damp with tenderness, Sydney’s voice was businesslike and stern.
And Ray looked none too pleased that she was obviously airing his privately dirtied laundry. “Anything I do, it won’t be because I’ve gone off half-cocked. I’m not stupid.”
As Annabel looked on, Patrick’s head whipped from his brother to Sydney and back. “Going after Dega? What the hell is that crap if it’s not stupid?”
Leaning forward at the table, Sydney spoke to Patrick even though her gaze remained fixed on his brother’s guilty face. “Exactly what I’ve asked him more than once since that bastard broke your leg.”
“Sydney?”
At Ray’s soft query, she turned. “Yes, Ray?”
“You said bastard,” he said with all seriousness, and Annabel had to hide her grin.
“I did, yes. And I meant it.” Sydney stabbed a fry with her fork and gestured with it. “You are not going to change the subject on me, Ray Coffey.”
“And you sure as hell aren’t going after Dega,” Patrick added in a voice Annabel wasn’t sure she’d ever heard. A voice that was low and lethal, threatening in its certainty, uncompromisingly brutal and sharp. “You don’t know him, Ray. Yeah, sure, you’ve seen what he can do. You’ve heard secondhand stories….”
Patrick let the sentence trail off, not for effect, she knew, but to gather his bearings, to center himself and find his reality. He looked back at his brother then, his expression just this side of savage and set off by the gleam of the hoop in his ear. “Secondhand stories aren’t worth a shit. Not when you haven’t heard mine.”
Ray nodded slowly, sat back in his chair. “So? Tell me.”
Patrick stared down into his plate. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Ray said fiercely. “But mostly about Soledad and the tattoo.”
“No,” Sydney said. “I want to know how you learned how to cook.”
“That, too,” Ray added. “But not so much how as where. This island have four-star kitchen facilities or something?”
“Or something, yeah.” Patrick chuckled under his breath, and the sound had Annabel sighing with relief. It was so good to know he had it in him to relax and enjoy his brother, even in the face of his previous and rather ferocious insistence that Ray mind his own business. “I might’ve been tied to a tree half the time, but trust me, Russell Dega lived in style.”
“I don’t get it,” Sydney said. “I thought the island was primitive. Uninhabitable. Not…”
“Paradise?” Patrick asked.
She nodded. “Exactly.”
“He’d been pirating long enough to have a palace to rival Saddam’s.” Patrick returned to his ketchup and fries, nodding as he swallowed. “No shortage of money, which meant no shortage of generators or fuel. The biggest building was fairly basic, a sort of barracks where most of his crew stayed. Where I stayed when I wasn’t shackled. But the house he lived in, that Soledad lived in, was twice this one’s size.”
Annabel’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. And it wasn’t just the size of the place. It was the extravagance, the cypress and cedar and walls of glass.” Patrick reached for his beer and drained the bottle. “Then there was the underground hangar for his helicopter.”
Ray’s “What the hell?” came on top of Sydney’s “Oh, my God.” Annabel had the same reaction. She hadn’t heard any of this. All this time she’d imagined him living like Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway—not in a resort to rival Nolan Ford’s vacation home off the coast of Belize.
“This is getting way too James Bond,” Ray finally said, dragging both hands down his face.
“It took him years to design and to build it,” Patrick continued. “He’d send different men to the States for supplies, bribe others whose skills he needed. He’d pay their way from Miami to Kingston or wherever, then bring them out to the island in the chopper, blindfolded and bound so they had no way of knowing where they were or how to get back.”
“And they went for this?”
“It was untraceable cash, Ray,” Patrick said soundly. “And you can’t discount the loyalty given a man as charismatic as Russell Dega.”
“Soledad told you all of this?”
Patrick nodded at Annabel’s question. “She’d been with him since the beginning. She’d seen it all. The loyalty part she didn’t have to tell me. I witnessed that myself.”
“How exactly did Soledad fit in?” Sydney asked.
“She was one of his earliest acquisitions.”
“He bought her?”
“Not really.” Patrick swirled another fry through ketchup as he responded again to Sydney. “Dega actually grew up in Miami. Same as Soledad. Late seventies, early eighties. He got his Master’s in engineering by the time he was twenty-two.”
Ray snorted. “A freakin’ whiz kid.”
“A genius. Literally.”
“That’s not hard to believe,” Annabel offered. “To pull off what he did? That’s not a simple feat.”
Patrick shifted in his chair. “Soledad was his only weakness. And I’m pretty damn positive I wouldn’t be alive if she hadn’t been.”
Ray bit off a curse. “If she knew what he was doing, what the hell was she doing with him?”
&nbs
p; “In the beginning? Getting out of a bad situation. Poverty, abuse, typical crap used to justify a life of crime. Except she was a straight arrow. Her mother was dead. Her father ran a tattoo parlor way the hell deep in Little Haiti.” Patrick’s mouth twisted. “Guys came after her all the time. She was raped at least twice.”
Shuddering, Annabel took a deep breath. “And Dega was her savior.”
Patrick gave a single nod. “Took her out of hell and dropped her into heaven. She tried to repay him by watching his back until she realized the extent of what he was into. It was mostly drugs back then,” he said, answering the unasked question Annabel was certain the others had, as well. “Dega was pretty much his own cartel before he decided to take over the Caribbean. By then she was embroiled and knew too much. He wasn’t ever going to let her go.”
Frowning, Ray crossed his arms over his chest. “And she sure as hell guaranteed he wouldn’t let you go, either, spilling her guts like that.”
“He wasn’t going to let me go, anyway. She knew that. Knew that neither one of us would leave the island alive. That’s why she talked in the end. She didn’t tell me much of anything at first, but eventually…” He took a breath, shifted in his chair, stretched out his injured leg. “Eventually she talked about everything. It was a kindred-spirit thing, I guess. We were in the same boat. I was a willing ear.” He shrugged. “That’s the most sense I can make out of it.”
Annabel reached across the table and took hold of his hand. It was time to change the subject. She sensed Patrick reaching a critical edge, a precipice, and she laced her fingers with his. “She learned to tattoo from her father, didn’t she?”
“And cook from her father’s mother. Dega made sure she had anything she wanted or needed. It was a game with him.” Patrick’s voice caught, cracked; his eyes grew watery, but he held tight to her hand. “Knowing he could take it all away at any time.”
“You don’t have to do this now.” God, but Patrick had gone through so much, Annabel thought. Both he and Soledad. The urge to push up from the table and take him in her arms was overwhelming. “Not if it’s too—”
“Too hard? It’s never going to be easy, sweetheart. I told you that.” He squeezed her fingers. “But this has been a long time coming. And I need to get it done.”
“Poe’s right, Patrick. We’ve never wanted to push you,” Sydney said, her head canted slightly with a gentle smile. She reached for Ray’s hand. “We’ve always wanted to know. I hope you don’t think we didn’t want to know.”
“Hell, if I were you I wouldn’t want to know,” he answered with a sharp laugh.
Ray placed his arm along the back of Sydney’s chair, looking at her as he spoke. “Not knowing has been killing the both of us.”
“Yeah, I can see that you’re wasting away to nothing over there,” Patrick said, ribbing his brother.
“I’m being serious.” Ray glared back. “You’re always sulking or goofing or walking off. Talking to you about anything hasn’t exactly been a piece of cake.”
Patrick took a deep breath. “Talking hasn’t done me a lot of good for quite a while. I got used to walking off, figuring it was better than having Dega cut out my tongue. But talking’s coming easier these days.”
“I should hope so,” Annabel said, trying to keep a straight face. “What with all the work I’ve done on you.”
Patrick gave her a look that lost its harshness when his eyes twinkled. “My lot in life. Always have women working on me.”
“Did it hurt?”
He glanced over to Sydney. “Annabel making me talk?”
Sydney shook her head, giving Annabel an eye-rolling glance. “I can’t get used to hearing Poe called Annabel. She’s always been Poe. And, no. I meant the tattoo.”
He gave a shake of his head, grimaced, then nodded quickly. “Like hell. Or parts of it did.”
“It must’ve taken forever.”
“A good while, yeah.”
“And you had no idea what she was doing.”
“Not a clue.” He continued his conversation with Sydney. “I knew she was proud of her work, and her timing makes me think the FBI will find a lot of information on Dega’s activities once they decipher it all.”
“What do you mean, her timing?” Ray asked.
“Just that Dega had this thing about showing off the goods. He’d have Soledad come out to the dock and watch the boat being unloaded. Proving himself, I guess. Strutting his feathers. And that gave her the firsthand particulars on which boats he’d boarded and the cargo he’d taken.”
“Too bad he wasn’t familiar with pride going before a fall, and all that,” Ray said, reaching for his beer bottle. “Guess he was disappointed we didn’t have crap worth ripping off. Then again, the way you kicked his ass, he was probably more about getting his pound of flesh than anything.”
Annabel lifted a brow, pulling her hand from Patrick’s. “You kicked his ass?”
He rolled his eyes before grabbing another handful of fries from the serving platter and turning to Sydney as she asked, “Why did he board your schooner in the first place, do you know?”
Ray shook his head. “Wrong place, wrong time. That’s about all I can figure.”
“He was looking for a yacht that was supposed to be in the area,” Patrick said, squirting a new pool of ketchup onto his plate.
Ray snorted at that. “And he couldn’t tell the difference between our schooner and a yacht?”
Patrick’s first response to his brother’s question was a quick shrug. “It wasn’t there and that pissed him off.”
Annabel glanced from one man to the other. “He couldn’t get what he wanted so he took what he could, right?”
“He’d take anything he could get a good buck for. But he’d also take a souvenir. Notching his bedpost or whatever. I have a feeling that’s what Soledad recorded somehow. Either the dates of the heists or the names of the boats, and then the accounts and storage locations where the money went.”
“If they weren’t together, what was the point of his showing off?” Sydney asked, frowning. “Or was he trying to win her back?”
“Nope. It was more like he wanted her to see what she’d given up when she’d given up on him.”
“That would make her revenge make sense.” Ray pushed away from the table, grabbed another beer from the fridge, offering one to Patrick, who nodded.
“I don’t think anything about this makes sense,” Sydney said with a sigh.
Patrick took the beer from his brother. “It would if you’d known Soledad. Dega guaranteed she wouldn’t leave him, at least not alive. So she did what she could to take him down.” He stared at his bottle. “For so long I thought she’d failed, that we’d both failed, but knowing she may win in the end makes her death a lot easier to deal with.”
Sydney started gathering up the dirty dishes, as if putting an end to the subject of death and the long silence that followed. “It’s hard to believe that amazing snake holds so many secrets.”
Patrick chuckled softly. “It looks like an average snake to me.”
“There is nothing average about that snake, Patrick,” Annabel said.
He wiggled both brows. “Glad you think so.”
Annabel rolled her eyes. “We’re trying to be serious here.”
“And you’re doing an excellent job.”
“I hate it when you do that.”
“No, you don’t. You love it when I don’t take things too seriously. In fact,” he added, his expression wickedly bright as he sat back in his chair as if surveying his harem, “I’ll bet you love me.”
Sydney, having moved from the table to the sink, gasped, then turned her attention to Annabel. “Well?”
“Well what?” Annabel answered. She was going to kill him right where he sat. Right in front of witnesses.
“Do you love him?”
No way was she going to get into this here and now and with an audience. She narrowed her eyes in Patrick’s direction, hoping her
voice wouldn’t break, and said, “Only in his dreams.”
THE DRIVE HOME from Ray and Sydney’s passed in silence for the most part. Patrick slumped back in the passenger seat of Annabel’s Jag and dozed. Or pretended to doze.
He was wiped out, exhausted beyond belief. But he also felt better about his life, his future, his relationships, than he had for approximately fifty-four months.
There were times, thinking about his life of five years ago, that he might as well have been watching a bad B-movie or reading dishwater-dull fiction. He’d been so lacking in ambition that the kid he’d been then now bored him silly.
Given a choice, he wouldn’t have picked growing up tied to a tree as the way to go, but he’d made it through. The only thing left to do was rid society of Russell Dega.
And convince Annabel how miserable she’d be if they didn’t spend the next fifty years together.
He rolled his head to the side and took in her profile, which was sharp and stunning and punched him in the gut every time. “Forty or fifty? You pick.”
Her brows came down in a small frown, and she kept her eyes on the road. “Forty or fifty what?”
“Years. With me. I figure if we decide on a time frame now,” he hurried to add, sensing her stiffening in her seat, “we won’t run into any of those awkward arguments later about you being too old or me being unstable.”
“I see.” That was all she said.
“Do you?” As tired as he was, he was more aware of the ticking clock than he was of his need to sleep. “What do you see? Tell me.”
“I see that you’re not going to be easy to get rid of.”
He watched her try to hide a grin, yet he wasn’t quite confident that they were on the same wavelength. Her grin was a bit too tight, her fingers too rigid on the wheel. “The age thing and the Dega thing aside—”
“As if we can push either one of them aside…”
“The age and the Dega thing aside—” he growled the words again, shifting in the seat to better face her “—I’ve never figured what the big deal is. I’m not going to get in the way of your career, and I’m not going to sit back and let you support me.”
