Chloe’s smirking expression of moments before went carefully blank. “I see.”
Annabel bristled. “You don’t think he’s capable?”
“Of cooking? Sure he is. Of handling possible crises until the last guest leaves?” Chloe shook her head. “Not on your life. A year and a half and he hasn’t stuck around to eat a single meal he’s cooked. The man is an island.”
Chest constricting, Annabel forced a smile and pushed away the unaccustomed protective instincts urging her to defend her lover’s good name. He didn’t have one, after all, leaving her with nothing to safeguard but her feelings, which were in conflict with her goal of their imminent parting.
“He doesn’t have to leave the kitchen or mingle with the guests. All I need is for him to cook and for you and the other girls to help me serve.”
S
TANDING IN THE
boarded-up doorway of the small video-rental store across the street, Patrick stared up at the fourth-story balcony of Annabel’s loft. He’d been here once already, earlier this morning, but couldn’t help it. He’d had to come back.
If anyone had been wanting a clear look at him last night, this would’ve been the place to get it. Not a single telephone pole or electrical line or billboard blocked the view from the sidewalk to the loft. It was a straight shot from here to there, and he didn’t like the idea that he’d been as exposed as he had, that Annabel had been exposed at all.
Mostly he didn’t like the idea that he’d been so stupidly reckless, that he’d been drinking and feeling sorry for himself when he knew better. The first didn’t do him
a bit of good, and he’d had three years of doing the second to prove it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Thing was, until he’d picked up the cigarette butt this morning, he’d been halfway convinced that looking over his shoulder was more a waste of time than a precaution. He’d been home for nearly a year and a half now and hadn’t seen so much as a shadow other than his own. And looking for shadows was something he’d gotten used to doing pretty damn fast.
For the first couple of months after being hijacked off the schooner and watching his brother and Ray’s two fraternity buddies sail away, Patrick had flinched at the slightest shift from light to dark. Or, he thought with a sharp laugh, from dark to light.
He’d jumped at everything, truth be told, until he’d met Soledad. When the pirates had returned to the island three days into his captivity, she’d boarded Russell Dega’s powerboat and dragged Patrick up out of the cargo hold, demanding the bandit bastard cut him free from his bonds. Dega had, but not out of the kindness of his heart.
He’d laughed at her saucy, rapid-fire orders and used the same knife Patrick now carried to slice through the ropes he’d had three days onboard to get used to wearing. Patrick had listened then to the two of them arguing in a mixture of English and Spanish, Soledad snapping at Dega that he was about profit, about money, not about sport or revenge.
For some reason, once Soledad came into the picture, Dega seemed to forget the enmity he had for Patrick, treating him as a curiosity, a joke and then as a new toy he’d tired of winding up and watching squirm. It was as if Soledad was the baby-sitter Dega hadn’t trusted any of his men to be. That was Patrick’s first clue that she
wasn’t just another of the women who waited for their men to return from a hard day’s looting at sea.
During the three days Patrick had been kept on the boat, however, Dega had been quite clear that he had zero patience with self-important college boys determined to muck up his operation by trying to play the hero. As if Patrick was going to sit back while the pirate crew boarded and trashed the schooner, threatening his brother and Ray’s buddies?
Even Dega’s threat to teach Patrick a lesson didn’t stop him from locking the main cabin hatches behind him as he bolted down the companionway. He’d been after a flare gun, a bullhorn, a handheld VHF radio—anything to signal their distress. He’d run into one of Dega’s men instead, and had been blasted with the rented schooner’s own canister of pepper spray.
Hero. Right.
He’d ended up being the only one dragged away.
The pirate gang numbered in the low twenties, as best Patrick had been able to tell once shuttled from the hold of the powerboat to the remote—though civilized—camp that served as their land-based operation. And that was where he’d stayed for most of his three years away.
He’d been free to wander through the compound, to swim in the cove surrounding the private dock, to fish the reef along the island from one of the flat-bottom boats. At least until the night he’d rowed out into open waters and fired up the outboard.
He really thought he’d calculated his timing, having clocked Dega’s comings and goings for several weeks. But he’d thought wrong. He hadn’t been out of the cove ten minutes when he’d looked up to see Dega’s boat bearing down on him. The searchlights had blinded him,
had guaranteed that Dega saw him, but the boat continued forward at full throttle.
Patrick had taken a dive he’d been certain at the time would be his last. He’d sunk like a rock as the propeller churned the water over his head, the boat coming to a stop and circling directly above the spot where he was trying not to drown.
He’d been wrong about the dive being his last, and had ended up with a lot of time to figure out how things had gone from bad to worse while the shackles binding his ankles kept him landlocked. Now, however, the task at hand was to figure out how to keep the situation from traveling any farther south, and how to bring Dega down for the very last time.
Wishing for a cigarette, but only half as much as he wished for a drink, Patrick stepped out of the doorway alcove onto the sidewalk. Lost in thoughts he’d like to lose permanently, he’d forgotten that it was barely ten o’clock. Hardly the time to be chugging down a cold one no matter that his drinking was more about the situation than the hour of the day.
He supposed he could toe a sober line for the next couple of weeks to make Annabel happy and keep her quiet. She didn’t like his drinking much, or at least she didn’t like not knowing the reasons he drank. But the day he answered her questions was the day she owned more than his willing body.
And sobriety was a small price to pay for a soul. Even a sorry-ass one like his.
Heading back across the street, he pulled open the door to the hallway leading to the warehouse’s bank of elevators. Even in daylight, the high, narrow windows provided scant illumination, barely more than the wall lamps that were supposed to finish the job. Patrick couldn’t fig
ure out why such a classy woman as Annabel would want to live in such a dump of a neighborhood.
No one was asking him, but
revitalization
appeared to be nothing but a fancy word for
rip-off
if she’d paid even half of what he imagined. Still, he had to admit he would miss the place. He felt safe here, as weird as that was. Felt as if he fit in, instead of sticking out like a big fat sore thumb the way he did in Ray’s neighborhood.
Yeah, they’d both grown up in the house Ray and Sydney now lived in, but Patrick had lost his suburban blinders a long time back. He no longer saw the same world as his brother, and that hurt, losing that connection over a freak disaster that was no one’s fault.
It hurt even more knowing Ray blamed himself for the entire vacation gone bad. That was one delusion Patrick needed to make sure got cleared up, and soon. Annabel had been right to chew him out.
Approaching the elevators, he fought a smile at the thought of her brutal honesty. Surprisingly refreshing, since everyone else seemed to tiptoe on eggshells around him. But not her. Oh, no. She crunched her way straight to her in-your-face point.
Namely that Ray’s self-inflicted punishment had gone on four years too long already. And if Patrick didn’t “snap out of his moody self-absorption and help his older brother forgive himself,” she wasn’t sure they’d ever be able to make up for lost time, much less get back the bond they’d once shared.
Hands braced on the hip-high elevator railing, Patrick hung his head and studied his boots. How she’d known about that brotherly bond was no mystery. Anything Ray knew, Sydney knew. And anything one gIRL-gEAR partner knew, they all learned eventually.
Stupidest damn thing Patrick had ever seen, and sure to get one or more of them burned.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like Annabel’s friends, because he did. He just couldn’t imagine trusting that many people so implicitly. And with Ray growing more and more distant, the one person Patrick might’ve felt free to confide his fears to couldn’t be counted on not to spill the gory details.
He spat out a mouthful of curses as his mood turned foul. Yeah, it was more than past time to make things right with his brother, but he wasn’t going to solve a thing standing inside a box going nowhere.
The elevator jerked upward once he finally hit the button for
four.
When it lurched to a stop, he yanked up the door until it caught and slid open on its tracks. Then, pulling back the folding grate, he stepped into the loft.
Chloe and Annabel still sat on the sofa; both women stared in his direction as if expecting his return to bring world peace, when he’d come back with nothing but his instinct for survival running high.
Still the two women stared, and his hackles rose. He hated feeling as if they’d been discussing him, analyzing him and finding him distinctly lacking.
“It’s just me. Your friendly neighborhood thug.”
“What happened to your hair?” Chloe asked.
“Annabel scalped me,” he said, running a hand over the top of his head. “She’s on a mission to improve my acceptability rating.”
Annabel gave him that look that made him feel as if he were a lost cause. Or maybe his perception was simply an extension of his mood. Either way, he needed to get out of here before he tossed out the smart-ass remarks on the tip of his tongue and pissed her off.
He took two steps down the long hallway that ran past
the kitchen toward the bedroom before she stopped him. “Walking out on a conversation, or on a guest, doesn’t exactly win you any points. Just in case you’re interested.”
Mouth twisted with sarcasm, he met her gaze. “Nope. Not interested in the least.”
“I see,” she said, all snotty and managing to look down her nose at him from her place on the couch.
If he hadn’t been watching closely, he might’ve missed the flicker of hurt in her beautiful eyes. He damned himself for that, for causing her pain, knowing he should pack up his duffel and go—no matter that he’d just spent an hour detailing the reasons he couldn’t walk out of her life.
But he sure as hell could walk out of the room.
And he did.
“O
KAY
,
SPILL
.
What was all that stuff going on back there with Patrick?” Chloe asked, having followed Poe in her own car as they’d driven from Midtown through Rice Village to Three Mings.
Earlier, Poe hadn’t wanted to talk about Patrick’s weirdness. She’d simply gotten dressed in the guest room, grabbed her bag and herded Chloe to the parking garage, using some excuse about needing to go over the setup for the New Year’s Eve showing at Devon’s gallery.
Now that they’d arrived, and Poe had had the twenty-minute trip across town to cool her jets, Chloe vowed that she wasn’t going anywhere without first getting the scoop.
Poe slammed the driver’s-side door of her low-slung black Jaguar. Her expression might’ve fooled others, but Chloe saw beneath the cold mask to the seething fire.
“It’s exactly as I related earlier. I told him he has to go, and he’s pissed off,” Poe said, walking around the front of the car.
“Patrick being pissed off makes sense.” Chloe fell into step beside her girlfriend as they headed for the staircase leading to the building’s second story. “But I still say that you blowing him off doesn’t.”
Poe cast a glance over her shoulder as she began the
climb. “Actually, it makes a lot of sense. He’s been a nice distraction, but it’s time for me to move on.”
“Move on to what?” Chloe asked, following Poe. “A nunnery? Because I can’t imagine that Patrick Coffey doesn’t know his way around a bedroom.”
“It’s about moving on with my life.
My life.
It has nothing to do with Patrick or the bedroom.” Poe reached the second-story covered landing and glanced back. “How many times have we talked about this recently? You know what I’m facing.”
“Yeah. A midlife crisis at age thirty-three.” Though thirty-three wasn’t as bad as the crisis Chloe was having as she neared twenty-eight.
“It’s hardly a crisis. I’m simply preparing for life after graduation.”
“So you’re determined to leave gIRL-gEAR?”
“You and I talked about this long before I was made partner. It can hardly be a surprise to anyone. But especially not to you.”
Chloe shrugged. “You’re right. It shouldn’t be. But it is.”
Poe crossed her arms over her chest and faced her friend directly. “This degree has taken me twice as long as it should have. I’ve worked full-time. I’ve modeled on the side, all to pay for this education. Why would you think I’d change my mind after the effort I’ve put in?”
“No reason. Just wishful thinking. We’ll miss you,” Chloe admitted, hating the thought of losing a friend. It was hard enough to face the idea of losing Eric.
Oh, God.
“
I’ll
miss you,” she said, her voice a strangled mess.
“Good Lord, Chloe. I’m not leaving the country. I’m not even leaving the city. At least not yet. I’ll certainly still be around.”
“You won’t be at the office.” She pursed her lips,
deciding to put an end to this depressing conversation before she sank any further into a morass of self-pity. “But nothing you’ve said explains why you’re dumping Patrick.”
Poe rolled her eyes before giving Chloe a look that throttled her as effectively as a pair of hands. “Our being together is not…healthy. You’ve seen how Patrick is.”
“Yeah. Sexy as hell. Moody and intense. Wickedly intriguing.”
“Not to mention quite unstable and more than a little bit wild. He’s unpredictable, to say the least, and I’m running short on patience dealing with his disposition.” Poe put an end to the conversation by turning away and opening the gallery’s front door.
But Chloe wasn’t that easily fooled. She’d seen the harsh pain in her girlfriend’s eyes and knew there was a lot more going on here than Poe, being Poe, would ever admit. With the subject of Patrick Coffey summarily closed, Chloe walked into the gallery.
The first thing that struck her was the coolness, then the silence and then the sense of calm. Closing the door behind her, she shut her eyes and breathed in the scents of hardwood floors and fresh flowers and oils on canvas.
Or she imagined the latter, because she couldn’t quite identify the source of a more earthy and elemental smell. No, even that was a lame description and not accurate at all. The scent was rich and sharp and…
arrgh!
She gave up trying to isolate what it was relaxing her so, and simply…relaxed.
“Chloe? Are you coming? Devon’s probably in his office.”
Chloe shook her head; her eyes drifted open slowly. “I’ll catch up. I want to look around. I haven’t been here before, remember?”
Poe smiled. “Sure. I’ll find Devon and be back.”
Chloe couldn’t even find the energy to wave the other woman away. She knew she was being overdramatic, or flaky a` la Kinsey Storey—the most recently married gIRL-gEAR partner—but it was as if Chloe could literally feel the tension of the last few weeks seeping away. Ridiculous, really.
She was much too practical to believe the ambience of a room could soothe her stress. Then again,
soothed
was exactly how she felt as she held her clutch purse at her waist and made her way slowly into the gallery proper.
It had to be the simplicity, the contrast to the recent chaos of her life, lending an air of tranquility to her surroundings in ways the supposed aromatherapy candles she burned failed to do.
Candles. Ha! Yes, she’d been that desperate, that hopeless, that lost of late that she’d turned to candles and bath oils and massages, looking to ease the nerves burning an ulcer into her stomach.
The massages had helped; sex would’ve been better.
But Eric never came to bed anymore until long after she was asleep.
“That watercolor is called
Missedtakes,
” said a voice at Chloe’s shoulder.
She glanced from the painting she hadn’t even noticed to the man who had spoken, the man without a trace of an accent, but whose beautiful almond-shaped eyes told her he was Devon Lee.
“I’ve thought of moving it farther into the gallery because visitors find it hard to walk away.” As he spoke, he studied the depiction of a woman staring into a pond, gazing at what wasn’t her reflection but a man’s retreating back. Devon didn’t look at Chloe at all.
She turned to the framed canvas again and listened to Poe’s brother; his voice lulled her further into a strangely hypnotic state.
“I suppose there’s a sadness about it, but I prefer to see the hope that comes with moving on.”
Moving on.
The very words Poe had used earlier. Chloe felt conspired against, though such a feeling was absurd. Neither Devon nor his sister knew all the details of the uncertainty plaguing her relationship with Eric, how she feared he’d fallen in love with who he thought she was and not the truth of who he’d since discovered her to be….
“It doesn’t appear to me as if she’s doing anything but wondering what went wrong.” Ugh. She’d barely managed to raise her voice above a whisper and still it had cracked.
Devon stepped closer, hovered behind her yet made no contact. “Or maybe she sees it exactly, and he’s the one who is blind.”
Emotion gripped Chloe’s throat and made it hard for her to swallow or to speak. She wondered what Eric would see in this painting, or if he would be as blind to any possible interpretation as he was to her.
No. That wasn’t fair. He knew she was restless, searching, unsatisfied. That was why he never came to bed. A funny way to go after all those babies he’d once claimed to want so badly. A claim she was coming to believe had been a lie.
Chloe turned and stared into Devon’s dark eyes, seeing a sensitivity that complemented rather than compromised his incredible masculinity. “You painted it, didn’t you?”
His lips quirked in a wry smile. “And here I worked so hard on disguising my signature.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see your signature. It’s in your eyes.”
Slowly, he moved his gaze from the canvas to her face. His black brows drew into a slashed V above a very straight, very aquiline nose. His lips were lush and eminently tempting, and his teeth fairly gleamed.
“I wasn’t aware I was that transparent,” he said softly, his voice low and seductive, even if he hadn’t meant it to be.
Or perhaps she was simply longing to be seduced. She tried to shrug it off. “You caught me in a receptive mood.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?”
She tilted her head ever so slightly. “Why do you ask?”
He drew closer without seeming to move at all. “I hear it in your voice.”
Oh, boy.
This was not good, this feeling of anticipation sweeping the length of her body. The unexpected excitement, the sudden giddy rush of blood to her head.
She reached deep inside to find the punchy sarcasm, the acerbic sense of humor that always served her well…and came up with nothing. “Then I suppose I ought to keep my mouth shut.”
What she really needed to do was turn and walk out the door, to wait for Poe at the car, to refuse to have anything to do with the New Year’s Eve showing that would mean time spent in this man’s company. She was hurt and raw and too susceptible to his flirtation, to the feeling of having what a man might want when she’d so obviously disappointed Eric.
“Devon Lee,” he said, and held out his hand.
She took it and replied, “Chloe Zuniga.”
“Ah. Annabel’s friend,” he murmured, taking far too long to release her.
Chloe nodded. “She thought she’d find you in your office. I told her I wanted to look through the gallery.”
He held out his arm, gesturing for her to precede him into the low-ceilinged maze. “Then it would be my pleasure to give you a tour.”
Doing her best to ignore the warmth of his attention, Chloe turned, only to come face-to-face with Poe. “Poe, hey. I found your brother.”
“So I see,” she said, with a remarkable lack of pleasure in her tone at finding the two of them so chummy.
Devon cleared his throat. “I was just about to walk Chloe through the gallery.”
Poe looked from Devon to Chloe and back again before facing them with crossed arms, a posture that nearly caused Chloe to cower.
“The only stop on this tour is your office,” Poe said to Devon, turning to Chloe and tapping into her guilt with what might as well have been an accusation. “We have work to do.”
U
PON RETURNING
to the loft, Annabel shoved the elevator grate closed just as Patrick came out of the kitchen. He was wiping his hands on a towel, and smells of onions and garlic followed him. The guarded look he wore told her she wasn’t in for a fun-filled evening at home.
It really was too much for a Saturday. No breakfast, refereeing Devon and Chloe and now back to face her pirate and his mercurial moods. Wondering what had happened to her nice, relaxing two-week vacation, Annabel tucked her car keys and sunglasses into her bag and tossed it to the sofa.
She arched one brow. “Are you finished sulking?”
Patrick waited for a moment, staring at her, unmoving, the glint off the silver hoop in his ear as bright as that in his eyes. With his hair cropped close and his face exposed completely, she had no trouble seeing the tic in his jaw as he bit down on his answer. Finally, he turned and walked back to the kitchen, leaving her unsatisfied and frustrated and on the verge of turning right around and walking back out.
Of abandoning him to his own devices. And abandonment was one thing of which she was incapable.
Circling the near end of the sofa, she picked up the wooden memento box she kept on her coffee table. Twelve inches long, four inches deep and covered with a Chinese almanac print, the box had belonged to her mother, a gift from man number seven and a keepsake that meant no more to Annabel now than it had to her mother then.
She’d kept it…she didn’t know why. It was as false in its representation of her Asian heritage as were her mother’s never-ending promises to stay.
Inside, however, was a rectangular jade pendant inscribed in gold with the Chinese character for love. The pendant had belonged to Annabel’s grandmother, who had willed it to her and it meant more to her than any single memory of her mother that remained.
Her grandmother had done all that she could for both of her grandchildren, finally moving them to Houston to be near more of her own family when it was clear their mother had left, never to return. Annabel couldn’t have asked for a better example of serenity in patience and purpose.
Inheriting more of that attitude would have served her well, but at least she knew that when she parted ways with Patrick, she would do so having given his redemp
tion her very best shot. If she failed in her efforts, it would be because he wasn’t ready to be redeemed. She stroked her thumb over the smooth jade before returning it to the box and going to salvage what she could of her Saturday night.
“Listen, Patrick,” she began, rounding the wall of lava lamp sculptures and entering the kitchen. Once again, the empty kitchen. She sighed heavily and turned off the fire beneath the skillet of braising garlic.
On the countertop next to the stovetop, she found the New Year’s Eve menu notes she’d left on the coffee table earlier in the day. This time her sigh was even heavier, as was the weight of her heart. She recognized his effort to apologize for being an ass this morning.
He’d taken the initiative and jumped right to what had to be a trial run of the recipes, taking care of what she wanted him to do. Holding up his end of the bargain they’d made. The only reason she’d agreed to keep him around.
That thought shouldn’t have caused her such grief, such a sense of foul play. She certainly shouldn’t be thinking of taking it all back—and she wasn’t, really. She was simply surprised to find Patrick so deeply under her skin.
Steeling herself for what she’d find in the bedroom, she walked out the kitchen’s back entrance and down the short hallway. He stood at the bedroom window. Even though it wasn’t yet dusk, the interior remained dim due to the cloudy evening skies.
With the miniblinds open but left down, stripes of what light there was outside fell across the hardwood floor and across Patrick’s body. From the rear, he appeared more as a silhouette than a three-dimensional man.