The Taken (18 page)

Tony laughed. “You’re not going to sway that stubborn old coot with macaroni. If he’s determined to be moody, he’s gonna be moody.”

“You should talk,” Grif shot back.

“Respect your elders,” Kit hissed so that Tony couldn’t hear. She smiled over at him apologetically, and ate the bite Grif had rejected. “His loss.”

“ ’At’s all right. Grif and I go way back. Fifty years, give or take.” He squinted in Grif’s direction. “That about right, Shaw?”

“That’s right, Tony,” he said, but gave Kit a knowing look. Dementia. She frowned sympathetically, and felt her appetite take a slight dive.

Tony dug around his plate, still talking. “Yep, I used to look up to ol’ Grif here. He knew when to hedge and when to move the line back. ’Course, he was working a legal trade . . . and had that stunner of a wife to keep him in line.”

Kit’s stomach sank further, and she swallowed hard.

“Tony,” Grif said lowly.

“What?” Tony looked up, catching the look on his friend’s face. “Oh. Sorry, Grif.”

There was silence that felt like it would fill the hour, then Tony tapped at the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Listen, I been asking around for you. Got out the old Rolodex. Used the old number. Actually got ahold of the kid.”

“What kid?” Kit glanced up, blinking. “What number?”

Tony looked at Grif, and raised his brows.

Grif gave a short nod. “It’s okay. You can talk in front of her.”

Tony nodded and resumed eating. “Ray DiMartino. He’s fifty-seven now, not really a kid anymore I guess, but I’ll always see him running the dice in the back of his dad’s liquor store.”

“How . . . endearing,” Kit said.

Tony chuckled. “Anyway, he owns the old place on Industrial, though they ain’t running booze no more.”

“What is it?” Grif asked.

“Ever hear of Masquerade?”

“The strip club?” Kit asked.

“Gentlemen’s club,” Tony corrected, causing Kit to scoff. He pointed his fork at her. “Sorry, missy, but you can’t change a man’s predilections. It’s simple human nature.”

Kit waved her perfectly manicured hand in the air. “I don’t care about that. There’s just no, I don’t know,
life
to it. No story to unfold with the dance, no suggestion of magic to come. No nuance to make a boy dream of more. Just body parts swinging around in your face.” She shuddered.

So did Tony. “Your point?”

“You should see a neo-burlesque show if you want to see something truly sexy. There’s drama, there’s kitsch. Winks and nods. It’s not just titillating, it’s full of life. It’s fun.”

Tony shook his head. “See what I been missing? Neo-burlesque. Everything old is new again.” He dug back into his ziti. “Anyway, the kid remembers you. Said you used to throw him a few bills when he was cleaned out.”

Kit drew back. How was that possible if Grif wasn’t from here, and was over twenty years younger than the man in question? She wondered again about Tony’s dementia, but her phone buzzed with a text before she could follow the thought.

Meanwhile, Tony kept eating, kept talking. “He’s grateful for the work you did on behalf of his family and his aunt Mary Margaret, and said you’re welcome to meet him at the club. Any night but Monday. That’s his night off.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

Tony shrugged. “Hey, we’re friends, right?”

“That’s right.”

Chewing, the old man nodded for a bit, then stilled. “I gotta take a leak. Don’t touch my chow.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Grif waited until the old man had slid from the booth, then turned to Kit. “What just happened?”

Distracted, Kit pulled her gaze from the window, and focused on him. “Sorry. I wasn’t listening. What?”

“Not with Tony. With you.” Grif almost looked angry as he studied her face. “One minute you’re eating like a starved horse and talking sex with a man three times your age. The next you’re staring out the window as if you’re the one stepping out for the first time in thirty years. Who was on the phone?”

Kit blew out a breath, surprised. She should have known he’d been paying attention. “It was just a text from Paul. Tickets for the benefit are waiting in my mailbox. He thought it best to just drop them off as he didn’t have time to meet in person.”

Grif studied her carefully, then finally said, “Why do you do that?”

She stopped rubbing her eyes. “What?”

“Give that knucklehead your softest emotion, then let him load it up and fire it back at you.” He shook his head, disgusted. “You always look war-torn when you come off a conversation with Pretty Paul.”

She didn’t chide him for the nickname. “I feel it, too,” she admitted, and frowned. Was that the first time she’d said it out loud? Sighing, she leaned her head back, then rolled it toward him. “What about you. Tony mentioned a wife?”

Even now, at the last word, Kit’s throat tried to close up. Of course he would have a woman. Probably more than one, looking like that—walking with thrust, taking up all that room. He didn’t wear a ring, but many men didn’t. Maybe it was because of his job. She’d read enough detective novels. Letting clients and suspects know you had family could be dangerous. Of course, he might not have worn one for the same reason Paul hadn’t. The thought depressed her.

“I’m married to my work these days.”

The words lifted her spirits, but the regret shadowing them did not.

“There’s more to life than that,” Kit said softly.

“That right, Kitty-Kat?”

The way he said it made her heart skip faster, and blood flooded the rest of her pulse points. The mild crush she was nursing over this severe man unfurled, blooming until her breath literally caught in her chest. And when he laid one wide hand over hers, she trembled. Having first seen his hands bunched into fists, flailing on her behalf, she didn’t know what was more shocking—the unexpected gentleness of his roughened palms or the pooled warmth as they slid down her fingers, cocooning her knuckles, heating her skin.

“Remember how you said we should all be more gentle with each other?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should start with yourself.”

Kit frowned.

And then Tony was back.

And then, regrettably, Grif’s touch was gone.

Chapter Thirteen

G
rif had been fighting sleep for a day and a half, ever since Sarge had threatened him with unforgettable dreams and a “living nightmare.”

So when he lay down on Tony’s couch while waiting for Kit to finish primping for the charity ball, he told himself he was just going to shut his eyes for one moment. Rest his body for the night to come. He had no intention of actually sleeping, which was why he was already entering the bungalow, hand-in-hand with Evie just as he had fifty years prior, before he even realized he was dreaming.

Of course, by then it was too late.

Defy me again and I
’
ll send you dreams you’ll never forget.

This dream picked up where the first had left off, on the final night of his first life. He and Evie had already arrived in Vegas and been driven by golf cart to a room that was a bungalow in name only. Hidden deep within the thick foliage of the Marquis’ horseshoed center, these were the high-roller suites. Evie squealed at the sight of all the white marble and gold paint, right at home in accommodations meant for a movie star.

“Everything’s comped, Mr. Shaw,” the bellboy said, but the owner had already told him that.
Anything for the man who tracked down my darling kidnapped niece,
said Sal DiMartino, clapping Grif on the back. Anything for the P.I. who’d put his family back together.

“It’s like the honeymoon we never took,” Evie beamed, once they were alone. Guilt sailed through Grif at that, but he’d been working long hours back then, and she had, too, until a few weeks later, when she quit, saying standing on her feet behind the counter at Woolworth’s was too hard on a woman trying for a baby.

But she wasn’t remotely fragile on this night. They exhausted themselves with each other in the bedroom, then again in the gilded shower. The heated water was bested only by Evie’s hot mouth, her need for him thrumming in the tightening of her thighs around his waist.

“Tonight we’ll make a baby,” she said, the words wet on his cheek. Tonight all their greatest hopes for the future would come true.

And she stared up at him like they already had.

But the Grif that was fifty years older and
deader
knew better than that, even as the dream-Grif felt his heart swell.

I love her best like this, he thought. Bare-faced, stripped of clothing and artifice, wet and giving him a look that belonged to him alone.

But later, when her hair framed her face in tight, gold waves, and she wore a wiggle dress and high heels, he thought her just as perfect. She dabbed perfume at her wrist, a lilac memory that made him pulse, and flashed him a knowing smile. Her nails matched her dress, a blend of dark cherry and glitter left over from the holiday season.

“It’s perfect for Vegas,” she explained, blowing on the tips, helping them dry. Then they wrapped their arms around each other’s waists and traded the privacy of their courtyard bungalow for the action of the clanging casino floor.

Evie went on to repay Sal DiMartino’s generous hospitality by chip-hustling her way through the craps pit. She moved like a charmer in a pit of snakes, and Grif was as enchanted as everyone else.

Yet this time he was also aware of the plasma.

He couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t do anything he hadn’t done the first time, but he’d dwelled in the Everlast, and knew what to look for now. The dead could spot death coming, even from the corner of their eyes.

So his eyes remained glued on Evie’s wrist, and as time ticked away on his celestial meter, he noted the gambler next to Evie watching it, too. The man, balding and wide, bit his lip as she threw a seven, hooting in celebration even as she slipped a couple of chips out of the rack near his waist. She turned her head away when he tried to buss her cheek in thanks, and fluttered her lashes at Grif, laughing like all of life was a game, and a grift at that.

Behind her, death—the world’s greatest con—inched closer.

Grif sipped at an old-fashioned, and then another. He switched to straight whiskey when Evie ignored the subtle jerk of his head and continued to hold the table like she was spotlit in the main lounge of the Silver Slipper Casino. He admired her moxy and style, every red-blooded man at the table did, but he was surprised to realize this time around that he hadn’t much liked it on this night.

So Grif drank some more. The Centurion in him, wise with hindsight, screamed for him to stop, that he’d need his senses and reflexes to react, to protect. But the old Griffin Shaw, the dream one—the dead one—kept drinking and silently fuming and watching that slim wrist throw sevens and spirit chips, mending and breaking hearts with fingertips that glittered.

The silver plasma gathering around him was now thick as mercury.

Then, without warning, they were back at the bungalow, and Sarge was right about the moments that followed. They were a living nightmare.

The movement was a blue-black slide from the shadows, too hard and fast for Grif to block, even without whiskey slowing him down. He slumped like a rag doll, but felt the wall, solid at his back, and pushed from it—moving forward, always forward, just like his boxing coach had taught. He didn’t yet feel the knife in his gut—the heat lightning of shock masked the severing of tissue and muscle and organs—but this time Grif felt
it.

The shearing of his remaining earthly years. His mortal coil unraveling like spilled guts.

Then, somewhere, Evie screamed.

And the knife was suddenly in his hand. It was slashing and furious, in some ways more alive than he, and suddenly it, too, was covered in blood. Grif didn’t remember this part.

He staggered, catching his balance, watching as the guy he’d gutted twitched but didn’t get up. He was dark-haired and olive-skinned, wearing driving gloves that matched his black suit, and Grif had a moment to think he looked vaguely familiar . . . but then there were no moments left.

His skull popped and his legs shorted out, electricity surging through them in a numbness that was oddly sharp, not blunt. A second man, thought the Grif with Centurion hindsight. Why hadn’t he realized it before?

Didn’t matter. Again. The marble floor was littered with too much, the knife, the gold vase. Blood. His mortal coil. And glittering fingertips, Grif saw. Splayed in the shards of gold, attached to a delicate, crafty wrist now covered in droplets of blood.

He’d never even heard Evie fall.

Horrified, Grif tried to call out, yet his brain was swelling, pushing like putty against the crack in his skull. Baby, he thought as he began to rise and float . . . but there was nothing he could do. Nothing but live out the nightmare, and remember what he’d rather forget.

Nothing but die again and, this time, watch Evie do the same.

G
rif!”

Kit had rushed into the room at the sound of the first cry, but froze when she saw Grif writhing and gasping, tears sliding from the corners of his eyes. She thought he was sleepwalking for a moment, but her voice had him lunging into a sitting position so quickly that he fell from the couch. He only hit his side on the coffee table, but he cried out like the wound had gone much deeper.

“Grif!” Kit rushed to his side. “Are you okay?”

But she could see he wasn’t. His heart raced beneath her palm, and his fists were clenched and sweaty. He squeezed his eyes shut, but still they moved beneath his lids like minnows caught in a drying puddle.

“God,” she said, pulling him close and wrapping her arms around him. “What happened?”

“It was only a dream, just a dream . . .” But he was talking to himself and rocking and still unable to catch his breath. Kit pulled him closer, and this time he clung to her, fingers digging into her back.

“Shh,” she said. “Sit. Just be right here, right now. It’s over . . .”

She continued to make soothing noises, coupled with reassuring platitudes until his trembling lessened and his grip relaxed. She soothed him as best she could, but fell short of telling him it was all right. She’d never seen anyone wake from a dream so violently before.

“It was only a dream,” he said again, and this time he sounded like himself. Kit pulled away and stared at his stricken face.

“You’re exhausted,” she said, and guilt flooded her because she knew it was mostly due to her. “Let me get you some water.”

“I’m fine.”

No one this drained of color was fine, Kit thought, but stayed close, still touching him, trying to stroke the nightmare away. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t even want to think about it.”

She nodded, and waited. Finally he breathed in deeply. “Sorry, I just . . . it was a flashback. It was a bad time.”

“I understand. The good thing about flashbacks is that they’re confined to the past. Dead and gone. They can’t really hurt you.”

More platitudes, she thought, and could see that Grif thought so, too. “You weren’t there.”

“I’m here now,” she said softly. And even with all her reservations and questions about his appearance in her life, she
wanted
to be here for him. Just as he’d been there, and stayed, when she needed him most.

But he wasn’t going to make it easy. “It’s not that simple, Kit.”

“No, I know that. But it can be.” Some things, she thought, stroking his neck, should be simple.

He froze under her touch, but this time she didn’t let it dissuade her. Her fingers tensed on his neck, neither demanding nor soft, but testing. Grif was trying to catch his breath again, and if she was right, it had nothing to do with his nightmare.

“It’s okay, Grif,” she whispered, letting her fingertips loosen, stroke, play. “You’re safe with me.”

He closed his hand atop hers and they both stilled. Tilting his head, he studied her face. “It doesn’t hurt as much when you’re around.”

“What doesn’t?”

He didn’t seem to hear. “I can actually feel your skin beneath my fingertips.”

And he touched her like that was novel, hands moving along her arms, firing nerve endings, and quickening her pulse.

“I can smell you, too. It’s been years . . .” And his gaze landed on her mouth.

Pulling her head low, he pressed a kiss to her lips, so that it sat there sweetly, like a gift. Like gratitude and acceptance all at once. He gave a full-body shudder, then slowly pulled away. “Thank you.”

But Kit wasn’t done. She found that her curves fit nicely to his ridges, and her skin still burned where his hand had found her waist. Her nipples brushed his chest as her mouth hovered over his, just long enough for her to know his breathing had stopped altogether.

Then she pressed with the whole of her body, mouth immediately widening for a deeper taste. Her chin brushed against his stubble as she sought and found soft places on the hard man, causing a needy hum to move in her throat and thread between them. She would have moved in closer if he didn’t pull away.

“No.”

“Why?” Kit’s voice was different, throatier than she’d ever heard it. Needier, too. She swallowed hard, but it was still there, desire rising up so thick in her throat she could choke.

“There’s . . . someone else.”

She shook her head immediately. “No. You haven’t mentioned anyone. There was a wife, I know, but you said that was long ago.”

Yet doubt edged in. Could she have missed the signs of another woman? She was normally good about such things. Maybe, she thought, she
wanted
to miss it.

“Don’t make me feel stupid about this, Grif,” she said, because irritation was better than injury. “Or . . . or like I’m crazy. There’s something between us. You know it. You kissed me back.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“It does!” Her voice was a shock, a slap, and it surprised her as much as Grif. But she was exhausted, too. Tired of lukewarm relationships, tired of feeling hope only to be let down. She wanted to feel
good.
She wanted to feel desired and cherished and loved.

“It always matters,” she told Grif. “At least to me.”

“I know that,” Grif said, hoping to soothe her. “And it’s not that I’m not attracted to you.”

“Oh,
I
know that,” she shot back, pushing away. Maybe Bridget had it wrong. Maybe Grif didn’t have an ounce of thrust in him.

Grif swallowed hard and rose, and she realized it was the first time she’d seen him back away from a fight. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Kit’s heart dropped like a sinking anchor. Grif almost looked as spooked as he had before she’d tasted those mind-numbing lips. “I’m not a rockabilly guy, Kit.”

She sat back on her heels, on the couch, and inclined her head. “I guess I knew that.”

“How?”

“You haven’t got a bit of ink on you.” She’d looked for it, too. She didn’t know one man in this lifestyle who didn’t, yet Grif was as clean-cut as a Boy Scout. Staring, she asked. “So . . . why?”

“Why what?” he asked, pacing.

“Why pretend? Why . . . me? Info for your case? Something only a reporter could get? Or money? Something only the future editor-in-chief might have?”