B008KQO31S EBOK (6 page)

“Just me in the garden and yes, it’s a partnership. Elaine Pope and I. She does more interior stuff. I’m the plant woman.”

“How’s it going?”

My chest puffed with pride and I couldn’t have stopped my smile to save my life. “We signed a deal today that will make us profitable for the first time.”

He must have heard the satisfaction that was practically oozing out my pores because he smiled too. “Oh, I remember that day. There’s nothing like moving into the black.”

I tried to sound casual, but probably failed. “You have your own business too?”

As if I didn’t know every damn detail.

Nick shrugged and his smile faded to nothing. “I had an adventure travel business. I just sold it off to the competition.”

That surprised me, but he didn’t give me a chance to ask anything more. Interrogation interruptus, that was Nick all over.

He waved my card at me. “Your family must be proud.”

I rolled my eyes. “As if. Do you remember my family?”

And he laughed. Nick has a great laugh, though he doesn’t let it lose very often. It seems to roll up right from his toes and flow over everything in its path. “Some things never change, do they Phil?”

I hoped that he wasn’t just talking about my family. “No, they sure don’t.”

Our gazes caught again and I caught my breath at the look in his eyes. His smile faded and he stepped closer, lifting one finger to touch my cheek. He was looking at me again, really looking, and I felt like the eighth marvel of the world.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” he whispered in that whiskey voice. He hesitated only a moment, as though giving me time to duck away, then leaned down and kissed me.

You know, some things are eroded by yearning—once delivered, they fall far short of the accumulated height of expectation, whereas on their own, without that yearning, they might have made a decent showing. I had wondered how Nick would kiss for about twenty-five years, off and on, and his kiss might very easily have been a disappointment.

It wasn’t, not by a long shot.

His kiss was gentle, yet hinted at strength, it was firm without being hard, it was passionate without being pushy. Mostly it was persuasive, a promise of potential, a tiny taste of what this volcano could offer to those who dared to slip over the side.

His kiss nudged awake the starlight that had dozed off in my veins, then hitched a ride to Venus.

I could have kissed him for a week, but he suddenly stepped back and looked away.

“Meet you there at seven,” he said quickly, more quickly than he usually spoke.

He pocketed my card and was out the door in a heartbeat. I had the sense that he was on the run from me, which would have been pretty funny if it had been the case. Without so much as a backward glance, he was gone into the night, swallowed so completely by the darkness that he might really have been a champagne fantasy.

But my lips burned.

Fantasies have never managed that. I locked the deadbolt and looked at that crack in the ceiling again, telling myself that this was no big deal. One kiss did not a future make.

Ha. My heart told me to check on those ruby slippers before I gave it up so easily.

But no, reason must prevail. I was just going to do a small favor for an old friend, and that would be that. Some favor, discovering a body that had been laying in the sun for a day or so. I wrinkled my nose at that prospect. But it was perfectly mundane, get in, get out, back at my desk by lunch and probably never see Nick again. My pounding heart missed a beat and I tasted him on my lips once more.

But maybe not. He had come to me, after all. He had confided in me, too, and I knew how reticent he was.

And he had kissed me. Fa la la.

I danced toward the bedroom, in no doubt that the world was my oyster. I knew I was going to dream about Nick Sullivan.

If I managed to sleep at all.

* * *

He walked.

He had no clear idea where to go, at least for the short term, but it didn’t matter. He had learned over the years to sleep when he could and get by without when he couldn’t—and there was no way he’d be sleeping tonight. He did his best thinking while walking and he had a lot of thinking to do.

He wasn’t ready to think about Phil Coxwell just yet.

He still couldn’t believe that Lucia was dead. Even though they hadn’t talked for years, he had known she was there. He had felt her presence, like a vigilant if temperamental guardian angel.

At least he had always thought that was what he felt. He still was aware of that force of will, which only proved how much he had kidded himself. Perhaps it was his own conscience. It certainly wasn’t Lucia.

Because she was dead.

He thought about change.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and lengthened his stride. Cars flew past him, headlights sweeping over him as the cars hurried from here to there. Everyone was in a hurry, everyone had somewhere to go and something to do, everyone was filled with purpose. Everyone embraced change and ‘progress’.

Everyone but him. He’d seen change, he’d witnessed the so-called progress that had spun from his influence and he didn’t like the view. He had thought he was doing something good but it was just an illusion. It had gone terribly wrong.

And it was his fault.

It seemed that no good deed of Nick’s ever went unpunished. For years, he had tried to protect Sean from the results of own misdeeds, from the potential consequences for both of them.

He had tried to protect Lucia from the truth about her favorite grandson. The price of his last lie had been his own relationship with her, a treasure which he had valued less than he should have.

And when he had finally returned to mend fences with his grandmother, it had cost Lucia her life. Sean had always been one to make the most of the barest sliver of opportunity.

While he had paved a personal road to hell with good intentions.

Not that he could do much about it now. He turned up his collar against the wind. The money from the sale of his company would always feel dirty in his hands, tainted by what had created its value. He spent it because he had no other options, but he didn’t enjoy these fruits of his success.

More than once, he had come close to giving it all to a charity, some organization that fed children in the third world or paid for vaccinations taken for granted in the first. But he had been to too many of those countries and seen too many of those charitable dollars end up in pockets they were never intended to line.

The money was his millstone and it might as well have hung around his neck.

He was a steady walker, used to covering a lot of ground with a minimum of effort. His feet were tired by the time he reached Cambridge, a gift from the relentless concrete. He headed for Mount Auburn Cemetery and the relief of greenery.

Even at night, there was a sense of spring in the buds on the trees and the bulbs bursting from the earth. The signs of rebirth invigorated him, and made him think of Phil. A garden designer. He could imagine her doing that, putting her mix of gentleness and severity to good use in a garden.

Her character would have been wasted on the law.

If she had been with him now, she could have told him what every plant was, how it would bloom, how big it would become. She would have infected each description with her enthusiasm and passion.

She would have made him smile. Even picturing her here, talking about plants in the dead of the night, did make him smile. He believed she would have done it.

By the time he had settled against a cold stone to watch the moon rise, he was inclined to be less hard on himself. There was one thing he had done that hadn’t gone wrong in the end. Phil blamed him for setting her on the course to making her own choices. He didn’t remember telling her to do so, but that was beside the point.

He liked the rare sense that he had been a catalyst for change that had proven positive. He watched the moon tear itself free of the horizon and cast its glow on the silhouette of Boston, enjoying the knowledge that he had been at the root of a good change.

He wasn’t an habitual smoker, but occasionally indulged when the moment was right. He wished he had a cigarette now, to turn in his fingers, to watch the red glow of the ember, to blow smoke rings at the stars.

Lucia had taught him to blow smoke rings. It would have been a fitting tribute to her. But he didn’t have a cigarette and he wasn’t likely to find one here.

He did without, as he so often did without so many things.

He had had his last butt in Chile, lost in the solitude of a state park that went on forever. He had been on a camping trip with half a dozen others, packed into an ancient blue minivan. The park was cut by a gravel road apparently untraveled by anyone other than themselves, because they drove for hours without seeing another vehicle or human.

Their truck had overheated at twilight and the local driver had opened the hood to study the engine. It seemed a peculiarity of South Americans, this conviction that just looking at the engine would make it spontaneously repair itself. And the more people who stared, the better. He had seen buses in the Andes broken down and drawn to the shoulder, their entire payload gathered around to eyeball the engine in silence.

He had joined the driver that evening, they had exchanged grim prognoses in Spanish, then the cook had climbed out to offer his pack of cigarettes. The three of them had stood there beneath a brilliant canopy of stars, smoking, collectively willing the engine back to life.

It hadn’t worked, but neither would have any expression of frustration. When the last cigarette was ground out under a heel, the three of them had pulled out the toolbox and set to work.

That moon had been bright enough that they hadn’t needed a flashlight. In contrast, this moon fought valiantly against the electrical glow of the city, but was still diminished to a distant glow. A nightlight in the celestial bathroom. Even the stars were so dim here.

But one star winked at him, as though it was telling him to buck up. It made him think again of a certain auburn-haired woman, one who had no trouble sharing her thoughts.

Phil had always been off limits, both because she was his friend, and because she was sweet on his brother. Not that Sean had ever reciprocated in kind. Consoling Phil when Sean treated her badly had been just part of the big brother clean up and protection plan.

Hadn’t it?

And she had gone along with Nick’s own lie to protect Sean from his own mistake, keeping the secret for Sean’s sake.

Hadn’t she?

But if she had, why hadn’t anything ever come of it? He had half-expected Sean to have capitalized on Phil’s complicity, to have used her affection for him against her. He had more than expected her to be either with Sean and miserable about it, or abandoned and embittered.

But she seemed to have completely forgotten Sean.

Or was that just Phil’s tough talk?

He didn’t know and it irritated him more than he knew it should have. After all, even dreading a confrontation with his brother, even suspecting that his brother might be with Phil, he hadn’t been able to stay away from her.

Phil had always had that effect upon him. It was the way she listened, the way she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, the way she made him feel at ease.

He had thought that was because they were friends, a tentative balance at best between teenagers of different genders and one he had worked hard not to upset.

But if Phil was yearning for his brother, how could she kiss him as though she would eat him alive? She was the most honest person he had ever known, and her passion couldn’t be a lie.

But was she making do with one brother because the other hadn’t shown? There was an ugly possibility and one that had occurred to him when her lips clung so sweetly to his. He’d stood in for Sean more than enough times in his life. The sense that he was doing it again had sent him running from Phil like an idiot.

The brothers had always looked similar, close enough in appearance that some people confused them. In manner, they had been like night and day, but few got friendly enough with the Sullivans to detect that. Both had been useful situations once.

At least to Sean.

But not this time. If Nick kissed Phil again, he’d make sure she knew which brother he was.

Speaking of the devil, he supposed he had avoided the inevitable long enough. Eventually the dirty work has to be done. He abandoned his imaginary cigarette and went to work.

He was, admittedly, curious.

He found the address in the North End without a lot of trouble, although the building’s windows were all in darkness when he arrived there. The street was close enough to Hanover Street to be bit busy, which suited him.

Sean’s was #2, according to the white pages, and he managed to get a look a the array of buzzers by the door on a stroll-by. Three buzzers, three floors, “Sullivan” beside the middle one. No mysteries there. He found a niche between the buildings opposite and hunkered down between the shadowed trash cans to wait.

He was rewarded just after three. The arguing couple didn’t attract his eye initially, until the man raised his voice in anger. Nick’s head snapped up at the familiarity of that drunken slur. He straightened silently, his eyes narrowing as his brother gave the woman a push up the stairs that was just a bit too helpful.

He noted with some satisfaction that he and his brother didn’t look that similar any more.

The lights came on in the second floor windows a moment later, the small dark-haired woman rushing to pull the blinds. Sean peeled off his coat with a deliberation Nick knew to beware, his gaze fixed on the woman.

She didn’t get the last blind down quickly enough. Nick flinched as his brother struck her shoulder. Hard. She cried out and Sean shouted something. He hauled down the blind and turned on her again, a menacing silhouette.

A neighbor’s light flicked out, as though that person chose deliberately to not be involved.

Nick did not share the neighbor’s reservations. It was time his brother learned something about repercussions.