Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) (3 page)

I didn’t exactly want to be reminded about the humiliation of losing the rape trial of basketball superstar Zane McMillan, but other than that, his words were perfect. Bart’s face flashed through my mind again, but I refused to feel the guilt I knew would come. I’d deal with it later.

“Come on,” I said, jumping out of the truck. My heels sank into the ground, so I took them off and tossed them into the bed of the pickup.

Nick was standing beside me trying to soothe the dogs. Sheila, a rottweiler, hung back. Cowboy, the alpha male, muttered in dog-speak under his breath. He gave Nick a thorough sniff-over before he let the others check him out. Nick stood his ground and I let the dogs do their thing. If he didn’t pass their muster, I’d rethink this.

The night air was singing its song of coqui frogs and leaf-rustling breezes, brushing my cheeks with its soft, damp kiss. I put out my hand to Nick, and he tucked it into his. He leaned in toward my face, which prompted a whine from Sheila. I ducked away from him, lifted the side of my long, voluminous skirt and flipped it over my arm, then loped toward the house, tugging him behind me.

We ran lightfooted, Nick trusting me to lead the way, the dogs all around us. When we came to the door of my big yellow house, I pulled Nick inside and the dogs stayed on the front step. The electricity wouldn’t be on until Crazy got one last permit, but I knew my way around even in the dark and I didn’t hesitate. I shut the door behind us, closing out the night-blooming jasmine and keeping in the sawdust and paint. Now the only sound was our panting breath.

I pulled Nick through the kitchen, where there was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that I could make out the hulking, unfinished cabinetry and appliances.

“Kitchen,” I said without slowing down.

Onward we ran into the great room, where the ceilings opened up into a towering cavern thirty-five feet high. The moon was brighter there, shining through the second-story windows onto the tongue-in-groove cypress and mahogany ceiling and the rock and brick fireplace the original owner had installed for God knows what reason in the tropics.

“Great room,” I announced. “Watch out for the scaffolding.”

I ducked between the steel supports and made a sharp right down a short, dark hall to an empty bedroom whose magnificence echoed that of the great room. The moon beckoned through the glass panels in the back door. I stood in the middle of the room and dropped Nick’s hand and my dress to wave my hand over my head.

“My room.”

I took a step toward the balcony door, but Nick grabbed my arm and swung me back around to him, creating a collision reminiscent of the one outside the bizarre beauty pageant two hours earlier. Only this time, I didn’t bounce back from him. I stuck. Like glue.

He slid his hands from the base of my neck up into my hair on both sides and leaned his face down to mine, his dark eyes intense. “Slow down.”

I put my hands around his wrists and stood on tiptoe to whisper, breath-distance from his lips, “We’re almost there.”

He closed the millimeters between us and pressed his warm, soft lips against mine.

Oh, my merciful God in heaven.

We stood there, lips clinging to each other as the seconds passed, until I disengaged. I pulled his hands down gently and backed toward the door without letting go of him. I reached behind me and turned the knob, pulling the door inward and hooking it open.

“Watch your step,” I said, moving out onto the ten-foot-long red-tiled balcony. Someday soon it would have a black metal railing.

“Whoa,” Nick said as I hung right and sat down at the far end of the narrow platform, my knees up and my back against the wall. It felt like sitting on thin air, except that thin air probably wouldn’t be quite as tough on the tush. Below, and beyond the patio tiled in pavers that matched the balcony’s, the pool shimmered, the moon dancing upon it like it was the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The moonlight was so bright that I could make out the brilliance of the dark turquoise pool tiles underwater.

The earth fell away fifteen feet past the pool, sloping dramatically into the valley that surrounded Annalise. It was like we were encircled by a moat of treetops. Rooftops off to the west marked the end of developed land on the island, and beyond them the moon glinted on white sand and the silver-streaked, undulating navy-blue sea. Three large ships dotted the horizon, one a cruise ship ringed with lights and two others, dark and lumbering.

Movement caught my eye closer in. I looked down. A tall black woman was standing on the far edge of the pool. She wore a mid-calf plaid skirt, faded but full. She lifted it with both hands and swung one foot through the water with her toe pointed, as if to test its temperature. The young woman cut her eyes up at me and did something she’d never done before. She smiled at me, then covered her mouth to hide it.

I glanced up at Nick. He hadn’t moved, nor did it appear as if he had seen my friend. He just stood staring into the distance. I looked back at the pool, but I already knew she would be gone.

“What do you think?” I asked Nick.

He came over and sank down beside me. “Wow. Just wow.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it. “You’ve got the train back on the tracks, for sure.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I was worried about you.”

“You mean when I had my complete and utter booze-fueled meltdown in court in front of the whole city of Dallas and tucked my tail between my legs and ran to hide in the islands?”

He kissed my hand again, then two more times in quick succession. “Yes, then.”

I sighed. “I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in two hundred and nine days.” I pursed my lips, thinking about all of Bart’s parties and how hard it was to abstain in that environment.

“Good for you.” Nick was playing with my fingers, bending them, straightening them, kissing each one. It was pleasantly distracting.

“Thank you.”

“I quit the firm,” he said. “Opened my own investigations business.”

“So I heard. Congratulations.”

“My divorce is final.” He kissed the inside of my wrist.

“I heard that, too. So it sounds like you have all those messy details in your life straightened out.”

He leaned his head back against the wall and I admired his profile. Nick is not small of nose, but it works for him. He sighed. “Not exactly.”

I curled my toes in hard, then released them. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning—well, wait a second. I don’t want to get this in the wrong order. I need to tell you something else first.”

“Ohhhhh kayyyyyy . . .” I said. Prickles ran up my neck.

“When I heard what happened to you, how you were nearly killed by the same guy that killed your parents, it knocked some sense into me. I was letting my pride get in the way before. So I got here as fast I could.”

Not very damn fast, I thought. “That was more than six months ago.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, I have challenging personal circumstances,” he said.

“Get to the point, Nick,” I said. Which sounds harsher than it came out. I swear.

“I couldn’t come because of Taylor,” he said.

My heart sank.

My mind conjured up a young blonde with an acoustic guitar. No, I knew he didn’t mean Taylor Swift. But who the hell was Nick’s Taylor? I spoke through my clenched jaw. “Taylor,” I repeated.

“Yes. Taylor. He’s fifteen months old.” Nick squeezed my hand.

Not a woman. A baby. Only a slight improvement. I had an instant headache.

“A baby.”

“Teresa is with me, too.”

Teresa. This just got better and better.

“Really.”

What the hell was he doing here with me, then? I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t release it.

“Katie, let me finish.”

He had divorced recently, and I thought I knew it was because he and his wife didn’t like each other, but I had always wondered if there was more. A baby would definitely be more. “Go on.”

“He’s my nephew. His mom, Teresa, is my little sister. Didn’t I ever tell you about her?”

“No.” The relief made me lightheaded. Taylor was neither a woman nor his baby. “That’s great!”

“The father, Derek, is a loser, a spoiled rich kid who went from rehab to dealing to prison right after he knocked my sister up, and now he’s on parole. Teresa was living with my parents in Port Aransas, but the loser was too close to them, less than an hour away in Corpus Christi, and he kept showing up, so she and Taylor came to stay with me when he was about three months old.”

I pondered Nick as a big brother with a troubled little sister. I got the loyalty part. My older brother exemplifies apple pie and baseball. If anything, I’m the cross he bears, especially after our parents died. Little sisters can be hell. I hadn’t expected a baby in Nick’s life, though, no matter whose it was.

“So?” Nick asked. “Any thoughts?”

I counted to ten.

I didn’t know what to say.

My dreams of Nick involved sexy times and happily ever after, not him an ocean away with a little sister and a toddler in tow. I restarted my count.

My hair had long since come loose, and I tucked it behind my ears. I licked my lips. I kept counting.

A gust of wind tore across the balcony so strongly that I grabbed Nick to anchor myself. Dirt whirled up from the bare earth beyond the pool and shot into the air like a dancing geyser. When the wind changed direction and spun the funnel across the yard to the patio below us, it pushed me back against the wall.

“What the hell?” Nick yelled, jumping up and pulling me to my feet. He stepped in front of me and a smile broke across my face.

Yes, Annalise, exactly. That’s just how I feel inside.

“I think my jumbie says it way better than I can,” I said.

The funnel backed off slightly and spun on the patio, the top of its cone just out of arm’s reach. I looked down into its dirtless core and my hair floated up like I was underwater.

“Your jumbie? Like a ghost? Yer shittin me, right?”

“Nick, meet Annalise. Annalise, this is my charming friend, Nick.” I let go of Nick and put my hands on my hips. “She must like you at least a little, or she’d have sucked you in there by now.”

I turned toward the wall and put my face and hands on her yellow stucco. “I think he gets it,” I said. “Thank you.”

The funnel stopped spinning and the dirt dropped to the patio with barely a whisper. The gentle breeze resumed. The night was eerily quiet and the smell of dust lingered. Annalise’s display had energized me, excited me. If this was all I got of Nick, so be it. I’d make the most of it.

Nick was staring at me. “That was wild. And you,” he said, and his voice grew rough, “you are the jumbie.”

I put my hands on his chest and rubbed up and out, across his collarbones, over his shoulders.

His eyes gleamed in the dark. “That was friendly.”

I slid my hands up the dark skin of his neck, then pulled it down just enough that I could bite the base of it where it angled down into his broad, chiseled shoulders. I nudged the neck of his t-shirt aside to get just the right spot. And another, and another, up and around the back. I had wanted to do this since the first time I saw him, and it was even better than I’d imagined.

“Holy shit, you’re not a jumbie, you’re a vampire.”

And then he pushed me against the wall, his hands following a path on me much like the one mine had on him. When he reached my neck, he grasped my face under my jaw and around the back of my head and held me still while he kissed me like it was a contact sport. If it was, I’d started it—and as far as I was concerned, I was winning.

Mother Goose and Grimm, I wanted to eat this man alive.

“Katie? Is that you?” a voice called out.

And just when we were getting to the good part.

I jumped, colliding teeth with Nick and biting his tongue. “Ow!” he said.

“Sorry about that,” I whispered. I wiped a drop of blood from his lip.

I yelled, “It’s me, Rashidi. I’m on the balcony outside my bedroom.”

“Who the hell is Rashidi?” Nick said, pressing his fingers against his mouth.

I came up on my toes and kissed Nick one last time, sucking his lip as I lowered myself down, pulling his head with me, which had the effect of starting the whole oral-gymnastics exercise over again. Nick pushed his body against mine, hard, dragging himself against me.

I pulled my mouth away and his followed mine. “We have to stop.”

“I don’t like this Rashidi,” Nick said against my mouth.

“Good evening, Katie, Bart,” I heard from somewhere down below.

Woopsie. “Hi, Rashidi.” I wriggled out from between Nick and the wall and reached for Nick’s hand. I peered down at Rashidi. “But this isn’t Bart.”

Rashidi John and my five dogs were standing on the side patio between the pool and the hill leading up along the back of the house and out to the driveway. His long dreadlocks were tied back neatly in a tail, his skin darker than the night sky around him. He craned his head up toward us, and the five dogs did too, six dominoes in a row.

“Hello, Not-Bart,” he said.

I winced. “This is Nick. From Dallas. Nick, Rashidi.”

Rashidi was one of my best friends, a University of the Virgin Islands botany professor, and the one who had introduced me to Annalise in the first place when he was moonlighting as a rainforest tour guide. Now he was house-sitting until she was ready for me to move in. I had forgotten to expect him. There were other things on my mind.

“Nice to meet you,” Nick said.

“We were just leaving,” I added. “We’ll meet you by the garage.”

I squeezed around Nick on the narrow balcony and he followed me through the house. In the kitchen, he slipped his arms around me from behind and stopped me for a few last kisses, but we made it out to the driveway without too much delay. We found Rashidi sitting on the hood of his red Jeep, chewing on a stalk of sugar cane.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ll introduce you properly tomorrow. We’re in kind of a hurry.”

Rashidi’s smile was all teeth. “Yah mon. I got what I came for,” he said, pinching the front of his shirt and giving it a shake, “so I off to town for now.” He hopped off the hood and got in the Jeep. Just before he put it in gear, he rolled down the window and called out, “Have fun, Katie and Not-Bart,” then drove away.

Nick shook his head and laughed. The dogs settled by the garage door in the dirt, their usual sleeping spot. We walked the fifteen yards to my truck, hands entwined, my skin tingling where it met his. We were leaving, but where would we go—back to his hotel? I shivered and hoped he didn’t notice. He didn’t release my hand until momentum forced our hands apart when we went our separate ways to get into the truck.

I climbed in and reached to turn the keys in the ignition, but they weren’t there. Nick got in and scooched toward me as I turned on the dome light and scanned the seat.

“I can’t find my keys. I thought for sure I left them in here. I always do.”

“Oh, no. I don’t have them.”

I searched inside and Nick searched outside, to no avail. I perched on the seat, half in and half out of the truck, facing Nick. “I guess we need to retrace our steps,” I said.

“Nah, I have a better idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s go parking.”

Before I could answer, he was crawling into the truck and on top of me, lowering me onto my back on the bench seat. I let out an involuntary but surely quite sexy “oomph.” A few wriggling, grasping minutes later, I broke lip lock. “Not here.”

Nick mumbled, “What’s wrong with here?” and reattached his lips to mine.

I thought of the five dogs outside the truck and Rashidi showing up again with us behind nothing but clear glass. I spoke without detaching this time. “Somewhere else, somewhere more private.”

Nick lifted his head a fraction of an inch and I could feel him thinking.

“Have you ever hotwired a car before?” he asked.

“Of course not. My dad was the Dallas chief of police. I didn’t run around with bad boys.”

“Well, you do now. Or at least a good boy who can hotwire your car.”

“And you know this how?”

He grinned. “It’s better if you don’t ask that. I need something with a small, flat tip to use as a lever, like a knife or something, and a couple of bobby pins.” He leaned back down and kissed the breath out of me. “And I think we should hurry.”

I hurried. The bobby pin was easy. They were scattered all over the floor of the truck. But a flat-tipped object to use as a lever? I reached down and pulled out the machete Ava had instructed me to keep beneath my seat. “How about this?”

Nick slid down me, in a very nice way, and to his feet outside the door. “Now that’s what I call a knife,” he said in a bad Australian accent. “A little big, though. Do you have a flathead screwdriver?”

I pointed to the giant toolbox I had in my truck bed, because that is how a butt-kicking goddess in the St. Marcos rainforest rolls. “Back there,” I said. “But, really, shouldn’t we search the house first?”

Nick winked. “Who knows where they could be, and we’re in a hurry. A very, very big hurry.”

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and used it as a flashlight. I heard my tools tumbling around as he made a shamble out of my organizational system, but he was back in seconds with a screwdriver. I moved aside to let him in and he set to work quickly.

“In these old trucks like yours, it’s easy,” he said, removing screws one by one from the steering wheel cover until it fell onto the floorboard with a plop. Every nerve in my body tingled with anticipation. The whole slightly-criminal-past thing was unexpected, and hot. I wondered how my father would have felt about Nick. And how my kindergarten-teacher mother would have, for that matter.

“You have to pull the wire harness out of the steering wheel, like so. This is the female end, with openings for each wire that comes in the back.”

“Cool,” I said, and leaned in to kiss the dark skin below his ear. If he thought I was paying any attention, he was mistaken, but I liked the rumble of his voice from his chest.

“That’s going to slow me down,” he said, but he didn’t sound upset about it. “I need to find the wires for the power supply, the starter, and the dashboard. Power is usually red, the dashboard normally has some yellow, and the starter is generally green.”

“Um hmmm,” I said. My hand snaked its way to his nicely defined chest somehow. Not on purpose, of course.

“You’re being very bad.” He turned his head just enough that I could catch his lips in mine for a moment, then pulled away. “Focus, Kovacs, focus. OK, I’ll stick one end of the bobby pin into the yellow wire’s dashboard hole like so. Then I’ll stick the other end of the bobby pin into the red power hole. Ouch!”

I stopped. “What’s wrong?”

“Old thing gave me a little shock. Not bad, though. It’s only twelve volts.” He tried again. The dashboard lit up, and I lit up with it. This was almost better than sex.

“Now we leave the bobby pin in here like this until we want to turn the car off. Then we just pull it out.”

I was pretty sure I was going to start rubbing against him like a cat if he didn’t finish soon.

“Now we stick a second bobby pin in the red power hole, and the other end into the hole with the green starter wire, and leave it there until the engine engages.”

The engine started to crank, then caught.

My stomach flipped with the engine. One step closer to wherever we were going and whatever we would do there. Nick jumped out and ran around to the passenger seat and I crawled into the driving position.

“You make that look awfully easy,” I said as I put the truck in drive and pressed the accelerator.

“Years of practice,” he admitted. “But it’s not so easy if you don’t have bobby pins. Then you have to rip the wires out of the harness and twist the right ones together. Or if you have a new car with one of those electronic anti-theft devices, then you’re SOL unless you’re a semi-pro thief.” He put his hand on my leg a few inches above my knee and gently squeezed. It tickled just enough for me to jump a little.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’m staying at Stoper’s Reef. How about we go there?”

I held myself to a smile that I hoped didn’t look easy. “I think that would be all right.”

The Reef was on the near side of Taino, which was better known as just “Town.” In fact, it was only five minutes away from Ava’s house, so I was driving a route I knew well. Clouds had gathered in front of the moon and the road was dark. The trees closed in on both sides, leaving a narrow path that blended with its surroundings except for the tunnel of light beamed ahead of us by my truck. We barreled through the black corridor.

I curled my fingers around Nick’s, which were still curled around my thigh. He flipped his hand and took mine, then started stroking my fingers with his. Twenty agonizingly long minutes later, we reached Nick’s hotel and parked next to the building. I jumped barefooted out of the truck.

“This way,” he said, and I followed.