“Actually,” Annabel began, wondering the best way to make this last-minute request, “I was hoping we could skip discussing Christmas and go straight to New Year’s.”
“Sure,” Chloe said with a shrug. “I’m game, and I’m easy.” She tapped her pen on her calendar page. Then she looked up questioningly. “What I’m not is clairvoyant.”
Annabel released a wry smile. “Newvale’s canceled on me.”
“For Devon’s showing? You’re kidding. What’s the deal?”
“One of their cooks took a walk. Or was asked to take a walk. Whatever.” She set her empty cup on the coffee table, leaned back and cinched her robe tighter. “I’m stuck with sixty RSVPs, a truckload of booze and no servers.”
“Servers, hell.” Chloe’s expression grew wide-eyed. “What about the food? I can’t believe Newvale’s didn’t sell the contract to another caterer.”
“I have the option, but have to let them know by Monday.”
“And something tells me you have an alternative up your sleeve.”
“Patrick’s agreed to cook.”
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.”
STANDING 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