Getting Lucky

by Susan Andersen

  “It is not bull crap,” she said hotly. “You know what I think? I think you must be one of those control freaks who likes keeping his womenfolk in ignorance. What is it, some kind of power trip that provides your kicks or something?”

  His sister was the only family he had left, and Zach had been on edge for three days, worrying about her. Anger and guilt and a sense of his own failure exploded in his gut and rose in a red tide to erode his control, and reacting for perhaps the first time in his adult life without considering the consequences of his actions, he grasped Lily by the shoulders and hauled her half out of her seat. Pulling her toward him over the console, he bent his head until their noses were a fraction of an inch apart and rasped, “You are full of shit, lady, you know that? If I was even half the control freak you accuse me of being I’d still have more candidates for victims than I’d know what to do with. I’ve got big, tough Marines to push around—I sure as hell don’t need to dominate my little sister to get my rocks off.”

  To his surprise she didn’t have an immediate smartass comeback, and he was on the verge of congratulating himself for finally scoring a point off her when he became aware that she was staring fixedly at his mouth. He stilled…and felt the quiver that ran through her.

  Slowly, her gaze rose to meet his. She swallowed and her tongue stole out to slick across her lower lip, and his dick shot from dormant to raging hard-on so fast he was surprised his little head didn’t get a concussion rapping against his fly. He dropped her so quick her breasts bounced as she plopped back in her seat, and he reared back against his door, scrubbing his fingers across his forehead.

  Jesus. What the hell just happened here? Had she really been looking at his mouth like she’d like to take a big bite out of it, or had the strain he was under finally popped a vein in his brain? Then his eyes narrowed. Or maybe she was switching her attention from his sister to him. After all, he had a lot more money than Glynnis.

  That theory would have held together a lot better if Lily looked anything like a woman who controlled men through sex right this moment. Instead, she sat there blinking, and when their eyes met, scalding color climbed her throat.

  Then she seemed to gather herself.

  “Okay,” she squeaked. Clearing her throat, she started over. “Okay, so maybe I was wrong about the control-freak thing. If so, I apologize. But I’m not wrong about Glynnis’s financial ignorance.” She sat up straighter. “She didn’t know how to balance a checkbook until I showed her, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea about managing her allowance.”

  Zach’s hand dropped. “That doesn’t make sense. She’s an extravagant shopper, sure, but Grandfather must have taught her something about handling her finances. He was sure as hell all over me to learn financial responsibility so I’d be in position to take over the family corporation. When I refused to fall in with his plans and joined the Marines instead, I just figured he’d eventually start grooming Glynnis for the position.” Surreptitiously adjusting himself, he gazed across the seat at her. “Now he was a controlling son of a bitch.”

  Then he stilled. “He was a control freak,” he reiterated slowly. “And I wouldn’t put it past the old bastard to have set it up to keep Glynnis ignorant on purpose.”

  A pucker formed between Lily’s slender brows. “Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. It pissed him off when I refused to toe the line—maybe he thought when I saw what he was doing it would bring me home to take care of her, and by extension, the business, just the way he wanted. God, that man was cold. He detested not getting his way, and if it hadn’t been for Grandmama, life in that frigging mausoleum would have been unbearable.” But warmth stole through him at the memory of his grandmother, and he felt a soft smile tug at his lips. “She was the best, though—that’s where Glynnie gets her sweetness.”

  “Glynnis said your grandmother died when you both were still quite young.”

  “Yeah, the same year as my folks, just days after I graduated prep school. Then it was just me and Grandfather, since Glynnis had been sent to a year-round boarding school in Geneva when Grandmama got sick. She hated that, but that was the old man for you. He didn’t give a shit what we wanted. He wanted Glynnie out of the way, so Glynnie was sent off. And he decided that I would be trained to take over the family corporation.” Feeling the weight of those suffocating expectations all over again, he tugged at the neckline of his thermal T.

  “So you ran away and joined the Marines?”

  He frowned at her. “I didn’t run away. I was eighteen years old; I simply exercised my right to choose my own career path. And it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be one that left me sitting in an office day after day.”

  Her lips curled up in a small, empathetic smile. “No,” she agreed solemnly. “I can’t envision that at all. I have no doubt an office job would have driven you straight up the wall.”

  Her comment caught him by surprise. He would have thought she’d be all for a guy taking whatever job brought in the most money. A vagrant thought that she might not fit so handily into the role he’d assigned her crawled uneasily through his mind, but he shoved it away. Don’t go there, he told himself.

  And didn’t allow himself to question why not.

  The sun had set behind the mountains to the west a few hours later when a tap on the window jerked Miguel out of the light doze he’d fallen into. He sat upright, adrenaline pumping through his veins as he half expected to see the sergeant major on the other side of the glass furiously demanding to know what Miguel was doing here. But the young woman who bent down to peer in his window was a stranger. Miguel cracked the window.

  “I need your ticket, sir.”

  It took a second to change mental gears; then he blinked, yawned, and plucked the ticket from the dashboard. He handed it to the woman.

  She looked at it and frowned. “You’re in the wrong line.”

  “Que?”

  “This ticket is for San Juan Island. You’re in line for Orcas.”

  Swearing to himself, he nodded emphatically at the young woman. “Sí. Orcas.”

  “Your ticket is for San Juan. You spent more on it than you had to for passage to Orcas.”

  He pretended not to understand, hoping she’d go away.

  She sighed. “You paid too much,” she said loudly, as if he were deaf instead of a foreign national, and tried to hand the ticket back to him. “If you take it up to the booth you can exchange it and get some money back.”

  People were starting to look this way, and Miguel wanted her gone before one of them was Taylor. “Sí,” he said again. “Orcas.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said. “Whatever. You can’t say I didn’t try.” Then, adding the ticket to the stack in her hand, she shrugged and moved on to the next car.

  She obviously thought he was an idiot, and Miguel glared first at her retreating back in the side-view mirror, then at the Jeep three cars forward. For this indignity, too, Taylor would pay. He was going to pay, and pay, and pay.

  8

  FULL NIGHT HAD FALLEN AND CLOUDS OBSCURED THE moon by the time they debarked the ferry at Orcas Island. Once past the lights of the landing’s tiny village, the darkness was absolute, and Lily’s first impression of the island was of a great mass of trees. Deciduous hard-and softwoods crowded the spaces between towering evergreens, which in turn soared overhead, their tangled branches meeting to form a tunnel over the road. Within the sweep of the Jeep’s headlights, their dark shapes gained color and texture, only to fade back into sooty shadows against the night sky like a multidimensional tone-on-tone onyx frieze.

  She turned from the window and looked at Zach. His eyes were impenetrable pools in the glow from the dash, and his face was all harsh angles. “We really should see if there are rooms available in Eastsound. It’s too late to just show up unannounced on David’s doorstep.”

  He didn’t even take his gaze off the road, but merely said tersely, “Let it go, Morrisette. We’ve had th
is conversation before.”

  And they had. They’d had it while he’d pored over the map of the island as they’d eaten Ivar’s clam chowder in the dining area on the boat’s upper deck. They’d had it while facing each other across bench seats as the ferry glided through narrow passages between dark islands. And they’d had it again while standing at the rail in the brisk early April breeze watching cars debark and load onto the boat at Lopez Island. When Lily had insisted one didn’t simply barge in on people at eleven o’clock at night, Zach had said watch me.

  “Yes we have,” she agreed now. “And you’re still wrong.”

  He didn’t flick so much as a glance her way, and her shoulders twitched irritably. She blew out an exasperated breath. “You are the stubbornest man I have ever met. And probably the rudest, too. I should have waited until tomorrow to give you the address.”

  His mouth tightened. His voice was cool and uninvolved, though when he said, “But you didn’t. And I didn’t invite you on this junket, lady; I’d be more than happy to head over to Eastsound and dump you off.”

  She made a rude noise. “Oh, right. Like I came all this way because I’m so fond of your jolly company.” She stared at him, willing him at least to glance at her, but not surprised when he didn’t. He’d been aloof since shortly after he’d caught her staring at his mouth in that brief moment of madness on the Anacortes ferry dock. Man, but she’d wanted to know what it would taste like—a momentary mania that was so far from smart she couldn’t believe it. Her face burned as it belatedly occurred to her that he might be acting this way to keep her from getting any funny ideas. She cleared her throat. “Nice try. But I plan to be right by your side to lend whatever damage control I can when you start throwing your weight around.”

  “Good. I’ll let you pass the tissues when Glynnie throws herself on my chest in gratitude for rescuing her from Trailer Town Tommy.”

  She felt her mouth drop open. “My gawd. What a snob you are.” She probably shouldn’t be shocked by the discovery, but she was.

  For the first time he took his gaze off the road long enough to look at her, and even in the murky light she could tell he was steamed. “It’s not snobbery, you little—” Cutting himself off, he gave her a strong look. “I’ve been through this shit before.”

  “Get out! Glynnis has never taken off with another guy.” At least…had she?

  “Did I say she had? But guess where the last guy she fancied herself in love with was waiting for his ship to come in when I tracked him down?”

  “Oh, let me take a wild stab, here. A trailer park?”

  “Damn right. And before you get on your high horse, I know living in a trailer park doesn’t automatically make a person trash, okay? I’m sure they’re filled with hard-working people, but this guy didn’t happen to be one of them. He maintained a few pieces of expensive clothing, but otherwise he lived like a pig. And he flatout lied to Glynnis. Until I took her out there to see for herself, she fully believed the reason they’d always had to meet at her place was because his beach condo was being renovated.”

  Poor Glynnis, Lily thought. But aloud she merely said, “David’s not like that. He loves her.”

  Zach made a derisive sound and stepped on the gas.

  Twenty minutes later he pulled up to a rural mailbox close to the entrance of a driveway. Rolling down the window, he aimed a flashlight on the address printed on its side. “This is it.”

  Headlights from a car that had turned onto the road behind them swept the interior of the Jeep, then just as quickly disappeared, and Lily turned from staring at the thick stand of Douglas firs that provided the Beaumont property with privacy. She opened her mouth to try one last time to talk Zach out of descending on David’s family at this late hour, but before she could say a word, he put the Jeep in gear.

  “I’m through debating this with you,” he said, as if she’d actually presented her argument, and wheeled the vehicle into the drive.

  They drove down a long ribbon of asphalt that unfurled through dense woods. Then the surrounding trees gave way to an acre of meticulously maintained lawn. But it was the lodgings perched midway between the woods and a bluff overlooking the water that caught Lily’s attention, and a startled laugh escaped her.

  “Oh, my.” She turned delighted eyes on Zach. “So much for your he-only-wants-my-sister-for-her-money theory.”

  Far from the trailer of Zach’s imagination, David’s home was an estate. Built of fieldstone and weathered shingles, it looked more like a sprawling country inn than a single-family dwelling. Angled to face the cliff and the water below, it had stubby wings on either side of the main structure, several chimneys, and shutters that framed exquisitely crafted windows…every one of which was currently lit up.

  Zach didn’t look the least bit embarrassed to have jumped to what was clearly a wrongheaded conclusion. He merely shrugged at her jibe, pulled the Jeep to a halt at the top of the circular drive, and killed the engine. He spared Lily a single glance before reaching for the door handle. “Yeah, but everyone appears to still be up. So I guess it’s not too late to come calling, after all.” He climbed out of the car.

  Lily rolled her eyes as she, too, got out, but she couldn’t prevent a tiny smile from curling up the corners of her lips. Soldier Boy was wrong, wrong, wrong, and soon he’d be forced to eat his words. She did a little dance and promised herself a ringside seat for the occasion.

  She was still smiling as she followed him to the front of the house, and they climbed the stone steps of a generously proportioned veranda. A minute later he rang the bell. When that didn’t garner a quick enough response to suit him, he raised a big fist and pounded on the solid portal.

  “For heaven’s sake, Zach,” she remonstrated, but when the front door abruptly opened, pure shock clogged her throat as they found themselves looking down the business end of a double-barreled shotgun.

  Whoa, shit! Holding his hands away from his body to demonstrate his harmlessness, Zach stepped in front of Lily. Not that putting himself between her and the shotgun would shield her from a helluva lot if the guy facing them decided to pull the trigger. At this range, two barrels worth of shot would rip a hole through him the size of a volleyball and plow right into her.

  Voices rose within the house, most of them feminine, one of them perilously close to hysteria, but Zach didn’t take his eyes off the young man with the shotgun. Stowing away the brief regret of having packed his Marine-issue nine-millimeter in his duffel bag before leaving the campground this morning, he said calmly, “Hi. How ya doin’? I know it’s a little late to be dropping by, but even so, this is a bit excessive, don’t you think? Or is this how you always greet visitors?”

  The man’s hands tightened on the stock of the gun. “Who the hell are you? And what the hell do you want?”

  The guy was nervous, and he was an amateur, neither of which was a condition Zach appreciated in someone pointing a gun at him. Seeing the young man’s finger slide off the trigger to tap restlessly against the stock, Zach whipped out a hand and wrenched the shotgun sideways, relieving him of it with a single, supple twist of his wrist.

  The man swore and made a grab for it in an attempt to regain possession.

  Fending him off, Zach broke open the barrel, slid out the two rounds of shot, then snapped the barrels back into place and passed the shotgun back to the other man. “My name is Zachariah Taylor,” he said. “Master Sergeant, U.S. Marines,” he added, hoping the fact he had the authority of the United States government behind him would help to cool the other man’s jets. The guy looked as if he were about to jump out of his skin. “I’m here to see my sister Glynnis.”

  He felt Lily unhook her fingers from his waistband where she’d anchored herself, and the warmth of her breasts dissipated as she peeled herself off his back. He barely had time to register the fact, however, before a woman in her late fifties materialized in the doorway.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” she said as tears trembled on her lower
lashes and her pale, fine-boned hands systematically shredded a lace-and-lawn handkerchief between them. Then she bunched the hankie in one hand as she reached out and grasped his arm with the other. She tugged him into the foyer, then stared up at him hopefully as the young man closed the door behind them. “Have you heard from him, then? Have you news of my David?”

  Damn. He didn’t like the sound of this. “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh, no!” An unchecked noise escaped her, and he realized this was the voice he’d heard on the edge of hysteria.

  “Take a deep breath, ma’am,” he ordered in the same I-will-be-obeyed tone he’d used throughout the years to get more than one green recruit over a hurdle of nerves. “Take nice, deep breaths and let them out slowly. Then tell me what’s going on here.”

  She sucked in air but didn’t look appreciably steadier for her efforts once she’d exhaled it. Nevertheless, she drew in and exhaled another, then faced him as calmly as she was able. “They’ve been kidnapped,” she said, her chin immediately beginning to wobble. “Oh, God, oh, God. David and his little girlfriend have been kidnapped.”

  Dios, it was cold. Miguel rubbed his hands up and down his arms and wished he had warmer clothing. He missed his beloved Colombia, where the heat sank into a man’s bones, and wondered in dissatisfaction if Master Sergeant Oh-Such-a-Big-Man Taylor and his anemic woman had finally reached the destination they’d been heading for ever since leaving California. He certainly hoped so, because the sooner he accomplished his mission, the sooner he could reclaim his rightful status and return to his village with his pride intact.

  He was tempted to get out of the car and make his way down the driveway where the master sergeant had parked a short while ago, to see if that was where the marine was now. Except it was the dilemma last night at the campground all over again. He didn’t dare abandon his car for fear he’d be caught unprepared should the commander suddenly return. And he couldn’t park too close for the same reason that had kept him a respectable distance for two long days—an unwillingness to give the game away before he was ready to make his move. As it was, he’d practically driven right up the Jeep’s back bumper in his race to catch up earlier, when he’d feared he’d lost them and had instead came across the vehicle unexpectedly parked in the middle of the road. He’d wheeled into the first private drive he’d seen and waited until he’d heard their car drive away before pulling out again. Then he’d found a better place from which he could not only keep an eye on this road but screen his car from the casual glance.