Night Edge (13 page)

Her eyelids would fall just as she’d catch her orgasm, never fully closing. She watched him watching her. Lola in her dresses, black and gold and peach. Turning her head over her shoulder and making eye contact with him. Smiling in the seat next to him at the theater, her polite applause. On the stage at Cat Shoppe, pirouetting around the pole in pink, arched ballet slippers, legs bowed, arms bent. A female audience member turned to him. “As we begin our descent, please make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened…”

Beau walked out of the strip club into a desert, sand crunching under the soles of his dress shoes as he stepped over fat succulent plants. “Where am I?”

“Local time in Phoenix is 4:05 in the morning. The temperature is sixty degrees.”

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

“She knows that,” said a female voice.

“Who?”

A camera shutter clicked, a light flashed. He squinted across a canyon at a young Lola, four or five years old, as she shielded her eyes from the sun. The horizon rippled.

“How could you not recognize her?” Lola’s voice asked from behind him. “Your own daughter?”

He turned around. Lola stood in Beau’s kitchen. A little girl clutched her leg. They both wore leotards and ballet slippers, fabric bunched at their ankles. The child’s hair was as dark as her mother’s, her cheeks flushed pink.

“My daughter?” he asked.

“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Lola sounded angry. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. You should leave.”

“But I’ve been looking for you.” She was trying to leave again. He lunged for her.

“Help,” she screamed, backing into a refrigerator. “Somebody help. Hello? Sir?”

Beau woke up to blinding fluorescence. He blinked up at the flight attendant, whose eyebrows were wrinkled with concern. “Sir? Are you feeling okay? We’ve landed in Phoenix. If you have a connection to make, you should go now.”

Beau sat up in his seat. He was sweating through his suit, his hairline damp. Someone had taken his empty glass and raised his tray. He rubbed his face, his stubbly chin. When he blinked, the little girl was there in her bubblegum-colored outfit, a carbon copy of her mother.

He hadn’t just lost Lola when he’d hurt her—he’d given up a life with her. Already, memories he’d never get were tormenting him. Beau stood and took his carryon from the overhead bin. The airport was midnight-quiet, Phoenix’s dry desert air in his chest, his throat. Choking him.

Chapter Sixteen

Beau straightened his tie and exited the town car. Even through his sunglasses, the California sun seemed excessively bright. Or maybe it was because of the pulsing in his head. Partway up the sidewalk, a car door slammed behind him.

“You can wait here,” Beau called back to Warner. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“I’d like to come with you.”

Beau stopped and turned around, curious. Warner didn’t ‘like’ to do things Beau hadn’t asked him to—or at least, he never expressed it. “Why?”

Warner shifted from one foot to the other. “The same reason you’re here instead of just sending me to pick Brigitte up. For support.”

Beau walked back until he was face to face with Warner. He removed his sunglasses to look him in the eye. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed your behavior the past few weeks.”

Warner’s spine straightened as if trying to meet Beau’s height. “Sir?”

“Defending her behavior to me. Sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. I should’ve suspected earlier. You’ve always been the only one who can stand to listen to her babble senselessly for hours.”

“If you’re suggesting I’m in love with your sister,” Warner said, hesitating only a moment, “you’d be right.”

“How long?”

“Years.”

Beau pulled at the knot around his neck. The sun was unforgiving today. “You should tell her that.”

“I did.” He glanced away briefly. “While you were away. I needed to distract her the night you left for Missouri. She wasn’t doing well.”

“She never does while I’m away.” Beau sighed, nodding back toward the doctor’s office. “Is that why we’re here?”

Warner nodded. “She came to me after your argument. Nothing unusual there, except this time when she tried to call and beg you not to go after Lola, I put my foot down.”

Beau frowned at Warner, his employee who exhibited less emotion than a robot. “And how did that go?”

“She’d told me what you’d said about me having feelings for her, so I said it was true. And I asked her why she wanted to be second in your eyes when she was first in mine.”

Beau couldn’t remember Brigitte ever responding to romantic gestures, though he suspected she didn’t care to share them with him. He almost didn’t want to ask. “What’d she say?”

“We had an honest talk. She was young when she moved here and hadn’t dealt with losing her mother the way a young girl should. She replaced one family with another before she ever had a chance to feel anything.”

Warner was always in the background, but Beau hadn’t realized how closely he must’ve been paying attention to them over the years. “She’s terrified I’ll leave her too,” Beau said, “and she’ll end up alone.”

“She won’t, and I told her so. Said she’s always had two people who would never abandon her, she just needs help seeing that.”

Beau gave Warner a heartfelt nod. He was grateful, for once, to have someone else looking out for Brigitte’s best interest. “Let’s go inside.”

They walked side by side to the therapist’s office, where they sat in the waiting room. Beau had nothing else to say to Warner. He kept quiet, wiped sweat from his temple with his shoulder sleeve.

His phone broke the silence, but he checked the screen and put it back in his pocket.

“You can take it,” Warner said. “We have a few minutes.”

Beau glanced at him and leaned his elbows on his knees. “It’s fine.” It rang again and didn’t stop until Beau finally answered it. “What is it?”

“What do Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have in common?” Detective Bragg asked, sounding more joyful than Beau thought possible.

“A lot, actually,” Beau said.

“They’re all on the way back to Los Angeles. She should be on our turf by tomorrow.”

Beau looked at the ground, bouncing his knee up and down. He’d learned his lesson—finally—when it came to assuming anything about Lola. Yet the promise he’d made himself to walk away was tenuous, something that could easily be broken if he wasn’t careful. A memory nagged at him—
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona
—but he shook his head quickly to deflect it.

“You hear what I said?” Bragg continued. “She’s coming home.”

That was a blow. Lola might be coming back to California, but if she considered Beau her home, she wouldn’t have left him this way. He massaged his forehead. “We decided to drop this.”

“That was before I knew we were at the end.”

“You were right, though. She wants to be…” It wasn’t a memory nagging him—it was his dream from the airplane. The details were fuzzy, but he could clearly picture Lola in the desert with their daughter. He stilled his leg. “Did you say Arizona?”

“Got a pending motel charge in Tucson just now. That’s why I called.”

The doctor’s office door opened, and a woman spoke. “See you in a few days, Brigitte?”

“I have to go,” Beau said, pulling his phone away.

“Maybe I was wrong.” Bragg cleared his throat. “About her not wanting to be found. Maybe I had it wrong.”

Beau didn’t think it could be that simple. “Congratulations on your second retirement, Bragg. Thanks for all your help.”

He hung up the phone as Brigitte entered the waiting room and stopped when she saw them. She turned a balled-up tissue over in her hand, a watery smile on her face. “You both came.”

Beau stood, and she went directly to him. She hugged him, melting against his body only a second before she pulled back. She narrowed her red-rimmed eyes. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Not yet.”

She shook her head. “Then you’re wildly hungover.”

“It’s been a rough couple weeks.”

Brigitte frowned, but for once it didn’t alarm him, since it was purely concern. She looked about to speak but then closed her mouth. Beau had gotten off the airplane and had a voicemail from Brigitte—she was going into therapy, for real this time. Careful not to upset her, he hadn’t yet mentioned any details about Lola or his trip, and Brigitte hadn’t asked.

“Your big meeting with VenTech is tomorrow. Shouldn’t you be at work prepping?”

Beau definitely should’ve been with his team, which was locked in a conference room surrounded by Subway sandwich wrappers. Things’d happened so quickly that the staff had been taking turns pulling all-nighters. Beau was having a hard time remembering why he needed VenTech so badly, though, and as a result, had been avoiding the office. That, and he was proud of Brigitte for finally making a good decision.

“I thought maybe my
soeurette
could use me more,” he said. “And I wanted to congratulate you.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t an easy decision, but with some urging from—”

“Not about that.” He jerked his head fractionally in Warner’s direction.

“Oh.” She looked down between them, but it was hard to miss the pink flush of her pale skin. “I don’t know where I was all these years. I must’ve been blinded by some—
thing
.”

Beau nodded that he understood. In her reality, she and Beau were linked for life. Whether it was simply familial for her or something more, Beau’d never asked, in case he didn’t like the answer. Her fear of loneliness was strong enough to shut out the truth. Beau was fine being pushed aside so Warner could take his place.

“We’ll have to figure out a new arrangement,” Beau said, loud enough for Warner to hear. “I’m not having my sister’s boyfriend drive me around.”

“Fire me.”

Beau and Brigitte both turned to him. She disengaged from Beau to go hug Warner instead. “But, Brandon, darling, you love what you do.”

Beau made a face.
Brandon?
He looked between them, suppressing his reflex to stop them from touching. He’d practically pushed Brigitte into Warner’s arms, but seeing them together would take some getting used to.

“I can always do it somewhere else,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, it’s just a job.”

Any other time, Beau might’ve scoffed at that—just a job? What else was there? But since Lola had disappeared, what he’d missed most was having someone to look forward to all day. He’d promised to make her a priority, but then he’d look up from his computer at some point to see afternoon had become evening, and he still hadn’t finished. That was a mistake he was paying for dearly in the tender of regret. Maybe if he’d chosen her over work, like Warner was with Brigitte, Lola would’ve found a reason to stay.

Beau tuned out his thoughts and focused on Brigitte, who was relaying her session to them.

“At first, it wasn’t too bad, mostly discussing what’ll happen over the course of my therapy. Then she asked about the accident, and…” She stepped away from Warner to take Beau’s hands. “And we talked about you. Me and you.”

Beau wasn’t looking forward to hearing whatever she said next, but he remained still despite his instinct to flee.

She must’ve noticed, because she held his hands more tightly. “Do you need to hear this from me? The doctor says I should tell you.” She looked into his eyes. “You’re a good brother. If I ever made you think otherwise, I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “I just want to see you healthy and happy.”

“I’m not your responsibility. You don’t have to take care of me.”

Brigitte, on her own two feet, without him to support her? He couldn’t picture it. “It’s the nature of our relationship.”

“Sometimes it’s okay to let me fail or fall on my face. All I ask is that you’re there to help me off the ground.”

Beau had his complaints about Brigitte, and sometimes she made his life hard. But without her, who would he be? He didn’t want to know, and he’d never wanted to be rid of her. Not completely, anyway. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t mean your money, Beau. Sometimes I just need you to be there when I call. That’s the relationship I want us to have.”

Beau’s hands were clammy. He’d bent over backward his whole life to make sure Brigitte and his mom were comfortably set up, never without food, shelter or, of course, the finer things in life. “I thought we already had that.”

“We don’t. I’ve spent the last twenty years just trying to get your attention, but nobody has your attention like your money.”

Lola had said the same thing in different words. With a sharp pain in his chest, Beau briefly wondered if this on top of everything else was finally just going to kill him.

“Don’t be upset,” Brigitte said. “
I
know it’s how you show affection. But it wasn’t enough for Lola, and it’s not enough for me anymore. I need a different kind of support from you now.”

“So, what—I’m the bad guy all the time? For everyone?”

“No. Since we were together when our parents died, I thought we were connected on some supernatural level. But maybe that’s a load of shit—at least, that’s what the doctor seems to think. I’ve been a burden. You’re not responsible for me—or your mom, for that matter. You’re not the man of the house. We can’t keep pulling you in different directions.”

“I want to take care of both of you, but you guys make it difficult to do a good job.”

“So don’t do it anymore.” She cleared her throat. “Take care of Lola instead.”

Beau wanted his hands back, but Brigitte wouldn’t let them go. “It’s over,” he said, subject closed, nothing else to say.

Brigitte looked down. “Ten years ago, you came home a complete mess because a
stripper
had turned down the money it’d taken you your whole life to earn. Remember that night?”

It was a rhetorical question. Of course Beau remembered every nuance of the hour he’d spent with Lola, the way his heart had stabbed with every footstep he’d taken on his way out of the club. “What about it?”

“Tell me what happened.”

“You already know the story—inside and out.”

“Just tell me.”