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 figure 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.
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