The Darkest Joy (10 page)

But he’s most definitely not falling for me.

“Let’s talk,” he says, all business, and my stomach falls like a stone in a lake.

Great.

He pulls open the door and the bell tinkles as I walk through it and pass by Chance, getting the slightest hint of his scent.

It’s not rank seawater either.

I find myself wanting to know exactly what it is, when I’m busy seeing where the tat ends. Yeah.

I turn and he sweeps his palm toward the chair.

I sit and hold my breath.

“I’ve already hired you. However,” he spreads his palms wide and away from his body, leaning against the beaten boards of the wall behind him, glass windows flank his form, his ankles crossed. “I think we have to talk about . . . what happened.”

I look down at my hands.
I can’t tell him
. He can’t know . . . if he does I’ll have to face his pity, or judgment. Or whatever.

I look up. “Listen, I’ve been through something and I drank too much last night . . .”

“So you decided to swan dive off the pier?” Chance asks, his brows rising to the short dark hair that frames a hard face: square jaw, cleft chin, yesterday’s stubble.

A beautiful face.

Gawd
. “Well . . . no. I mean,” my eyes flick to his and they’re leveled on me. Not going anywhere. “I’m trying to make a new start.”

“I can’t have you on my boat if you think you’re going to”—his intense eyes stay steady on mine—“do a repeat,” he finishes softly.

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

There’s a long pause and he exhales, raking a hand through his dark hair, those deep eyes nailing me . . . boring holes deep inside me, carving up my soul with the pathway of their intensity.

“You don’t think or you don’t know?”

We stare at each other and I say, “I don’t think.”

“Shit, that puts me in a tough spot.” He puts his hands on his hips and paces in front of me.

“I know,” I reply in a whisper. I just can’t lie . . . not to him. I put a hand over my heart. Trying to hold in my misery through the hole that’s there. My emotions are all over the place.

He stops in front of the window and gazes out at the sea. The whitecaps look like whipping cream against a green that mimics the grayness of the sky, the water reflecting the turmoil of my day.

He spins around and pegs me with those eyes. “I can’t . . . let you go. God knows I should. But I want to try to help. And I think . . . I think this will be a good job for you.”

“You don’t have to,” I say. I don’t need the money, I need to heal . . . but he doesn’t know that.

But maybe he’s not blind.

Chance walks to my chair, his hands wrapping the armrests.

“I know,” he says. Suddenly he jerks the chair so close our faces are inches from touching. “I don’t do shit I don’t want to.”

“Then why . . .” I start, my mind filling in the blanks,
do you want to
? My mind finishes my own question.

“Because I want to,” he whispers in answer, his crisp, minty breath filling my nose.

I
told myself never to get involved,
really
involved.

And here I am, hiring this beautiful, fragile, emotionally vulnerable girl, just to keep her close to me.

I don’t even know why I feel this need to protect her. I don’t even know what I’m protecting her from. Maybe I can’t protect her from herself?

Not okay. I stand there indecisively for a minute and then Brooke gives me those big doe eyes and that’s when I see her, really see her.
God, her eyes are some kind of purple
, lashes like black lace setting them off like jewels of tanzanite.

I stuff my hands into my pockets to keep them off her.

Then, suddenly, all I want is to feel my lips on hers again. Without thinking, I move in for the kill. I place both hands on her face, looking into those deep eyes and feel my own close as I barely brush her lips and Brooke gasps and flinches away. My eyes pop open and I drop my hands from where they’ve
captured her. I see emotions flow over her face, but the one I don’t want to see is there in living color.

Gravity. Like a slow-moving avalanche her face shuts down. “I can’t,” she says in a breathy whisper and I feel like kicking my own ass. Of course she doesn’t . . . she just tried to kill herself and here I am, her boss . . . trying to, I don’t even know. I straighten, raking a hand through my hair, and back the fuck off. I shouldn’t have done that. Knowing it didn’t stop it from happening though. What the hell is wrong with me?

I struggle to recover. “I’m . . . I’m sorry . . . I really do want you to feel . . . like you can work these eight weeks of the season without . . . fear of, whatever,” I say, scrubbing my face, trying to wipe it clean of my lapse.

“It’s okay, Chance,” she says and I see a flinty sort of resolution in her eyes. It replaces the soft desire I’d seen before and I miss it as I watch it slide away. But I’d set the tone and she’d followed it.

“I never really said thank you,” she says so quietly that I lean forward over my cluttered desk. Brooke isn’t looking at me and misses my unguarded expression. I’m glad, since it sorta belies my words when I say
back off
and my face says
I want you
. And it does. My body wants her, the desk being more of a barrier than she knows.

No relationships
, my mind reminds me like a threat.
No entanglements of any kind
. I exhale loudly and her eyes snap to mine.

Then I remember what she just said instead of struggling to tamp my awakened libido like noxious weeds. “You’re welcome,” I reply, shrugging.

There’s a beat of awkwardness between us, a clock’s tick ringing out in the silence. Then I say, “So, the job . . .”

“Okay,” Brooke replies, her shoulders slumping a little. Her expression makes something unexpected constrict in my chest. Feels like my give-a-shit meter just came online. I don’t want to care.

The hell with it
. “Do you want to talk about what the problem is?” I feel my brows rise, my hands resting on the thick wood desk.

Brooke shakes her head, that black hair sliding around her shoulders like watered silk.

I remember what it felt like between my fingers. I pause, collecting my shit.

“No,” then her gaze locks with mine, “ever.”

Okay.
Broken I don’t need
, I decide. The phrase rings false even when I hear it in my own head, but I power through my bullshit.

Fine, it’s all business. “I need you here at 4 a.m.” Brooke just nods and I continue. “We put in about ten hours of flat-out, balls-to-the-wall fish time then we hightail it back to the harbor, clean our catch, pack . . . clean the boat . . . then you go home.”

I watch Brooke’s eyes get wider with each detail of the hard life of a deckhand.

Here’s the breaking point. This is when the weak will jump ship.

I wait.

Then Brooke surprises me. “Okay, I’ll be here.” I watch her small hands clench the armrests of my ancient oak chair.

We look at each other. So many unspoken words remain unsaid.

“Good,” I say in brusque dismissal. I’ve not had much fear in my life. I’ll take the swell, the weather . . . beating a two-hundred-pound halibut that wanted to break my leg with its tail.

I’d never felt anxiety of this variety.

The woman variety. It’s a singular flavor of
oh shit
that I don’t want to taste.

Brooke stands and puts her hand out and I break into a cold sweat.
I want to touch her again
.

Haul her against me and never let go.

The watery memory of her floating below me in the sea rises to the surface of my mind. I blink the visual away, trying to grip the reality before me.

What scares me the most is I want to wipe away that despondent edge she wears like clothes in the wrong size. I want it gone.

Instead I take her hand in mine, and that zing like a conduit buzz of electricity goes off between us.

I shift subtly. My body’s such a traitor.

She keeps it together, but I can’t. Won’t.

“Feel that?” I say, calling it out, the zing.

“Yeah,” she admits in a tentative whisper.

“What do you think it means?” I ask, wanting to kick my own ass for posing the question.

Brooke gives a sad little lift of her lips and answers as she turns for the door, “Something I don’t deserve.”

Well fuck me if that’s not a sucker punch. I feel it like she just struck me in the bread basket. Her words are the weapon.

I feel like a dick as Brooke makes her way to the door, her
fingers trembling slightly as she twists the knob and closes the solid spruce behind her.

I want to kick the thing. I want to go after her.

Tell her how I feel.

Trouble is, I don’t fucking know myself.

I practically run to escape that office . . . my embarrassment.

I veer, taking a sharp right and racing across the busy road, dodging tourists, fishermen. My bright bus stands in the empty lot of the Salty Dawg.

I tear the door open and slide inside, taking great swooping breaths of old car mixed with the sea. The side window, like a pie wedge of glass, was left open and the misty filter of sea air drifts through. The salt of my tears is masked by the thickness of the air, the two mingle like coconspirators.

I can’t do it.

You will do it
, my mind whispers. That tenacious form of self-preservation will stubbornly not be put to rest.

I place my forehead on the steering column. My mind turns over the last twenty-four hours. I need to come to some kind of decision. I can’t continue inside this excruciating limbo. Either I choose life and live as my family would want or I throw in the towel.

I need to learn to love another human being again, though the threat of their death hangs over me like a noxious cloud, smothering my intent.

I have to make the decision to move on.

My tears fall to my jeans, forming dark splotches, speckling the denim with my indecision.

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I lift my head off the wheel, digging in my jeans to retrieve it.

Decatur Clearwater
.

A little icon flashes with the ringing—FBI logo. I exhale somewhere between a huff and a rush.

My finger hovers, then I lightly brush over the icon.

“Hello,” I say.

“Miss Starr.”

Oh my God
, that voice. The memories threaten, triggered. They push to get in, demanding to be seen. I shove them away. A light sweat coats my body instantly.

Panic attack
.

“Miss Starr?” Concern radiates from his voice, that light accent he has threading through the vowels in my name, and I swallow.

I can do this
. I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly.

“Hi.” Start simply, work from there.

“Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for almost a week . . .”

I don’t respond. There’s no lie that will sound like the truth.

He ignores my silence, moving forward. “There’s been . . . another murder.”

“I know.”

A pause. “Okay. I’m certain this is difficult to hear about and I’m not calling to hash through it and drag you through things that are painful.”

Then why are you calling?
“Okay,” I reply listlessly.
When can I end this phone call?

“There are similarities between these most recent murders and . . . those of your family members.”

My chest tightens. I repeat the deep breathing method, disallowing the panic that’s a knot of cement in my chest to take over.

I see the rain.

The wet grass.

The crime scene tape; the garish yellow floating ribbon a banner of death forever.

My mother’s hand, slash marks like red stripes proof of her efforts to ward off death.

“We need to warn you. You might require protection from our Anchorage division.”

The constriction in my chest notches tighter. My breaths are starting to whistle.

“Miss Starr. Please, don’t be . . . frightened. I’m just phoning to alert you that this is not the last of these tragedies and we’re treating it as a serial.”

“A serial?” I ask faintly.

“Absolutely. The VanZyle family was killed . . . and there’s one more that took place last month, near Portland.”

“Oregon?”

“Yes.”

Oh my God
. “So . . . is the other family . . . ?” I couldn’t say it.

“Yes, all the families were related to pianists. We have a profiler working full-time on identifying who might be responsible for this.”

“My family’s already gone, Agent Clearwater. This killer can’t hurt me more than he already has.” It’s the truest thing I’ve articulated since my family’s death.

Silence.

“That’s not true,” he says carefully.

“What . . . ?
Listen to me, Clearwater. This is worse than death.”

“What is worse than death, Miss Starr?”

“My
life
.” I enunciate the angry words that seethe between us like brackish water.