Barefoot With a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover Book 2) (17 page)

“And what exactly is wrong with safe and fast? I like safe and fast. It’s how I drive, how I work, and how I live.”

“Question for you, rookie:
Why
do you think I’m taking the slow and treacherous route?”

“Because it has the least likelihood of us being followed.”

He grinned at her. “Give an A to the pretty girl in the front row.”

“Pretty, my ass.”

“Your ass is pretty, too.”

She looked skyward. “So how slow and treacherous is this route that guarantees we won’t be followed?”

“First, no guarantees. Second, it’ll add a few more hours to the drive, so it’ll be quite dark when we go over the roads that are the most likely to wash out in a rainstorm. But, big picture, we’ll be safer, I promise. And when I see somewhere to grab food, we will, but we’ll eat in the car.”

“Okay.” She leaned her head back and gave a sigh. “What else can you teach me about being a spy?”

“Why do you want to know?”

She closed her eyes. “You know, in case we get into trouble. More trouble. Anyway…” She reached over and put a hand on his arm. “Your voice is sexy.”

He couldn’t help smiling. “No one’s ever told me that before.”

“Then no one was listening to you.”

He just smiled, wishing they could take the fastest route, because the sooner they could start hopeless sex, the better.

Chapter Thirteen

Gabe put his fork down and glowered across the table. “Do I have basil hanging out of my mouth or something?”

Nino instantly looked down at his plate. “There’s no basil in this, Gabriel.”

“Then do you want to tell me why you have been scrutinizing me for this whole meal like I’m a research monkey under observation?”

Nino just shook his head and stabbed at the chicken. “I’m worried she’s right.”

“Who?”

“Poppy.”

Gabe resumed eating. “This again. You and that woman have to work it out, old man, because she’s a natural spook and isn’t going anywhere.”

“She’s all under my business, Gabriel.”

He smiled at this latest malapropism. “You mean up in your business. ’Cause if she’s under your business, you’ve been holding out on me, you dirty dog.”

Nino ignored the tease. “She’s always looking for trouble.”

“Makes her a good spy. People think she’s sharing inside info, and they do the same.”

“She thinks she knows everything.”

Gabe grunted, already sick of a conversation that hadn’t really started. “Oh, for crap’s sake, if this is about some Jamaican-Italian kitchen showdown between you two, I’m going to—”

“She’s not right about food,” Nino insisted, underscoring that with a bite of chicken pointed directly at Gabe. “She actually thought she knew a better way to make
pollo Romano
than this. I said to her, ‘It’s called
Romano
, woman.’ Like Rome. Not
pollo
Kingston.”

“Look at you, knowing your capitals of foreign countries.”

Nino harrumphed and straightened the dish towel that hung from his collar. In Gabe’s entire life, including
La Vigilia
on Christmas Eve, he’d never seen Nino use a napkin. He wore his
mopina
and never got a spot of sauce on his shirt.

“So what’s the problem?” Gabe asked, spinning through the possibilities like the pasta on his fork despite his shitty appetite. It pained Nino when he didn’t eat with gusto. “She doesn’t know where Chessie and Mal went, or why. We don’t have a client on site at the moment, and I haven’t asked her to do anything but take the fresh flowers out of our bathroom because they’re too fucking happy in the morning.”

“That’s what she’s right about,” Nino said, nothing but seriousness in his deep-brown eyes.

The flowers? “They’re pink, for crying out loud. On the bathroom counter where two guys live. Is that necessary?”

“She’s right about…” Nino swallowed hard like a chicken bone was caught in his throat. “You and the happy… You’re not happy.”

“Damn right I’m not happy about the flowers.”

“No, Gabriel. You’re not happy about anything.”

He snorted softly and picked up the juice glass of homemade wine that Nino had brought from his stash in Boston. “Dude.” He downed the wine. “Shit’s real, and you know it.”

“Shit, as you say, is always real with you,” Nino countered. “But I suspect this whole child thing in Cuba is affecting you more than you realize.”

Oh man. Really? He started to reply, but nothing came. No quip, curse, or comment. What could he say? He never lied to Nino. By omission, of course. Gabe lied by omission by breathing. But flat-out lie? Not to Nino.

“She thinks you’re experiencing…” His bushy brows furrowed as he tried to think of something. “Situational depression.”

“What the holy fuck is that?”

“She showed me a book about it, and, I have to say, you have some of the symptoms, and I—”

He pushed back, practically knocking over the chair. “You know what I have, Nino? Situational anger. Seriously royal pissed-offedness that I am fucking helpless to get my own kid. And you know what else frosts my situational ass? The only woman I ever loved is dead. I think you know how that feels.”

This time Nino couldn’t even swallow. His eyes filled up as he stood. “You’re damn right I do. It feels like…like…” He fisted his ham hocks and punched his barrel chest. “This is broken and bleeding red-hot misery.”

“Go easy,” Gabe warned. “You crack that feeble chest, where the hell would I be without you?” He scooped up his plate, more for something to do than a favor for the cook. “And tell that woman to stick her nose in the business I pay her to stick her nose in, which isn’t mine.”

“You don’t think you’re depressed?”

He couldn’t even conjure the words to deny that moronic question hotly enough. “I don’t know what that shit is, Nino. I’m…I’m impotent.”

“Oh dear, that’s—”

“Not
literally
.” Though he couldn’t remember the last time being with a chick was anything but a physical release. Maybe…five years. Since he’d last seen Isadora.

He yanked the dishwasher door open with so much force it was a wonder the thing didn’t go flying. “I mean I can’t do anything. Do you know what it’s like to have to send my pal and my little sister to do the job I should be doing? It sucks balls, I tell you. But if I get killed, then that kid won’t have a mother
or
a father. I can’t do that to him.” He turned to Nino, knowing his own expression was probably as pained as his grandfather’s. “So, excuse the fuck out of me if I don’t want to look at pink flowers when I drag my sorry ass out of bed to face another day in this shithole that I moved to so I could be closer to her before I knew she was…” Dead. Dead.
Dead
. “Gone.”

Nino blinked. And, damn it, a tear almost fell out of his watery eyes. “This child could give you a new life.”

“Christ knows I could use one.” He stuck his fingers in his hair and dragged hard, but that didn’t pull the misery out. “I’m going out.”

“Like, for the night? Maybe that’s a good idea, grandson. Stop into that Toasted Pelican and meet a lady. You need—”

“I don’t need a lady.”

“Somebody to just get your mind off things.”

“A substitute,” he muttered. “Which is what every woman will be from now until the day I close up shop and head to hell.”

He marched out the back door, ignoring the call of his makeshift gym, his shirtless body, and bare feet. He ran.

He ran through the stupid gardens with too many pink flowers—especially those things that looked like lilies and smelled like hot nights in Cuba. Hibiscus. Isadora used to put them in her hair.

Crushing the memory, he headed to the resort road and down to the beach with too many bright umbrellas and, of course, a picture-perfect sunset that could make the most miserable person happy.

But not him. He didn’t know what the hell situational depression was or meant or how it felt or how long it would last. But he sure as hell didn’t like the darkness of his soul and didn’t need to give it a name other than loss. Frustration. Agony.

Love.

God, he’d loved her so hard. He turned away from the umbrellas and the happy resort people, heading to where the sand was far less populated. He jogged in the soft stuff because it was a challenge, ignoring the stabs of stones and broken shells on the bottoms of his feet. He heard his own breath and felt his blood pump and waited for some chemical release in his brain that would numb the pain.

He passed a couple walking hand in hand, throwing some mental shade at them for being so lucky. A father and daughter picking seashells. He turned away so he didn’t stare at them.

There was no one else for another hundred feet, except a woman in a long black beach cover-up, walking slowly, bending to pick up shells. She stood and looked out at the sunset, brushing some blond hair off her face and…

Gabe slowed his momentum ever so slightly. That gesture. That move.

Damn it, would he go through life seeing her in every woman…but not seeing her at all?

She walked to the water’s edge, her shoulders squared, but her gait was long and even and…familiar.
Come on, Rossi! You gotta stop.

She glanced to her side as he approached on a run, doing the slightest double take, then looking away. His spy training kicked in as he summed her up and figured out her life in one half-second glance.

Thirties, a little too skinny, probably one of the bridesmaids for the weddings they were always having at this place. Pretty enough, too proud to accept the nose job her father offered when she was fifteen.

He ran closer, and she stole the slightest look, one so sly a less-well-trained spy wouldn’t have noticed it, but she was checking him out. Comparing him to the best man her sister was trying to set her up with, no doubt.

She did that thing with her hair again, but this time it wasn’t so much like Isa, who used to finger her thick brown curls endlessly. She continued toward the water, and he could see now that he was wrong about her walk, too. She had a nearly invisible hitch in her step.

Just as he reached her, she slowed, as if to avoid getting any closer to him. But he smelled it…just the barest, slightest, spiciest hint of Chanel No. 5.

He almost howled. It took everything in him not to scream in her face.
Only Isadora can wear that!
It was her perfume, her scent, her siren call to Gabe.

He closed his eyes and ran harder, sucking in the salt air to get rid of the scent of a woman he would never, ever forget. This wasn’t fucking depression. This was grief, and it had him by the balls and the heart and the soul, and it wouldn’t let go.

* * *

Chessie was on the T, desperate to get off at the next stop. She was stuck on the last car on the train as it rolled under Boston, the ancient tracks jostling her and sending her tumbling three steps back for every one she made forward. It felt like she was clawing her way uphill, bumping into people, trying to swim through the crowd and get to the exit. But every few seconds, the train would clatter and bounce to a near stop…except out the window, the Green Line stops were whizzing by like they were going a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Copley. The Pru. Brigham Circle.
Stop
! “I have to…get off.”

“I might be able to help.”

“Gabe needs—” Her head slammed against a window. “Owww.”

“Sorry. Potholes. This is why we call it slow and treacherous.”

On the train tracks? Wait. Chessie fought to open her eyes, but nothing in her vision made sense. “I was…” Dreaming. “Why is it so dark?” So, so dark.

“It’s night. Has been for a long time.”

She squinted into the near blackness, able to make out the hood, and the man next to her, lit by the dim, yellow dash lights.

“You talk in your sleep, did you know that? Said you need to get off.”

She frowned at him, a memory pulling. “Did you actually make a sex joke to a person talking in her sleep?”

His grin was sly and slow. “I didn’t really think you heard.”

She tried to look around, but, damn, it was dark. “Where are we?”

“Here.” He held out her glasses. “We’re miles from any civilization that would have working electricity. Just some farms out here and whoa”—he jerked the car to the left into the other lane—“and the occasional discarded oven door. We narrowly missed a refrigerator a few miles back, so someone mustn’t have tied down their traveling kitchen too well.”

She shook her head and squinted again, frustration rising. “Why don’t you have the headlights on?” she demanded. “And do not tell me it’s some spook safety thing and you don’t want to risk getting attention.”

They clunked into a pothole so deep she could hear the road practically crack the axle. Somehow he managed to drive them out of it. The old beast didn’t have too many of those left in her.

“I have nothing against headlights,” he said. “It’s just that…” He clicked a switch on the dash. Twice. And one more time to make his point. “They must be optional on this model.”

“They don’t work.” She dropped her head back, expecting to hit the headrest…but there was no headrest.