been strung up by his balls at all. Instead, he’d spent a whole lot of hours flat on his back, napping in the sun, an ankle shackled to the base of a huge palm. And, hey. He’d lost a good forty pounds.
Yeah, he doubted that scenario would’ve garnered a lot of sympathy. Thank goodness he’d had his brother to count on. Ray had refused to give him up for gone. Three long years, and he’d put everything he’d had into the search, exhausting his finances, putting his own life on hold, working to right a very bad wrong.
He’d been just as conscientious since Patrick’s return, making sure he had time and space to get his act together without the pressure of reporters and other inquiring minds butting in. Thing was, it was too much time and way too much space. Lately, they rarely spoke of anything more vital than football stats.
Oh, yeah. Rushing yardage and passing percentages were the things that made life worth living. Patrick considered his bottle, considered his brother. Hell. If nothing else, Ray’s inability to shed the guilt eating him up deserved the biggest toast of the night.
He hadn’t been responsible for the kidnapping, but nothing Patrick said made a dent in Ray’s hardheaded insistence that he should have been more vigilant in plotting their course, in choosing a captain with a better sense of the region’s criminal climate, in negotiating their freedom when the pirates boarded the schooner.
Patrick drained the bottle, reached for another, not feeling half the buzz he’d been aiming for when he’d grabbed the two six-packs on his way home from the gIRL-gEAR offices. Home. Now that was pretty damn funny, thinking of Annabel’s place as home when she didn’t even want him around.
As much as Ray sidestepped digging through the pit of Patrick’s psyche, Annabel didn’t even bother with a shovel, but plunged knee-deep through his crap. She expected him to be the man he was, the best he could be, no matter how many bamboo shoots he’d had shoved under his fingernails.
He smiled, a strange feeling he was still getting used to, remembering the night he’d bought her at the auction. Damned if that hadn’t been some kind of night. She’d wanted answers: Why had he bought her? Where did he get the money? What was he expecting in return?
He’d had no answers to give. He’d simply herded her into the narrow alley behind the bar, wrapped her up in his jacket and backed her barely dressed body into the cold brick wall. He’d been healthy and horny. She’d been sex on stiletto heels. He’d kissed her until neither one of them could breathe, and his cock sat up and begged.
No surprise there.
What he hadn’t seen coming at all, what had crept up from behind and slipped a shiv between his ribs, was her appeal above the neck. After their bodies were spent, the brain sex took over. And it was every bit as addictive as conventional intercourse.
She was older than he was, independent, smart as hell. She was ballsy and brash and driven. In a horribly Freudian sort of way, she reminded him of Soledad—the woman who had been the one and only reason he’d held on to his sanity during those years away. And that was enough reason to let Annabel kick him to the curb.
Having one woman’s blood on his hands was a sin for which he had a long time left to pay.
Thing was, it wasn’t easy lately for him to separate past from present, because Soledad’s death was the reason he couldn’t let Annabel blow him off. Call it a hunch. Call it intuition. Call it thirty-six months kept captive in the hot seat.
Patrick’s cushy homecoming was about to fall apart.
He didn’t have anything solid to back up his suspicions, didn’t have proof to take to his contact at the FBI, didn’t have anything more than his instincts to rely on.
But he knew. He knew.
Russell Dega, the pirate leader who’d escaped during the confusion of Patrick’s rescue, was here. The scum-sucking thief had come to close the one piece of business left unsettled between them: ending Patrick’s life.
And if that didn’t deserve another toast, he didn’t know what did.
He finished off his fourth drink and had just reached for his fifth from the open six-pack sitting on the balcony’s black-iron table when the whir of the loft’s private elevator signaled Annabel’s arrival. His gut clenched hard in response.
Using his knife, he pried off the bottle cap and tried not to choke on the memory of what they’d done earlier in her office.
The disk clattered against the patio as the converted freight car stopped on the fourth floor. As he listened, Annabel lifted the elevator’s rolling garagelike door, sliding it overhead on its tracks. He heard her unlock and slide back the accordion-style grate that opened into the dark room behind him. He lifted the beer, drank deeply, waited for the buzz that was way too long in coming.
Annabel was already stepping out onto the balcony and he’d yet to feel a thing.
“What are you doing here?”
He raised his drink. “Toasting my fine taste in women.”
She waited a moment, then reached for the last bottle in the six-pack and tilted it his way. He removed the cap and, as she drank, their gazes met, stinging him with a keenly sharp buzz that he sure as hell wasn’t getting from the alcohol.
He let the sizzle settle, watching her keep the table between them and move to sit in one of the balcony set’s matching chairs. She shivered lightly, he noticed, when the cold metal bit into the backs of her bare legs.
Served her right for wearing the panty hose.
She drank again before glancing in his direction a second time and getting back to business. “You know me well enough by now to understand that I mean what I say.”
“Yes, but here’s to all the things you don’t say.” He tilted his bottle toward her in, what? His tenth toast of the night? Bringing the lip of the glass to his mouth, he swallowed a quarter of the contents, feeling…nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing but the same determination, the same wariness that had brought him here earlier. He wouldn’t be leaving tonight until she was aware of…Hell. He wouldn’t be leaving tonight period. Her awareness of anything wasn’t a factor in the equation.
“What sort of things am I not saying?” she finally asked. “What do I need to say to make myself clear?”
“Give me a reason. Why can’t you, or won’t you, see me anymore?” He hated that his request came out sounding so candy-assed, but he was no good at conversation, and conversation was the only way to get from here to there.
“Having you here is inconvenient.”
He sputtered at that. “Inconvenient? I’d say I’ve been about as convenient as you’re ever going to get in a roommate.”
“I don’t want a roommate, and I’m not talking about the sex.”
She wouldn’t be. She never wanted to talk about the sex, simply engage.
Annabel was one of only two women he’d known who approached life—and sex—like a man. Then again, his experience with the opposite sex consisted of no more than a short list of adventurous coeds before graduation, and two
