Adrenaline (2 page)

Royal and the bike flipped through the air until they landed on the roof of the stucco house below. The bike kept on tumbling and went over the edge. Royal didn’t go as far.

At first, he thought the breath was just knocked out of him. And definitely that was true, he was gasping and flopping on top of that house, his body not his own.

But it was as if it was all happening to his upper body, his legs were twisted at an angle that would’ve made him scream if he had the air.

The voices above him, the sight of the woman and man looking down at him, those were things that came back to him later. Days later, in the hospital.

“We can’t leave him,” she had said. The lady was terrified. “He’s hurt.”

“People get hurt,” the man had said.

“Not like this!”

“Just like this. I can’t afford this kind of trouble. Not now. Neither can you.”

Royal had tried to call out to them. To tell them to get an ambulance, to get him some frigging help. But the two of them took off. Left him to wait two hours with a compound fracture in his right leg, and a mess of splinters in his left. Left him to wait until the owner of the house came home and wondered aloud what the hell was a ruined bike doing on his driveway.

The bike. The least of Royal’s problems.

Because Royal never raced a bike again.

Or walked, for that matter.

Chapter 2

It was Steve’s turn.

The hull trembled. They were fifty feet underwater, taking the big wheel out of the cabin cruiser when they both felt it. She was beginning to shift.

Ray spun for the cabinway and Steve headed for the shattered porthole.

Every bit of instinct, training, and knowledge told him to stop. The boat had been listing to port, the cabinway was more protected—he was putting himself in a worse spot.

But it was his turn.

The boat captured him by the knees as she settled. He screamed in his mouthpiece, but the pain was strangely remote. Ray was there, his face concerned through the faceplate. But Steve could see relief in Ray’s face as well, relief that it wasn’t him who was trapped. It shamed Steve to see that, because he knew it must have been on his own face when it had been Ray’s turn.

Ray tried to dig him free. But it quickly became apparent that Steve was pinned to rock, covered by only a fine layer of mud. Ray’s dive knife did no more than make a sharp scratching sound. But Ray fought for Steve, fought in a way that gave Steve pause, insight into himself, perhaps.

Even so, Steve knew and Ray knew, it was simply Steve’s turn.

And so Ray left when it was his time to go. Steve rode the anger, the hatred for his best friend as he swam away to let him drown. He watched Ray reach the silvery surface, and a part of him wondered if that meant Lisa would now be Ray’s too.

The air in his mouthpiece tugged against his lungs, that artificial shortening of breath that meant he was sucking his tank dry.

Here we go, Steve thought.

And then he began to drown. He watched his friend watch him from far above. Steve gagged and coughed, and beat his hands against the slick fiberglass. In his struggles, he knocked his mask askew and the water poured in, blinding him.

For a horrific moment, it was all true.

And then Steve broke to the surface—and woke up in his bunk alongside Lisa.

“Sssh,” she said, holding him. “Again?”

He coughed and gasped. The air was close in their sloop. He had dogged down the hatches because it had been raining when they turned in.

“Yeah,” he said when he could speak steadily. “I could use a new nightmare.”

“You’re all right,” she said.

“I know I am.” His heart was tripping.

Steve was very definitely alive.

He couldn’t say the same for Ray. As much as Steve’s subconscious insisted, the truth was, it had been Ray’s turn, and always would be.

Steve stroked Lisa’s back until she fell asleep. His eyes were wide open and he knew that after that particular dream he wouldn’t be sleeping again for hours.

After a few minutes, he slipped out of bed and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. He quietly made his way over to the icebox and pulled out a beer. It was beaded with condensation, and he touched the cold bottle to his forehead. He caught a glimpse of a photo of him, Alex, and Ray over the navigation station, and he said, quietly, “Hey, I could use the sleep.”

He climbed up into the cockpit of
The Sea Tern,
and was struck immediately with the beauty of the Boston skyline. He wondered, not for the first time, if they were making a mistake building their new home so far from the city. He checked his watch. Just after three-thirty in the morning.

He grabbed a seat cushion and quietly made his way forward. He settled back against the mast, thinking about the nightmare. It had been months since it had visited him. Years since the actual event. Steve thought it through … damn near twelve years. He was thirty-seven now. He and Ray had just gotten out of the navy when they had bought the salvage boat.

Steve would guess that the dream revisiting him probably had to do with the move and the new job. Steve smiled wryly, wondering when the hell he had become such a weenie. He didn’t deal in life-and-death decisions anymore. Profit and loss. Markets and share. Financially, Steve was moving from a decent income to a damn good income. Possibly a spectacular income, if he played the next year right and the executive vice president position for the corporation opened up, the way it was rumored. In fact, that could be what Carl Jansten, the head of the conglomerate that owned Steve’s division, wanted to talk with him about. Jansten’s secretary had called to schedule a breakfast meeting at Jansten’s home. And if Steve
did
land the position … Jansten would most likely be retiring within the next four or five years, positioning Steve as the next president and CEO. All the money and power he could want.

Hell, probably more. And maybe that’s why Ray was coming to visit him now. Ray, and others, had always looked for Steve to take the lead. Ray had been as fully capable a diver as Steve, but he had followed Steve into that boat even though both of them knew damn well that it was balanced precariously. Their air had been low; they had been searching for days for the boat, and money very definitely had not been decent back in those days. Finding the cruiser with only minor damage meant their fledgling business could make it through the next few months, and they had been anxious to prize something free and go up and claim the salvage rights. They should have at the very least braced the boat, protected their exit.

But we were twenty-five,
Steve told himself.

Sometimes that rationalization helped. But at three-thirty-eight in the morning, it didn’t make a dent.

Steve downed his beer.

After a while, it became apparent that the city lights didn’t have any answers for him. And an occasional sleepless night wasn’t so bad, not as atonement went.

So he went below and started in on some paperwork.

He was still at it when the sun rose and Lisa awoke.

“You didn’t stay up working all this time,” she said.

“Insomnia. Secret to my success.”

As she yawned and stretched, he smiled, just to look at her. She was five years his junior, thirty-two. Black hair, fair skin with a sprinkle of freckles. He enjoyed watching her emerge from her slumber, hair tousled, faintly cranky at the start … watching her awake was like seeing her as a child. It took no more than a few minutes for her to quickly become her normal self. And that self was good-natured, sexy, smart, and tough.

He loved her without reservation.

She said, “Do I hear wind out there?”

He looked up through the hatch, and indeed, the halyards were slapping against the mast. “Not bad. About ten knots.”

She reached out for his hand. “Take a little sail with your wife?”

“You romantic, you.”

“We can do that, too.” She kissed him and pulled him down onto the bunk. He drew off his shirt. She said, “You’re never home before ten, and you’ve worked every weekend since we’ve gotten here. So take a couple hours off, play with your wife, get some rest. You can be a little late one morning.”

“Hmmm …” he said.

“Hmmm …” she mocked.

He pulled her close, burying his face in her dark curls … and ticked through the responsibilities of his morning: a conference call over the Blue Waters design budget, which he could perhaps postpone until later in the week … two short meetings with members of Jansten’s corporate staff that he really shouldn’t miss … he needed an hour or so to gear up for a briefing he was to give to the ad agency over a lunchtime meeting … there was just no way.

He gasped. Her bare skin against his felt so damn
good
. She had opened the old shirt of his that she had been wearing. He said, “How long’s it been?”

“Four days, but who’s counting?” She looked up mischievously. “I know you must be exhausted.…”

He stood up and kicked off his shorts, and she pulled him down to the bed and straddled him. He drew the shirt off her shoulders so he could look at her. She had been a competitive swimmer in college. And though he hadn’t known her back then, he could still see the lean strength of an athlete within the ripeness of her body. Time had added faint character lines about her eyes and he loved that about her too—time was passing with them together. He only wished he had known her sooner. “God, you’re beautiful.” He laid his hand along her face and she held him by the wrist.

“So are you,” she whispered.

Outside, the wind gusted, rocking their boat. As he entered her, Lisa’s nipples stiffened and she grew flushed. There was a faint shiver in her voice as she leaned down, her lips moving against his ear. “We’re going to do this … and then we’ll shove this boat away from the dock, and I’m going to sail it while you sleep. You think you can make time for that?”

Those responsibilities flashed through his mind again, meetings and tasks fanning before him like a deck of cards. “No,” he said. “But I will.”

Chapter 3

Coming out of the terminal at Logan Airport, Geoff found a limo driver holding a sign bearing his name. Geoff handed the driver his luggage ticket and said, “Get me a newspaper first.”

The driver tipped his hat and offered him tightly folded copies of
The Wall Street Journal
and
The Boston Globe
from his front seat. “I picked these up on the way, sir. However, I’ll be happy to get you something else if you prefer.”

Geoff shook his head. “The bags, and let’s go.”

After they were out of the airport traffic and heading into the tunnel, the driver cleared his throat. “Mr. Jansten said to offer you his welcome to Boston. He is occupied this evening, but if you are free, he would like to have you out to his home for breakfast tomorrow morning, along with Mr. Dern.”

“Steve Dern?”

“Yes, sir.”

Interesting.

Geoff didn’t let the surprise show on his face. He kept his eyes busy on more important business, working his way quickly through the
Journal
back to the New York Stock Exchange listings. He scanned a few of his smaller purchases. Nothing much had happened. Then he focused his attention where it mattered: TerrPac.

His only reaction was to draw his breath just a tad more sharply. Just a little taste of additional oxygen to acknowledge what had happened to him.

He flipped to the front page and began to work his way back, paying attention this time. He found a lead taking him back to a more in-depth article on page twelve. TerrPac had lost a lawsuit charging them with copyright infringement. Their settlement would not be a record breaker for the pharmaceutical industry, but it would possibly be enough to put them out of business. Certainly enough to send their stock into a tailspin.

And certainly enough to be a nasty surprise for Geoff.

At thirty-four, he had amassed just over six million dollars, the results of hundreds of high-flying transactions in and outside of his own field of real estate development. Plenty of times he had taken hits, but never anything like this.

On TerrPac, he had leveraged everything to bet the pot. His inside informer was highly placed, and for over six months the stock had been climbing as expected.

Now Geoff had virtually lost the pot.

He went through a series of rapid calculations. For a number of good reasons, no one within the corporation knew of his personal investments; he had even conducted the transactions over the wire. Bob Guston, his informer at TerrPac, would keep his mouth shut. Geoff had sniffed out a sweetheart deal that Guston had put together, where he was buying real estate for TerrPac that he actually owned. He had been holding that over Guston for information for over two years now. The blackmail would work just as well for silence.

Geoff’s position at Jansten Enterprises would certainly give him enough income to keep up appearances for the time being. And there would be even more of that once he nailed the executive vice president job. He figured that Jansten’s agreeing to let him run his division from Boston was a sure sign of his favor. So if everything went the way he intended, there would be plenty of money.