Hot Contract (25 page)

It was raining, like it always did in
Seattle. Keegan shook, looking down into the gutter, awash with the
things people threw away.

****

Jen ignored the weather forecast, but the
camera rushed over the waves and exploded into a panoramic view of
downtown Honolulu anyway—another beautiful day in Paradise. Either
it was warm or it rained. Sometimes a lull in the trade winds
produced a temporary depression and the city baked.

She pulled her hat down low over her eyes and
edged the cutting wagon out through the tall copper doors. Buckets
of shears and empty containers rattled in her wake. Security
followed at a discreet distance. After the first horribly numb day,
Percy’s men tried to give her as much space as they could,
providing her with an illusion of privacy.

The sprawling half-acre garden sweltered
silently in the noonday heat. Her pre-job wardrobe—really her
pre-escape wardrobe—contained no jeans, only a pair of khakis that
reminded her too much of Deacon. If she stayed any longer she was
going to have to go shopping.

The wagon rattled over a long granite slab.
Her mother’s imported Japanese gravel formed neatly raked paths.
The sky was a deep luminous sapphire and the clouds long strands of
torn cotton stretching out to the distant horizon. A whisper of
sound came from the building behind her.

...lucky you live Hawaii.

“No,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes with the
back of her hand. “No, I’m not. I want Keegan. Damn him.”

God, it hurt.

Even knowing what she did. Even knowing that
the man she’d slept with, the man she’d trusted with her heart
wasn’t the man he really was—she wanted him still. She smeared the
makeup around her eyes before she remembered it was there. Other
than the time she’d spent with her father, this was the first time
she’d left her rooms. There were only so many times she could hide
in the bathroom and cry.

Voices came from Percy’s end of the garden.
He lived in the only family building to look inward. On a slight
rise, it seemed an organic part of Eliza Stalling’s original design
work. A long, shoji-screened veranda ran the length of the ground
floor, vaguely reminiscent of an ancient Japanese fortress done up
Hawaiian-style.

“Jen! Where are you? Jen!”

Percy vaulted the red lacquered rail, his
usual entourage nowhere in sight. He looked tattered and scruffy,
dressed way down in a pair of loose cargo shorts and a faded blue
t-shirt. Jen recognized it as one their mother had given him just
before she died. The logo had flaked off years ago, leaving little
patches of something silver.

He found her beside the jasmine and stared
down at the white-starred bushes for a long time before he
transferred his attention back to her. “I was wrong,” he said
without any other greeting.

The cutting shears dropped out of her hands
and narrowly missed her foot. She squatted to retrieve them and
crushed a newly transplanted bush. “About what?”

“Dalfrey.” Percy folded his arms over his
chest with that stuffed look he got when he was wrestling with his
conscience.

She waved a hand. “Oh, him.”

Percy found the bodyguards trailing Jen and
jerked his head. The men nodded and left.

“Look at me, tell me you have no interest in
him and I’ll leave.” He reached down in his pocket and produced a
tablet. “I watched the lounge vid.”

She bit her lips, but the words blurted out
anyway, “So did I—I doubt you found it as interesting.”

“Then you did watch it?” he asked.

“Once. I’m not a masochist.”

“Watch it again. With me.”

Jen was finished with pretense. “No.”

Percy stared at her intently. “Do you
remember Tim? The final scene played out after you left. When you
went missing, we thought you’d been kidnapped. Dad was so scared he
was puking blood, and into that hellish mess...came Tim. The most
perfect specimen Dad could buy.”

Her brother’s eyes unfocused, staring at
something only he could see. He shook his head. “Good old Tim. He
wanted to be a Stalling so much he was willing to be your husband
as a condition of entry. Turns out he’d forgotten that sleeping
with you would be a lifetime commitment. I put the pieces together
and called off the hunt."

His hand fisted on the tablet. “Makena did
the right thing or rather, a right thing. There’s such a damned
small number of right things, more wrong things than right anymore.
It’s all hot and tangled up inside and it still makes me furious
each and every time I think about it. All this, because Dad wants
grandchildren with green eyes and has no problem using us to get
them. You. Me. Nothing but a means to an end. I can’t even look at
a woman without wondering if she’s not dad's perfect genetic
match-up.”

Percy swore, sharp and angry. “We’re more
alike than you know, little sister. At least you got to escape.” He
took a deep breath. “When Dalfrey slept with you, I thought he was
a user out to suck you dry and I...reacted badly. Help me out here,
Jen. I’m guilt-tripping like mad—”

He punched through the menu on his tablet and
brought up the video clip. Keegan’s face showed for just an instant
before he turned his back on the cameras. Percy backed it up,
slowed it down, and zoomed in on Keegan’s reflection in the
darkened glass.

“There,” he said softly.

Jen touched the screen. “I did that to him,”
she whispered.

“We gutted him. You see it too.”

“He...I...why didn’t he tell me?”

Percy gave her a smile that went nowhere near
his eyes. “We’re nothing if not thorough, we Stallings. I
threatened everything. I’ll bet Dad went after his brother. You
tell me, Jen. Who does he give up? You...or everyone else?”

Pain drove Jen back toward her rooms. Some
vague idea of hiding. But she couldn’t run from herself. Keegan had
never said he loved her, but he’d proved it beyond all doubt trying
to rescue Deacon.

She lurched into her building and slammed the
doors behind her. The entry rose around her, atrium tall. Steps at
the far end curved down to her rooms, and up to the empty floors
between her and Tris.

A wide cargo elevator balanced out the other
side. Tris kept it locked when he wasn’t in residence. It had been
locked when she left.

But it was open now.

****

“What do you want, Jen?”

Jen followed his voice. “How did you know it
was me?”

“No one else comes up here.”

“Not even Housekeeping?”

“They clean my windows and get out. They
don’t come to talk.”

Tris stood silhouetted against the afternoon
sun, his face in shadow.

Jen pulled her collar up to wipe at her eyes.
“I-I need some help.”

“Help chokes you, huh? God knows, it chokes
the hell out of me.” He raised a thick brown bottle to his lips and
flung it away.

There was a crate of them next to his futon,
and Jen eyed it warily. Two missing. Not drunk yet.

She knotted her hands. “Keegan loves me.”

“What do you want me to do about it? I could
kill him, but that would just create problems. Or...” Tris
unscrewed the top to another bottle and drank half of it. “I could
kill you, it’s what I do. But that would make Percival mad, and
hell—you’re the only relative I like.”

“I let Keegan down. I couldn’t see past my
own fears to his, and...I let him push me away.”

Tris stretched out on his futon, clad only in
a pair of jeans. Long black hair fell away from heavy black brows,
a prominent hawk-like nose, and thinly cut lips. He gave her a
sardonic look and drained the rest of his bottle.

“Percy went to see you,” he said. “I told him
not to.”

“What should I do? I feel so guilty.”

“You’re asking me about matters of the
heart?” Tris laughed softly. “Only you, Jen...” He closed his eyes
and flung the bottle after the first. “I must be drunk.”

“Tris!” Jen pushed the case away from his
seeking hand.

Tris opened his eyes and caught her wrist.
“Do you love him, Jen? Do you love him enough to follow and fight
for him? Enough to give up your independence?”

Like a scalpel cutting away dead scar tissue,
his words sliced away all doubt. Eight years ago, she’d wanted to
believe in love, and now she was afraid to try. There was nothing
in her to believe it would always be smooth between her and Keegan,
or that it would be beautiful. But beauty was in the eye of the
beholder, and she couldn’t stop that part of her that ached with
loss, that screamed out soul-deep to be with him.

She believed in the geothermal linkage with
all her heart, but Keegan was her air. Her hand turned up. “I can’t
breathe without him,” she whispered and knew oddly enough, that
this—her most dangerous cousin—understood.

The elevator ground to a halt.

Tris released her, folded his arms over his
chest and looked at the cage from under lowered brows. “Got
something to add?”

Percival flung the gate up. “She came to you
for advice?”

Tris sneered. “Is that what this is about?
You’re jealous? I saw the vid. Feel good about yourself, do you?
This is about your guilt, isn’t it?”

Percy raked a hand over his face, teeth
clenched. “Yes, I feel guilty. I want to make amends. My karma
stinks, and I want to do a good deed. Want me to grovel, Tristan?
Want to see me crawl?”

Tris came off his futon. Face to face, the
two men were nearly identical in shape and size. “I want you to
give me my father.”

“This isn’t about Lance.”

“The hell it’s not—”

Jen swallowed her heart down and got between
the two men, only vaguely aware of Percy at her back. She looked up
at Tris and put a hand on his chest. He watched her with cold,
empty eyes.

“I need Keegan’s file.”

Tris spun on his heel, and braced his
shoulder against the window, one hand pressed to the glass, head
turned away. “This is not a good time,” he growled.

Jen followed him. From the surprised look on
his face, her vertigo wasn’t the big secret she’d imagined it to
be. Fear churned her stomach into a roiling mess. She wondered when
heights had ceased to matter.

“I don’t know how to find him,” she told her
cousin. “Find him for me...please?”

****

“Have you eaten?” Corlis asked.

The thought of food made Keegan sick. He
sprawled on the floor of his office and stared at the ceiling with
dry, burning eyes. Ever since they’d returned from the hospital two
days ago, he hadn’t moved, except for an occasional trip down the
hall to the bathroom.

Corlis squatted by his side. “Ray some
crackers,” she said. “Put something down in your stomach before the
antibiotics make you puke.”

“I don’t want food.”

The door banged back. “What’s wrong, Liss?”
Fallon entered the room. “Torture quota not full?”

Keegan rolled over and opened his eyes in
time to see his sister jerk the door closed behind her, leaving him
and Fallon alone. Fallon pulled out a chair, straddled it and
leaned both arms on the back.

Keegan hunched to a sitting position. “What
do you want?”

Fallon shrugged. “Nothing, everything.” His
normally angry snarl was tired. “A measure of peace perhaps...” He
scrubbed at his face and laughed softly. “I thought you’d
understand.”

“You love her,” Keegan said flatly.

“Yeah, man—I love your sister. Want to pound
me for it?”

Keegan fumbled a cracker off the desk. His
stomach clenched around the tiny bit of food. “Tell her how you
feel.”

“And have her laugh at me? Yeah, right.”

Something scratched outside the windows.
Fallon looked up quickly, on his feet and away from the chair. He
flattened himself against the wall, gun in hand, and flung the
blinds back, exposing the cold, Seattle drizzle. A twenty foot
expanse of lawn rolled down away from the building and ended in a
wall of pine and thorny blackberry brambles.

“Did you see anything?” he asked.

Keegan shook his head and went still. His
stomach lurched up in his throat, the second cracker halfway to his
mouth. He crawled for the trashcan and held on to the rolled metal
lip.

Fallon slid his gun back into the holster and
pulled his t-shirt down. “Get over her, Keegan. She ain’t coming
back.”

“I’m drunk and fucking miserable,” said
Keegan. “Not stupid.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his
hand.

Fallon snagged the trash can with a sour
grimace. “Aww, man. It’s sloshing. You’re damned lucky you’re my
friend.”

****

The big dumpster at the foot of the parking
lot didn’t look like it saw much action. Fallon flipped the trash
can over the top. It was small and easy to replace. Not that he
cared. No way was he cleaning that puppy out.

He stopped with one hand on the heavy redwood
gate and watched the trees that bordered the lot behind the small
office complex. Corlis walked out through the front door, and
stopped at the picnic table they’d put in adjacent to the
planters.

Looking for her keys.

She had a damned big purse, and her keys had
a tendency to get lost in the bottom. He’d meant to talk to her,
try to work things out. God knew, it couldn’t hurt—he didn’t want
to end up alone like Keegan. But Maggie had handed him the flight
number and acted surprised he didn’t know Nick was flying in.
Apparently it was common knowledge Nick and Corlis were sleeping
together.

“You have a fucking date?” he roared.

Shit. He hadn’t meant to blurt that out. He’d
meant to work up to it, smooth and easy. Pain made him vicious.
Jesus, he was fucked-up. He couldn’t stop; he just kept going,
screwing himself, walking across the parking lot to where she stood
with one hand still in her purse.

“Are you going to fuck him?” Fallon asked.
“Are you taking numbers? Because if you are—y’know, I could get in
line.”