Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (2 page)

Truth be told, the serenity I’d sought on St. Marcos was in no small part to escape my feelings for Nick—the ones he had made clear he did not share—and the soggy, drunken mess I’d made of myself over him. I’d buried my phone’s old SIM card only a few months before with great solemnity and purpose so Nick couldn’t reach me even if he wanted to. I hadn’t just buried the SIM card, either. I’d put my dead mother’s heirloom ring and an empty bottle of Cruzan Rum under the dirt, too. Release. Closure. Moving on from the pains that bound me. But apparently I’d failed. How did he have my new number? And what the hell did “I vote for the MC” mean, anyway?

Jackie hissed at me, “You’re on.”

“Can you take over for me? I’m feeling ill.” I put the back of my hand to my forehead. Was that a fever? Or was I just delirious?

Miraculously, Jackie didn’t give me any lip. She just nodded, put on a wide pageant smile, and hit the stage. The way she shouldered on through her grief was an inspiration.

Alone, I texted back to Nick. “?”

“For Mrs. St. M. I vote for you. Great outfits.”

I felt my face scrunch like a Sharpei in confusion. “What? Me? Where are you?”

“Back row, far left.”

“St. M???”

“Couldn’t be watching you at this pageant from anywhere else.”

My hands started shaking so badly I could barely type. Holy guacamole, this couldn’t be happening. In the middle of the already surreal Mrs. St. Marcos contest, in the middle of my five ridiculous wardrobe changes, here was Nick. Had he come to the island to see me? I clasped my hands together for a few seconds until they stopped shaking.

I typed another message to him. “What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

Ha. Those were practically the last civil words he had spoken to me, a lifetime of humiliation ago in Shreveport, Louisiana, before I threw myself at him and he opted not to catch.

Well. Truth be told, there was a little blame on my side of the cosmic ledger. Details.

He sent another text. “I even brought the damn bar napkin. May I have another chance?”

Oh, no, and here were the details, whether I wanted them or not. The bar napkin. The one he’d held in a tight grip in my hotel room in Shreveport when I lied about my feelings for him and he erased me from his life. The napkin he’d made notes on to talk to me about, the napkin I had ridiculed, along with him. My bad. Someone needed to inform my emotions that burying a SIM card was an act of finality, because they hadn’t gotten the memo.

The room was spinning. It was all too much. I had to get out of there. I turned off my phone, grabbed my purse, and left the theater in my blue wake with not a thought in my head but the need to escape to Annalise.

I didn’t make it far in my strappy high-heeled sprint. My dress weighed a thousand pounds and I’d only stuck to my New Year’s resolution of thrice-weekly karate workouts for one-third of a week. I burst out the back door of the theater, clippety-clopped up the sidewalk, and turned the corner that would take me past the front doors to the parking lot, my truck, and my house. Except as I hit the front sidewalk, I ran pell-mell into Nick himself.

Somehow I managed to bounce back and remain upright, and to keep from voicing the “Oh shit” that sprang to my lips. But I still mouthed the words.

“I had a feeling you’d bolt,” he said.

He looked exactly as I remembered him—gorgeous, angular, and dark, thanks to his gypsy ancestors—but he was
smiling
down at me. That was a change. He’d done a damn good impersonation of Heathcliff on the moors last time I’d seen him.

Traitorous tears spilled from my eyes.

Nick stepped close and wiped them away. My face burned under his fingers, then cooled as soon as he pulled back. It was the first time he’d ever touched me, other than shaking my hand when we met over a year and a half before. The sound of beetles buzzing in the outdoor lighting was the only sound until he spoke again.

“So, this is what lawyers do for fun on St. Marcos?”

That made me laugh. I dried my tears with the back of my forearm and tried to remember to hate him. “It was awful, wasn’t it?” I asked.

He grinned. “You look the best I’ve ever seen you. You’re so tan and . . . fashionable.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

He leaned back against the wall of the theater and crossed his arms. “I came to talk to you. And to see you.”

I looked around us. Nothing to see but the roach coach that served snacks at intermission. I busied myself with putting my phone away in my pocketbook, then held the purse with both hands in front of me. “You missed a lot of those opportunities, even when I was still in Texas.”

“I did. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me and let me tell you what I came to say?”

“How’d you know where I was?”

“I’m a professional investigator.”

He was, but he didn’t look like it right now in his khaki cargo shorts, red Texas Surf Camp t-shirt, and thong sandals.

“So Emily told you.” Emily, Nick, and I had made a formidable litigation team—paralegal, investigator, and attorney—back at Hailey & Hart in Dallas.

“I had to buy her a very expensive lunch at Del Frisco’s first.”

I stared at the ground, thinking. Could I forgive him? I wasn’t sure yet. Could I listen? I couldn’t exactly say no when he’d come halfway around the world—and I didn’t want to. Sweat was dripping down my chest to my stomach, following a trail I had imagined his tongue making many times.

Stop it, I told myself.

“OK, I’ll listen. At lunch tomorrow.”

Nick’s lips compressed into a line. The front doors to the theater swung open and people started exiting around us. I got a steady stream of congratulations and atta-girls, which I responded to with nods and hand lifts.

“Katie?”

Bart’s voice brought me to attention and I swiveled my head toward him. Bart. My not-yet-ex-boyfriend. He wasn’t alone, either. An unfamiliar too-cool forty-something guy in skinny jeans and dark sunglasses leaned in and said something to him. The man’s dark head was a contrast to Bart’s light one, and Bart’s de rigueur outfit of plaid shorts, collared shirt, and brown boat shoes completed the inverse image. Bart nodded and I lip-read his reply: “Everything is fine. I’ll talk to you later.” The hipster headed toward the parking lot with a blonde Amazon encased in spandex right behind him.

Bart shouted to me over the tops of people’s heads. “I didn’t know you’d stepped out. Are we still on for dinner?”

And then he noticed Nick. Bart’s brow furrowed as Nick locked eyes with him and didn’t flinch. It had the potential to go bad in a hurry. I took two giant steps toward Bart and grabbed his arm like it was a life preserver, hoping he couldn’t feel the tremors racking my body.

“Absolutely. If you’re up for it, with what happened to Tarah and all.” I pressed my paper-dry lips against a thin sheen of sweat on his cheek.

“I am.” Bart exhaled audibly and swiveled his head toward Nick for an introduction, but I gave him a push toward the parking lot. He stopped on the way to greet a covey of customers, ever the sociable restaurateur.

Hurry, Bart, I thought. Before I lose my willpower.

I looked over my shoulder and Nick straightened up from his slouch against the wall, silent and unhappy, which served him right. Sort of.

“Tomorrow, then,” he said.

I nodded.

Bart returned his attention to me and took my arm. As we couple-walked off to my truck, I could feel the heat of Nick’s eyes on us.

“Tomorrow what?” Bart asked.

“Lunch,” I said, hoping brevity would do the trick.

“Who is he?”

I scrambled for a good lie and couldn’t find one, so I stalled until I came up with a bad partial truth and delivered it casually. “He’s an investigator I knew in the states, down here on a case. We ran into each other after the pageant. It’ll be nice to catch up with an old friend.”

Our feet crunched the gravel as we moved beyond the lights around the theater into the dark parking lot. Bart pulled me closer to him, weaving even more than I was in my heels. He was bulkier than Nick. The thick blond hair on his arms rubbed against my skin and the heat of his body, the nearness of him, suddenly was too much. He smelled like rum.

Dammit. He knew I’d given up alcohol, that I couldn’t drink, that I mustn’t drink. The endless wine-tasting parties with his high-living clientele were hard enough for me. He’d promised not to drink around me anymore.

More sweat, this time beading my upper lip. My pre-pageant sushi lunch no longer sat well in my stomach, and in a wave of certainty, I knew I needed away from him that very second. For good.

“Bart.”

“Yes?”

We stopped beside my ancient red Ford pickup, the replacement for the one that went off a cliff without me months ago. “I’ll have to pass on dinner. I feel sick.” It was as true as when I’d said it to Jackie earlier, but I left out the why. And the “not just tonight but forever” part.

“Really?”

He sounded suspicious, but I couldn’t see him in the dark.

“It just came over me. I’m sorry.”

“Let me drive you home.”

No, I thought, panicked. “No, thank you. Sweet of you. Gotta go.” I feared I would throw up on him.

He deposited me in my truck and I pulled the door shut without giving him a chance to kiss me goodbye. He stood there staring in at me, then knocked on the window.

“Aren’t you going to leave?” he asked, his voice raised so I could hear him through the glass.

I yelled back, “In a minute. I just want to call Ava. Safety first.” I retrieved my phone from my handbag and held it aloft. “See you later.”

He hesitated. I waved goodbye. He walked over to his car and looked at me again. I put my phone to my face and pretended to talk to Ava, acting my little heart out. He opened the door to his black Pathfinder, turned to me one last time, then got in and slowly drove away.

I was a total shit.

I put the phone down, drew in a ragged breath, and wondered if I was developing adult-onset asthma. Why was it so hard to breathe? I watched the digital clock on my dash count forward the minutes. Time dragged by. Breathing didn’t get easier. I sat there in the dark.

Tap tap tap.
A noise in my left ear, on the window
.

Of course. This is what I had expected. But when I peered out, I got a big surprise.

A puffy black face was staring at me from four inches away. A not-so-attractive oversized male face, but one I knew well. It was Officer Darren Jacoby, a longtime admirer of Ava’s and a short-term non-admirer of me, with a Caribe version of Ichabod Crane looming behind him. Jacoby rotated his hand, pantomiming rolling my window down, old school. I turned my key halfway in the ignition and used the button to lower the window.

“I looking for Bart,” Jacoby said.

“He’s not here.”

“Can you pass the message to him?”

Ichabod pulled at the waist of his pants and smoothed his shirt over his stomach.

“If I talk to him, I will.”

“You not keeping company with him anymore?”

“Not really.”

Jacoby nodded, looking like I’d said something smart. Then he walked away. Ichabod turned and followed him. I rolled up my window.

The whole thing was odd bordering on a little bit terrifying. It hadn’t helped with my breathing issue. I put my head in my hands.

Tap tap tap.

Not again. I looked up to give Jacoby an OK sign and saw the face I’d expected the first time.

“Let me in?” Nick asked.

His question spun my dial from wrecked to enraged. I started the truck and hit the window button again. It started its descent. I yelled out the slowly widening gap.

“You think you can just hop in my car, when you treated me like I didn’t exist for months? Now you show up where I live, where I work, where I have a life, like I’m just going to put out the welcome mat for you. I already gave you my friendship and my dignity. What else do you want, Nick?”

I thwonked my head down on my steering wheel once, twice, then turned on him again. “Who am I kidding? I gave you my heart, you asshole. So how about my wallet? Or would you just like me to cut off my arm instead?”

I wasn’t so much screaming as drilling my words into the thick night air in a high-pitched rush, and then I couldn’t catch my breath. I tried—I gasped—I blew out oxygen to make room for more, and none was coming back in.

Nick spoke but I couldn’t hear him over the buzzing noise in my ears. I turned the air conditioner on my face full blast and felt the warm air cooling as it hit my sweat. After a few seconds, I could draw in a deep, shuddering breath. As soon as the air came into my lungs, I sobbed it back out again. Over and over.

I flapped my hand at Nick, who was still talking. “Go away. Go back to Texas. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want to be friends or pretend to be nice. Just go away.”

Nick’s hand grabbed mine as I shooed him with it, and his calloused grip was strong but gentle. A real man’s hands, my father would have said. Nick leaned his head into the truck.

“Katie, listen to me. I’m sorry,” he said, but I cut him off.

“For what? Because you wasted your money coming here?”

“God, no. But I only have forty-eight hours until I have to leave. Are you going to make me stand out here that whole time, or could you let me in where you can yell at me from close range?”

Forty-eight hours?

Shit.

I did want to talk to him. I wanted to rip his head off first, but afterwards, I wanted to hear what he had to say. My sobs turned to sniffles. A car drove slowly past us in the parking lot. Great. I probably looked like a drunk prom queen fighting with her date.

“Can I please get in the car with you?” he pressed as a black Pathfinder jerked to a stop beside me, skidding the last few feet.

Oh, yes, I knew that car. And it was driven by someone who was about to be very mad at me. A door slammed. Feet crunched on gravel. But it wasn’t Bart who appeared at my window.

Ava came up beside Nick, looking incredibly Ava-like in a stretchy red dress with off-the-shoulder sleeves and voluminous black hair billowing behind her in the night wind. Ava, whom I had supposedly called from my truck. Oops.

“Girl, got an angry man over there who come and get me.” She stabbed an index finger toward Nick. “That the one you not s’posed to pine for?”

I instantly regretted that I had vomited up the whole story about Nick to my new friend. Not exactly what I wanted him to hear, but oh well. “Correct,” I said.

“Thought so,” she said. “I think the one in my car expect you to choose between the two of them real quick.”
Thought
sounded like
taught
and
think
like
tink.
Them
like
dem.

“He sent you over here to tell me that instead of coming himself?” The heat rose in my face and settled over my cheekbones.

Ava shrugged and she had the grace to look apologetic. But it wasn’t Ava I was upset with. I remembered Bart’s liquored-up breath from earlier and I added that sin to this new one. I pulled my gearshift forward and slammed it down into drive, but kept my foot on the brake.

“Tell him he just made it pretty easy,” I told her. I unlocked the doors. “Get in,” I said to Nick. Letting him in didn’t mean I had to be through letting him have it.

Ava got back in Bart’s Pathfinder. Nick went around and climbed into the passenger seat. I punched the accelerator and enjoyed the sensation of my big tires throwing rocks ten feet into the air behind me. I hoped a few of them made contact with something shiny and black with four wheels.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” I said to Nick. “I’m just mad at him.”

He didn’t answer, but he pulled his seatbelt across his body and snapped it into place. I turned the wheel hard to the left, barely slowing down for the turn out of the parking lot. I mashed the pedal to the floor and an enormous pressure I hadn’t known I’d borne lifted from me, floated in the air above my head, and then was gone.

Wow. What was that?

“Where are we going?” Nick asked. His body was angled toward me and his dark eyes bore into me.

“Scared?” I asked him.

“No, curious.”

I put both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and drummed the fingers of my right hand. A tingling sensation had started somewhere deep inside me. Excitement. Something I hadn’t felt since the last time I’d been in Nick’s personal space. I knew I’d better hurry if I had a prayer of continuing this ass-chewing. I kept driving.

We crested Mabry Hill, the highest point at the center of the island, and I didn’t even tap the brakes as we changed trajectory for a downward plunge. I felt crazy alive. As we approached the first turn, I slowed the truck to a nearly reasonable speed and snuck a glance at Nick. He was still staring at me.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m just waiting for you to answer my question.”

We rounded the bend and the Caribbean Sea spread out before us under the spotlight of the full moon. The moonlight turned the night sky from black to a blue suede. The trees on either side of us were ghostly in its light, but I knew them by their silhouettes. A stately kapok. A cluster of giant mahoganies. The spidery arms of a flamboyant, and the deceptively smooth-looking tourist tree that by day flaked like a sunburn.

“We’re going to my house,” I said.

“The one you live in or the one you bought?”

“Emily didn’t miss a detail, did she? No, we’re not going to Ava’s.” That’s where I was living until my contractor finished the work at Annalise. Crazy Grove had promised to have me in before summer, and it appeared he’d just make it.

“Em told me about your boyfriend,” Nick prodded.

Ex-boyfriend, as far as I was concerned. It was none of his business, though, so I didn’t respond.

“Are you in love with him?”

“How about we play the quiet game? First one to break the silence is the loser,” I replied.

Nick appeared to roll his eyes, but with only my peripheral vision I couldn’t be sure.

I drove on, swinging left again onto Centerline Road. Just for fun, I gave the truck a little more gas and reveled in the sight of Nick bouncing up and down. Fifteen sadistically perfect minutes later, we pulled up the dark driveway to Annalise with the moon’s beacon pointing the way to the most beautiful place in the world.

“Jesus, is this your house? It’s amazing,” Nick said.

“You lose,” I said.

Five of my dogs met us in the side yard, barking joyfully. The sixth, my German shepherd and personal protector, Poco Oso, was back at Ava’s place. Nick rolled down his window and talked to them, which drove them into a fever pitch. “Highly suspicious new person,” they announced. I parked my truck under the immense mango tree on the near side of the house.

Now what?

My flight had seemed like a great plan until we landed at our destination. I felt a little airsick. Nick wasn’t suffering, though.

“Here,” he said, handing me a Kleenex.

Mortified that my mascara had run, I started to mop at my face.

“Don’t do that!” Nick shouted.

I jerked back. “What?! What did I do?”

“That’s not for your face. It’s for you to read.”

My forehead formed its familiar pattern of a bazillion furrowed lines and I consciously tried to erase them before they became permanent. “What is it?”

Nick searched with his fingers for the dome light and punched it on. “Read it, Katie.”

It wasn’t a Kleenex. It was a crumpled cocktail napkin with writing on it.

Oh.

The napkin.

I couldn’t believe he had kept the damn thing. My mouth fell open. Fly-catching position, I realized. I shut it.

Nick ran his hand back through his hair.

Ah, the hair scrub, I thought. He was nervous.

I read the words written in blue ballpoint pen above, below, and around the Eldorado Hotel & Casino’s logo.

Can’t happen now/you stop my heart

I want to do this right

Wait for me

I smoothed the soft bar napkin and tried to take it in. When we’d talked last summer in Shreveport, he had only gotten through the “can’t happen” part before I launched a defense in my weapons-of-mass-destruction mode. My brain struggled to process the new information.

“Stop my heart”—that was good, right?

Mine felt like it had just stopped, as a matter of fact. I searched his face for information.

He said, “Can I tell you what I should have said in Shreveport, Katie? What I meant to say?”

I nodded, because I didn’t think I could even speak. Strong fingers of emotion were wrapped around my throat and were squeezing it shut. From past experience, I knew this was probably for the best.

He cleared his throat. “There were three things I was going to say to you,” he said, gesturing at the worn paper. “What I didn’t get out after the ‘this can’t happen’ part, at least before you got upset, was the word YET, and . . .” Here he stopped and muttered, “You can do this, Kovacs,” so softly that I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him or if it was only the wind.

My words broke through the grip around my throat. “And what?”

He laughed, breaking the tension. “Slow down, this is important.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked straight into mine. “That my heart stops whenever you walk into a room.”

He waited. Here was the part where I was supposed to say something.

I sat still as granite. I didn’t want to mess this up with the wrong words, and I couldn’t find the right ones. But in my confusion over what to say, I left a silence that I didn’t mean. Nick frowned slightly, but he went on.

“And so the second thing was that I wanted to do this right. I wanted a real relationship with you, not just a wild weekend.”

Again, he waited for my response, and again I sat stricken mute.

He dragged his hand back through his hair. “But my third point was that I needed to ask you to wait, because things were too crazy in my life right then. I needed time because I didn’t want the beginning of us ruined by all of that.”

Finally, I could speak.

“Oh, my,” I said in a squeaky whisper.

That was it. But what I felt? I would have crawled on my belly across hot broken glass to hear those words from him.

The little voice in my head chimed in. “But he hurt you. He was cold and mean. He could have said these words to you one thousand times over before now.”

Shut up,
I said back. This is the good part. Where was the voice to cheer me on and wish me happiness?

Nick spoke. “But that night, everything went to hell. I got so angry at you that—”

I found my breath. I had to get something out before I did something foolish, like listen to the little voice that wanted to sabotage this for me. “Nick, stop. I have to tell you before you say another word: I am so sorry. I lied to you. You were right, I did tell Emily I was in love with you, and I knew you’d overheard us on the phone. But when you started with ‘this can’t happen,’ I was mortified. I got defensive and I was . . . I was . . . well, I was awful. And I was wrong.”

Nick released a giant breath. “It’s OK. I know I blew what you said out of proportion. I wasn’t as mad at you as I was at myself for messing it up—my life and that conversation—but I blamed it all on you. I was a shit to you, and I know I hurt you. What happened is my fault. You coming to St. Marcos is my fault. That damn McMillan trial fiasco was my fault. It’s taken me months to get up the courage to come here. But I had to say all this just one time. I had to try.”

Those. Those were the words I needed to hear.