Finished (13 page)

Drayton. Leaning against Mike’s black SUV. His arms crossed in casual indifference. As they got closer, she could see a half-smile on his handsome face.

There was nothing remotely threatening about his demeanor or his presence, but Julia went cold and started to shake anyway. Her hand dropped away from Mike’s and she couldn’t process the icy chaos of her thoughts.

Mike’s reaction was different, although he must have felt the same threat at Drayton’s presence that she had.

His hand went into the inner pocket of his jacket and he pulled out the gun.

“Mike, no,” Julia choked, a vision of horror rising in her mind as she realized the confrontation that might result from this encounter.

Mike stopped, but he didn’t put the gun away.

Drayton lifted his eyebrows—as cool and urbane as always. “Go ahead and aim it at me, if you want,” he drawled. “But I’ve been at gunpoint before, too many times to count, and I haven’t been killed yet.”

“Mike,” Julia murmured, closing her hand around his hard bicep. “Put the gun away.”

Mike’s eyes moved assessingly from Drayton’s passive expression to Julia’s obvious urgency, and he silently returned the gun to his pocket.

Julia let out her breath in a whoosh, and Drayton arched his eyebrows again as he said, “Turning into something of commando on us, aren’t you?”

Mike’s annoyance was visible in the tightening of his jaw. “Given the circumstances, I thought it best to take some precautions.”

“And what circumstances are those? I believe you two are the ones who violated my trust and my privacy, obviously followed me, and evidently just now broke into a house that belongs to me. And you’re acting like
I
am a threat?”

Before Mike could answer and this encounter break down into even more aggression, Julia jumped in. “You’ve been lying to us, Drayton. You’ve violated our trust too. We might be in danger because of you. There are things we need to know, and you refuse to tell us.”

Drayton had always been remarkable in his cool control over his emotions and his consistently ironic perspective. It didn’t fail him now, as his mouth tilted up at the corners and he extended his hands in an elaborate gesture of surrender. “What is it you want to know?”

“Are you a hit man or something?” she blurted out, landing on the worst of her speculations first.

Drayton gave a huff of dry amusement. “Uh, no.”

“But you’re a criminal.” The timbre of Mike’s voice made the words a statement, rather than a question.

“I am,” Drayton said, his green eyes swinging from Julia to Mike.

As simple as that. As life-changing.

“So it’s true?” Julia whispered, Drayton’s perfectly sculpted features blurring slightly in front of her eyes.

“And all this time, as far back as college, you’ve been lying about who you are and what you do?” Mike asked, his voice thick with an emotion she wasn’t prepared to name.

The only response from Drayton was a half-shrug.

 “So what do you do?” Julia asked, trying to find the solid ground of reason and failing completely. “Are you a thief? Like your father?”

“A thief, yes. Not exactly like my father. I assume you’ve been doing some investigating, since you ended up here. How much did you uncover?”

“Enough to believe what you just said,” Mike said, the roughness still evident in his voice. “And enough not to trust you.”

“Julia?” Drayton prompted after a moment.

She realized he wanted her response as well, and she wondered if he thought she’d be more on his side than Mike was.

At this point, she had no idea whose side she was on. She didn’t have nearly enough information, and she didn’t feel capable of processing information, even if it was forthcoming.

“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted, edging closer to Mike’s big form and reassuring strength. “None of this makes any sense.”

“I’ll be happy to explain, if you let me.” Drayton’s gaze was mostly fixed on Julia, but it occasionally flickered over to Mike—as if he couldn’t stop himself from checking for Mike’s reactions every few seconds.

“Drayton? Where have you run off to?”

The voice came from down the road, toward the house they’d just left. And Julia recognized it after just a moment. Female, cultured, faintly teasing.

So she knew who she would see approaching them even before the gorgeous brunette from the party appeared from behind the trees.

“What is this?” the woman asked as she neared them. “Do we have guests?”

“
I
do, yes,” Drayton replied.

Julia felt a pang of fear at the implications of his words, as if he were setting a boundary between them and the woman. Mike must have heard the same thing because he moved even closer, putting a protective hand on her back and moving his other hand nearer to his jacket pocket.

“No need for the archaic protective act,” Drayton told him, taking in Mike’s stance with a lofty expression. “This is Gia. She’s not going to hurt you.” Again, the tone of the words sounded like they were intended as much for Gia as for the two of them.

“Not at the moment, anyway,” Gia said, moving until she was standing next to Drayton.

“Forgive me if I don’t trust the man who just admitted to being a criminal,” Mike replied in a clipped voice. “Or a woman I know absolutely nothing about.”

“You are rather disgruntled, aren’t you?” Drayton expression was half-mocking and half-bittersweet as he looked at the man who’d once been his best friend.

Mike bristled at the condescension, but he kept control and nudged Julia closer to his SUV.

“Only natural,” Gia put in. “Perhaps we could all have a drink and talk about it. Nothing like liquid refreshment to open the channels of communication.”

Julia was prepared to agree, since she desperately needed some answers and an explanation before she could even begin to move forward from this revelation.

But Mike’s hand tightened on her arm as he opened his driver’s side door. “If you really think I’m going to put Julia in any more danger—”

“For God’s sake,” Drayton interrupted. “You seem to forget that I care about Julia too. The invitation was to talk. No one is going to hurt your
baby
.”

There was an obvious edge to the last word, and to Julia it felt like a slap in the face. Everything that had been simmering under the surface between the men for the last two months was starting to come out, and the bitterness was absolutely heartbreaking.

“Your professed love might be more convincing had you not been lying to both her and me for so long. And there is no way in hell I’m taking Julia back to that house, having no assurances of the safety of the situation or either one of your motives.”

“We need to talk,” Julia put in softly. She wasn’t about to leave the stability Mike offered her, but they couldn’t just run away from this.

“We will talk,” Mike said, his eyes softening briefly on her face before they chilled again when he turned back to Drayton. “But we’ll have the conversation in a more controlled environment. And without the company of strangers.” His eyes flickered over to Gia, who was watching them all with distanced amusement. “I’m taking Julia home. If you want to talk, you can join us there.”

Julia didn’t resist when Mike urged her into the car, and she noticed his understated urgency in getting in himself and starting up the car.

A year and a half ago she never would have dreamed she’d be in a relationship with two men, and so she hadn’t truly been prepared for the changes such a development would create in her life.

But now she’d learned that one of those men was even more than that.

Things like this just didn’t happen to normal people like her.

Nothing could have prepared her.

***

The ride home with Mike started out quiet and tense. Nothing that had happened fit with the way she’d always understood the world, so she couldn’t even begin to talk about it. She fazed out, staring out the window blankly at the tree-lined country road.

Then, suddenly, she was hit with such intense claustrophobia she could barely breathe. She took a few gasping breaths and rubbed at her neck distractedly, trying to will herself back into control.

“What’s wrong, baby? Are you sick?”

“Can you stop the car, please?” She felt dizzy, nauseated, and she stumbled out of the car when he pulled it over to the side of the road. She took a few steps toward the wooded area and tried to breathe.

Mike had gotten out too, and he reached out in concern as he approached her.

“I’m okay,” she told him, letting him wrap an arm around her for a minute before she pulled away.

“I don’t think you are. You’re white as a sheet.”

“It’s just all so much. I don’t know how we even got here.” She met his eyes, looking for understanding, stability, kindness.

She found it—all of it—in his eyes. “Me either. But we’re here, and we’ve got to somehow deal with it.”

“I know.” She made herself take a few breaths, feeling the cold nausea dissipating. “It would be easier if we didn’t care about him. If we could just let him go, let him do his own thing, without it really mattering. We’d set up this relationship to keep us free, but I don’t think it really worked out that way.”

Mike sighed audibly. “It never does.”

“Do you think he’ll come home?” she asked hoarsely.

Mike stepped closer to her but made no attempt to touch her again. “Yes. He’s made it clear he doesn’t want to let go. He’ll try to talk us into believing that his deception was natural, understandable, even selfless. He’s arrogant enough to assume we’re not going to turn him in.”

“We can’t turn him in, Mike. Not until we know the whole story.”

“I’m not going to turn him in unless I have to. Fifteen years of friendship doesn’t disappear just because it should. But right now I mostly want answers because I’ve wasted years of my life on him, and I’d like to know why.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, his words hurting almost more than having heard the truth at last from Drayton. “Your…your friendship was real. Our relationship was real. It wasn’t a waste.”

Mike’s lips tightened in a familiar way. “And you’re still not ready for it to end.”

He said it so bluntly that Julia felt like she might choke. “Are you?”

“It’s already finished, baby.” His voice was thick and unexpectedly gentle. “All that’s left is to see where the shattered pieces fall.”

It was horrible—hearing it like that—even though she’d been reconciling herself to the truth of his words for the last week, the last month, ever since she’d started to see Mike and Drayton pull apart.

She felt so small and shaky that she desperately wanted Mike to pull her close, to hold her, to make her feel better.

But she didn’t lean into him. She couldn’t let Mike deal with this for her. She had her own decisions to make—about this relationship, about the rest of her life. And her decisions weren’t necessarily the same ones Mike had already made.

She’d never willingly let go of anyone she cared about. Not in her whole life. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to do it now.

She and Mike were standing in silence when they heard another car pull onto the shoulder behind the SUV.  Drayton’s Lexus.

Julia’s spine stiffened as he got out, and she took another deep breath, trying to prepare herself for what she couldn’t possibly see coming.

Drayton closed his door and clicked the lock with a small chirp.

The sound was ominous in the otherwise silent roadside.

He walked over, as coolly sophisticated as ever.

He stood in front of them. Met their eyes in turn. Then he began.

“My father was Six—the notorious, mysterious thief that most of the world knows nothing about. He trained me early, and we might have started to work together had he not been killed in a car accident when I was sixteen. Instead, I went out on my own. It was what I knew—the only thing I really knew—and it was the only way I had of being close to my father. I never knew my mother.”

Julia saw again the pictures in that photo album—Drayton as a beautiful child, with parents who loved him.

“Alexander, the man from the antique shop, was always the fence that my father used, so I continued to work with him. Gia was a partner of mine for a while, but I liked it better on my own. Working with other people can get…messy.”

“Messy as in violent?” Mike asked curtly.

“Yes. Among other things. I prefer to avoid violence whenever possible, but when you’re working with someone like Gia, it isn’t always possible. So I moved on so I could do what I do best.”

“Steal things?”

“Commissioned pieces. High end art and jewelry mostly. I’m not a thug.”

“After what you’ve admitted to us,” Mike said, gravel in his voice, “you really care about those distinctions?”

“Yes, I care. It matters. One of the only truths I believe is that you should call things by their right names.” Drayton’s words and his deep, lilting voice frightened her, as much as they compelled her.

Julia tried to shake off her response. “So why didn’t you call things by their right names with us? You’ve done nothing but lie to us.”

“Because it wasn’t relevant. As I kept trying to tell you, who I am has nothing to do with what we’ve had here.”

“What?” Julia gasped, distracted from her scrutiny by the bald presumption of Drayton’s last claim. “You’re saying it wasn’t about us? You lied to us, Drayton. Constantly. Over and over again. If it really wasn’t significant to our relationship, then why didn’t you tell us the truth?”

“Right. How would you propose I ought to have done that? By the way, I stole a priceless emerald broach last night. Can I have a blow-job now?”

“So why did everything seem to come to a head in the last month?” Julia asked.

“Because Alexander and Gia wanted me to help with a job. One Gia can’t handle on her own. But the risk was higher than I prefer to take anymore, and I refused to help. So they used other means to persuade me.”

“They were blackmailing you?”

“I guess you could call it that. They kept showing up where you were as a warning to me—like Alexander with the car. They think they can pressure me into it, but I’ve taken care of it”

“So that’s it?” Julia asked. “You’re saying there are no more secrets.”

“No more secrets. I’ve told you the truth. That’s it.”

 “That’s
not
it,” Mike gritted out, breaking into the conversation at last.

Julia’s gaze flew to his with a small gasp. He’d been so quiet that the depth and strength of his response startled her.

Mike stared at Drayton coldly. “What will you do now?”

She thought she caught a swift flicker of a shadow pass over Drayton’s face. But it disappeared as he asked lightly, “What do you mean?”

“Julia and I know about your ‘profession’ and your former partners. How are you planning to deal with
us
?”

“I’m hoping, since you care about me, you’ll let me be who I am. I’m selective about the jobs I do, and I don’t take anything from people who can’t afford to lose it. I am not a danger to you or anyone else. If you agree not to say anything, then things can go back to the way they were.”