“Yeah, and when I’m ninety-six you’ll be a hundred and three.” The hoop in his nipple twinkled, as did the one in his ear. “What about it?”
“Nothing really.” Looking down, she swirled her fin
gers through the water between them, brushing ever so lightly over his groin.
He gasped, sucking in a sharp breath. “You think I’m too young for you?”
“I think you’re young, yes.” She leaned forward, took his nipple ring between her teeth and tugged, letting go and teasing his tight nub with her tongue.
“And you’re just entering your prime,” he managed to mutter from between gritted teeth.
She sat back, cocked her head, moved her fingers down beneath his balls. “Is that so?”
“Oh, yeah.” He closed his eyes, let his head fall back, and groaned. “By the way, have I ever told you how glad I am that you keep your nails short?”
“I see,” she said, demonstrating thoroughly how very short they were.
“You’re not a guy, so I doubt that you do.” He blew out a series of short panting breaths, then released a seriously satisfied sigh. “But you can definitely feel.”
“Like that?”
“God, yes. You’re the only woman I’ve let touch me like that. Hell, you’re the only one who’s ever wanted to.”
“I like touching you, Patrick. It…stimulates me.” She circled her clit before testing her own readiness.
“And here I thought I was the one getting a rise out of it.”
“And what a nice rise it is,” she said, wrapping her hand around him.
His eyes burned brightly. “Then a proper show of appreciation is in order.”
“There’s nothing proper about what we do together, Patrick.” At that, she took him deeply inside.
Neither one of them moved. They simply sat there,
joined in the most intimate mating of bodies, staring into each other’s eyes. She felt as if for the very first time she knew the purity, the immeasurable depth, the passion of Patrick’s soul, and she could no longer deny her love.
“I want to kiss you,” he finally said, his voice a raw whisper, his eyes growing red-rimmed.
She shook her head, although she couldn’t deny how much she wanted the very same thing. “No, you don’t. You’ll taste too much of yourself.”
“No,” he said, shifting his hips forward so that he buried himself even deeper within her body. “I’ll taste us.”
And then he cupped his hand to the back of her head, pulled her to him and drove his tongue into her mouth.
A
NNABEL DIDN’T CARE
that Patrick wanted to stay at the loft to do what advance prep he could for Friday night’s showing. She wanted him with her at Devon’s gallery for Luc Beacon’s Tuesday morning travel-ad shoot.
Since the incident with Dega a week ago, she hadn’t let Patrick out of her sight. She had no idea why she thought she could keep him safer than he could keep himself. But there it was. Her need to know he was out of harm’s way was as real as the cast immobilizing the leg Russell Dega had fractured.
The depth of trouble Patrick was in went beyond what she’d convinced herself she was willing to overlook. She was still too scared to tell him that she loved him. Admitting it to herself had been hard enough. But speaking the words, lowering her walls, opening her heart to a man whose stability she still wasn’t sure she could trust…She shook her head.
Soon, but not yet.
Once this shoot was out of the way. Or maybe once
they’d made it through New Year’s Eve in one piece. Only three days remained until Devon’s showing. Her stress level, which had skyrocketed this time last week, still hadn’t safely splashed down. It would, though, of that she was fairly certain. What she didn’t know, couldn’t anticipate, was the frame of mind she’d be in once it did.
Standing in front of the single floor-length mirror in the gallery studio’s small dressing room, Annabel adjusted the belt on the cargo-style jumpsuit she wore and pondered again her current pickle. Not the pickle of wearing what looked and fitted like a leopard-print parachute and did nothing for her very fine ass, but the pickle of loving an unsuitable, dangerous and inappropriate man.
She would have to tell him how she felt. But dealing with the emotion had her reeling and unbalanced, even while feeling strangely…giddy. She smiled for no reason way too often. Patrick had caught her in the act and once actually backed away. That, of course, had started her giggling.
She’d chased him threateningly through the loft, giving his gimpiness a head start, laughing maniacally as they’d tumbled onto the sofa. For a long time after, they’d simply lain there in one another’s arms, breathing together, silent in their communication, speaking with their heartbeats and their fingertips and quiet brushes of lips.
She’d never in her life experienced anything like those amazing moments, lying on him as much as at his side, their legs tangled, her head in the curve of his shoulder, his arm around her back, keeping her from tumbling to the floor. This love business was frightening, exhilarating
and too uncertain—all emotions she’d long thought unhealthy in their inability to be controlled.
Of course, here she was out of control and wearing a parachute; each time she moved she expected the material to deploy, what with its
swish, swish, swish
as she walked and its refusal to cling to any of her curves. She’d worked with Luc Beacon often in the past and had always trusted his judgment. But, good grief, what in the world had he been thinking? She looked so much better in Lycra.
The travel agency that had hired the photographer to shoot the ads for their summer campaign was looking to promote a new “Sex and the Safari” tour package. Said package was aimed toward single female professionals who wanted to let down their hair, kick out of their Manolo Blahniks, and run wild with nubile young jungle boys.
The running would all be done in a climate-controlled and catered environment complete with Grecian pool and spa, Finnish sauna and twenty-four-hour Swedish massage. The pool, spa, sauna and massage sounded like heaven, but Annabel doubted that before knowing Patrick Coffey she would have been able to see the jungle boy appeal. Now, however, she was a full proponent of getting naked and savage. At least with her savage.
What she was not the least enamored with was this outfit.
Muttering to herself, she gave up on doing any sort of accessorizing with the belt she’d been given to wear. Her hair had been slicked back, her makeup appropriately applied in sweeping strokes of olive and dust. She’d laced the drawstring hems of both pant legs tight above the Manolo Blahniks out of which she would be kicking.
She’d even ditched her bra and left the jumpsuit open from stem to stern.
She turned this way and that in the dressing room mirror. It wasn’t a bad look; it just wasn’t her. She cast a frowning glance at Luc’s assistant for a second opinion. “Well?”
Gennie smiled, taking the belt Annabel offered and grasping it close to her chest. “You look awesome, Ms. Lee. Luc is so going to die.”
“I’d rather he wait until after the shoot,” Annabel said, heading for the door. “I don’t plan to star in his skydiving fantasy again.”
The dressing room opened onto the hardwood floor at the rear of the dark high-ceilinged studio. Camera strapped around his neck, Luc stood off to the side talking to Patrick, who sat in a plain folding chair.
He still didn’t look thrilled that she’d appointed herself his baby-sitter, but at least he hadn’t called a cab and vanished while her back was turned. And, really. She did like having him around. In fact, just as it had on Christmas Eve, his decision to stay put a new bounce in her already swishy walk.
Umbrella reflectors and lighting equipment clamped to C-stands sat clustered around the room. Luc’s safari set consisted of a bamboo hut mock-up with a hammock suspended from the thatched roof. Nearby, handler at the ready, two parrots perched on a bamboo bird stand. As critical of the backdrop as of her own appearance, Annabel decided Luc was just not in his element today. The set needed serious sexing up.
She considered how to do just that while she followed Luc’s posing instructions. Bracing a hip on the hut’s porch railing, she stood with a parrot on one shoulder, another on her arm. Lounging in the doorway, she turned
her head in profile. Standing with her feet spread wide in the stilettos, she held on to the porch support beams as a wind machine tried to blow her away.
Finally Luc stopped. He scrubbed a hand over his near-white buzz cut, rubbed behind his black-rimmed glasses at his eyes, which were bleary. “I’m not in love with this, Annabel. It just doesn’t say sexy to me.”
Taking a deep breath and stepping out of the glare of the lights, Annabel glanced over at Patrick, who was standing now and leaning on one crutch. He shrugged, his earring twinkling, and reached one arm overhead and stretched, left, right, back, twisting one way, then the other. The motion of his body was so naturally sexy…Inspiration struck. “Gennie, would you bring me that belt?”
With Luc looking on, Annabel took the belt from his assistant and motioned Patrick forward. Eyes rolling, and obviously reading her mind, he stripped off his shirt. Gennie twittered. Luc cleared his throat. He started to speak but stopped—Annabel had predicted he would—as he watched Patrick peel off the snap-away warm-up pants he wore over his cast and the single sandal he had on.
“Amazing,” the photographer muttered, his gaze taking in Patrick’s coiled tattoo. His eyes widened further as Patrick clumped past him toward the set across the room, grumbling under his breath the entire way.
“What do you think, Luc?” Annabel asked, knowing the effect the head of the snake in the small of Patrick’s back had at first viewing.
“Brilliant,” the photographer said, looking down to adjust his camera’s settings. “Utterly, frighteningly brilliant.”
Annabel turned to Patrick as he ducked beneath the
thatched porch, his expression petulantly glum, the thud of his crutch on the hardwood floor emphasizing his mood. “I know, I know,” she said, reaching a soothing hand to his cheek. “You feel like a freak.”
“Freak, hell,” he grumbled. “I feel like a piece of meat.”
“You are a piece of meat,” she whispered into his ear, biting the lobe and slipping the belt she’d previously had no use for around his neck like a leash.
Patrick glanced at the strip of faux black crocodile she held in her hand. His eyes sparked, his mouth twisted, his nostrils flared. “You’re going to pay for this, sweetheart.”
She gave a gentle tug to the belt, tweaked the ring in his nipple, managed to keep from pulling his mouth down to hers. “Exact your price, jungle boy.”
“You’d better believe that I will.”
In front of them, Luc’s camera began to whir. “Ah, yes, Annabel, you angel. This is the sexy I was looking for. Keep it up. Don’t stop.”
“I’m wearing my friggin’ underwear here,” Patrick growled to no one in particular.
What he was wearing was a pair of very formfitting, long-legged briefs in basic black. Annabel shivered. “Women won’t be able to resist.”
“The ad will sell millions,” Gennie added breathlessly.
Patrick snorted. “Millions of pairs of my underwear?”
“No.” Luc shook his head, continuing to shoot. “We’ll Photoshop them right off of you.”
“Oh, that’s even better,” Patrick said, and Annabel laughed, turned, tugged on the belt as if leading her pet. He grabbed hold of the faux leather and forced her back. “Aren’t we supposed to be posing here or something?”
“No, no. This is perfect,” she insisted. “This is the attitude the ad needs. ‘Sex and the Safari.’ Hot studly jungle boys and the women who keep them leashed.”
He groaned and leaned closer to whisper, “This won’t go up on a billboard, will it?”
“The agency probably won’t use our faces at all. Just our bodies. It’s all about sex and anonymity,” Annabel answered, then realized Luc had stopped shooting. She shaded her eyes and glanced beyond the blinding lights to where he stood with his eye to the camera, his hands still. “Luc?”
“Huh. Strange.” He shook off the comment and began shooting again.
“Strange doesn’t even cover it,” Patrick said.
“Down, boy.” Annabel tugged on his leash and returned her attention to Luc. “What’s strange?”
Letting his camera hang on its strap, Luc walked toward them, stopping at the edge of the set. He stared at Patrick’s leg, blew out a curious huff. “Did you know your tattoo looks like it’s written in code?”
Annabel’s heart thumped. Her gaze shot to Patrick’s, then to his leg where he was staring, his mouth a grim line, his temple throbbing. Her voice croaked out in a whisper. “What do you mean, a code?”
Luc shook his head, shoved his hand over his hair again. “Code’s probably not the right word. It’s just the way the design is laid out.”
“Show me,” Patrick demanded.
“Okay, look at the pattern of the scales.” He pointed as he spoke. “It’s balanced and symmetrical. At least the sections that are red, blue and green.”
“And the yellow?” Annabel asked, nearly breathless.
“That’s the thing. The bars of yellow seem random, but they’re not. Turn around,” Luc ordered Patrick with
a spin of one finger. “It starts here.” Annabel studied the snake’s head, where Luc pointed out the first series of yellow markings. “This is the key. There are ten individual shapes right here, and they’re scattered the length of the snake.”
“Ten shapes,” Patrick repeated, staring down at the part of his thigh he could see. “Zero through nine.”
“I’m probably imagining things, but I design a lot of mandalas.” Luc looked from Annabel to Patrick as each stared. “It’s Sanskrit.” He gestured as if at a loss to explain. “A ritualistic geometric design. Colorful. Symbolic of the universe. They’re used in Hinduism and Buddhism to aid in mediation. Which is why the pattern stood out.”
“The code,” Patrick said, looking down at Annabel.
She got to her feet, loosened the leash from his neck. “Sorry, Luc. Shoot’s over. We’ve got to go.”
“I
CAN’T BELIEVE
it’s in his tattoo,” Sydney said. “I never would’ve guessed.”
“I know,” Annabel replied. “The photographer I occasionally work for discovered it today.”
“Discovered what?” Ray asked, walking into the kitchen and sliding the patio door closed on its tracks.
“The code,” Sydney said. “The information Dega wants from Patrick. Soledad hid it in his tattoo.”
“What?” Ray’s voice raised the rafters. “How do you know? And why the hell didn’t someone tell me?”
“She is telling you, Ray,” Sydney replied. “They only found it today.”
“We’re still in the dark as to exactly what the information is going to reveal,” Annabel added. “We left it in the hands of the FBI.”
Snapping up his sweatpants in the small private study off the kitchen, Patrick shook his head, listening to his brother and the two women go at it in the other room. He’d closed himself in here earlier, while Sydney and Annabel worked on throwing together a quick dinner of burgers and fries.
So much for the downtime he’d desperately needed.
He’d spent the four hours before arriving at the house bare-ass naked, or near enough, having literally every inch of his tattoo scrutinized, measured, photographed and scanned in the FBI lab.
He’d spent the last thirty minutes doing his own study while sitting in the same chair his and Ray’s father had sat in every night after dinner for years. Patrick supposed he’d been looking for the same peace and quiet, the same sense of privacy their dad had come here to find.
The room had been off-limits then; as boys, they were only allowed in by invitation. As a kid Patrick had been awed by the room, had spoken in a whisper anytime he’d been inside. Later he’d come to realize that this study, and not the family room, was the true hub of the household. Out of it bills were paid, home remodeling contracts analyzed, decisions made on family vacation destinations.
Sitting here now, swiveling from side to side in the cracked leather desk chair, which had to be thirty years old, Patrick realized that their father had probably loved this room for another reason, as well.
It kept him near their mother, who had puttered endlessly in the kitchen and family-size breakfast room. Patrick realized that fact because he liked sitting here and hearing Annabel’s voice nearby.
After he and Annabel had made the drive from the FBI office to the Woodlands and filled in Sydney as she arrived home from the office, Patrick had come in here to unwind, to get a grip, to wait for Ray to arrive home. And to decide if the pain and the cash would be worth removing the tattoo.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to live beneath the specter of Russell Dega for the rest of his days. What he wanted was the normalcy of family life this room caused him to feel.
And he wanted it with Annabel.
Unfortunately, plans for his future—their future—were going to have to wait, as would any thoughts of returning
the skin on his leg to rights. He was branded with more than a memory of Dega and the time Patrick spent with Soledad.
Patrick was carrying what might turn out to be a record of not only Dega’s piratical activity but years’ worth of Caribbean crime.
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.”
D
URING 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?”
“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.”