He's A Magic Man (The Children of Merlin) (8 page)

“At the bar.”

“We are
not
going back there. You live on your boat?” That would involve driving past the bar, so she hoped the answer was no.

He shook his head, easing back against the seat. The muscles in his chest and shoulders were pretty impressive. Abs? She could count them if she wanted to. Which she
didn’t.
How in the world did an alcoholic boat guy get an eight-pack?

“Okay, where do you live then?”

“Sugarloaf Key.” His eyes closed.

She remembered the signs. “Good. That’s on my way. You can give me directions.”

“Deal.” But he didn’t look like he was going to get coherent anytime soon.

She put the car in gear and eased out into the highway.
Time for some air.
She rolled up the window and cranked up the air conditioning. Cool air fanned her face as she worked her way up Highway 1. She began to breathe a little easier. But that left her strangely empty. What was she going to do now? Slink back to the Ritz for some spa treatment with Jane? Maybe it was just the adrenaline letdown. But her future in LA seemed meaningless right now.

*****

Who
was
this girl? And what the hell had she been doing in a place like O’Toole’s? He tried to gather his thoughts. The adrenaline had taken the edge off his drunk. More’s the pity. Now his jaw hurt and his ribs hurt and his bad knee, not to mention his belly. Those guys wouldn’t have been able to touch him if he was sober.

He should never have gotten involved. He was doing fine. Drowning the fact that it was Alice’s birthday. Why
had
he gotten involved?
Because if Alice had been here, she’d have wanted you to help this girl.

The pain that hit him had nothing to do with the beating he’d just taken.
Don’t think about her.
He rolled his head.
Need a drink. Right now.

But there wasn’t any drink coming until he got back to his shack. And this girl was the quickest way there. He rolled his head back and saw her glance in the rearview mirror at him. Her eyes were a cool gray. Gray sounded plain, dead. But they weren’t.
Alive looking, maybe.
The thought made him uncomfortable. Yeah. Alice’s eyes had been alive like that. Only they had been cornflower blue.

He took the punch of pain he always got when he thought of Alice.
Take it like a man,
he heard his father say. Only he wasn’t really a man anymore.
A ghost, a shadow, a fog of alcohol, maybe, but not a man.
His father had been right all along.

“There’s an exit for Sugarloaf Boulevard,” she said, glancing again in the rearview mirror. She looked a little wary.

“Take it,” he croaked. Her neck was slender, elegant. Yeah. Elegant. That’s how she’d looked walking in through that door with the light behind her.
An elegant creature of the light.

The pulse to his groin was shocking. He actually looked down to be sure. Shit. He was getting a hard-on. He hadn’t had an erection in....

The punch of pain wasn’t unexpected this time. He
really
needed a drink.

*****

“What address am I looking for?” Drew asked her backseat passenger.

She heard a half-grunt. “No address. Keep going.”

The big, beautiful houses disappeared behind them. She should have known he didn’t live in one of those. Now it was mostly sand and low brush, some algae-clotted ponds. She kept going. The road was called County Road 939 now. The brush turned into trees. The landscape started looking even more tropical and
jungly
. The road ended at Old State Road 4a. Not much of a road. Hardly even two lanes and it only went one way. To the left a gate led to a hiking trail.

“I take it we go right?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. Not a talkative guy. Or maybe he was still too drunk.

The road wound through trees and sloughs. The forest was dense. There were a couple of gates that might lead to invisible houses. They passed a little beach with a lone picnic table, and went over a bridge that crossed a channel of some sort. After that there weren’t any more gates, and no visible houses.

Dowser pulled himself up with a groan. “Next dirt road,” he muttered. “On the left.”

She didn’t see anything except places where bugs and snakes might hang out. She was out here in the middle of nowhere with a drunk guy.
Not smart, Drew.
Her style lately.
“I don’t see any road,” she said, irritated.

“Wait for it.” He leaned over the back seat now. She smelled the alcohol on his breath, the musky sweat, even the blood from his scrapes and under that, something that was just…
him
. Had she ever been able to distinguish scents like that? His warm breath on her neck was doing something to her she didn’t like. Well, that wasn’t really true. But it scared her.

“There,” he said.

She had to look twice. A track really, not a road, meandered off the asphalt into the foliage. A battered metal mailbox sat on a post half-buried in the vines. She slowed, thinking. She should just drop him here. Make him get out right now. At least she still had her shotgun.

“How far down this road?”

“Leave me here. You’ve done enough.”

Wow. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She was the reason he’d been beaten. He’d helped her. And stupid or not, Drew Tremaine paid her debts. “I’ll take you to your house,” she said, through tight lips. She turned down the track. Vines hung from big trees. The car jolted along the ruts. How did he get in and out when it rained? Which it did a lot
here.

In about a hundred yards a weather-beaten cabin appeared in the middle of a clearing already being reclaimed by the jungle. The cabin stood on stilts about six or eight feet high, with a wide porch and a shallow shingled roof. Not much paint left, but it had once been white. Or maybe pale yellow. It looked like an ancient lady from a bygone age picking up her skirts to avoid the mud and sand. Vines were already beginning to encroach on the stilts on one side of the porch.

Pretty different than the multimillion dollar homes up in Sugarloaf proper.
She pulled onto a sandy place that looked like it might support a car. A derelict boat was turned upside down off to the right, with a motor and multiple engine parts littering the ground. She could see a dock just past the boat, jutting out over a channel maybe ten or fifteen feet wide.

“Okay, home sweet home,” she announced, turning in the seat.

Boy, Dowser really looked bad. His eye was swollen almost shut. His right cheek was scraped and bruised along with his chin. He had a split lip. And that was what she could see.

He leaned forward with an effort and opened the car door. It was painful to watch him pull himself out. He made only one little grunt, but that told its own story. A guy like this wouldn’t want to admit weakness. He stood, holding on to the car door.

“You going to be okay?” she asked. This was just not feeling right.

“Sure,” he grunted. But as he took a step, his right leg gave way and he fell to the ground in a heap, groaning.

Damn. She got out of the car. Heat and the humidity engulfed her. It was hard even to breathe. She ran around the car. “Oh, my goodness,” she murmured. “Did they do something to your leg?”

“Old injury,” he said through clenched teeth. “Just needs ice.”

“Sure. You’re fine. No help needed here.” She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him. “Since you’re not asking, I’m not offering.” She reached down and took his arm. “I’m telling you. You need help into the house.”

He glared at her. “Thanks,” he
half-sneered
. But as she pulled, he got his good leg under himself, and allowed her to pull his arm over her shoulder.

This guy must be six-four or -five if he was an inch. She put her arm around his waist. His shirt was hanging in rags off him. His back was really scarred. Her hand touched bare skin. Drew sucked in a breath. Let it out. In. Out.
You can do this.
Having his body this close to hers was making it hard to think. Together they hobbled toward the steps.

They maneuvered around a pile of rope coils grayed by the weather and several rusting underwater traps, and took the steps one at a time so he could hop. She pulled open the rusted screen. He pushed open the door. It wasn’t locked. The inside of the cabin looked like it hadn’t survived a tornado. The place was essentially one big room filled with fast-food bags, empty bottles of booze, paper plates, an old TV that looked like it hadn’t worked in years with a coat hanger antenna listing from the top. A rumpled four-poster bed made from timbers and huge bolts and draped in mosquito netting sat in the corner next to a small chest of drawers.
One area of the room was set off by a rough wood counter
where a sink, a battered stove, two cupboards, and an old rounded fridge made a kitchen. Through an open door in the other corner she could dimly see a toilet. Thank goodness for small favors.

“What was this place, a vacation cabin?” she asked just to cover her horror.

He looked down at her like she was crazy. “Fishing shack. Canal goes down to the open water. ” He pulled her with him to the small round table, which, along with its two chairs and a dilapidated love seat, were the room’s only other furniture. Except, rather amazingly, for a desolate-looking Bowflex machine in the corner by the love seat. Well, that explained the physique. Did he still use it, even in his drunken condition? His body said yes. He reached for a half gallon of some house-brand vodka on the table. The cap was already missing, and he didn’t wait for a glass. He just tipped up the bottle and threw back his head. The way the muscles in this throat moved so distracted her that it took her a minute to remember all those stories about frat rats guzzling booze until they got alcohol poisoning.
As in death.

She pulled at his arm. “Hey! Stop that.”

He came up for air. “Got almost sober there for a minute.” He took another glug.

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“Aw. What a tragedy.” He took another glug.

Drew just stared at him. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? He didn’t care if he died. He was trying to blot something out so hard he didn’t care whether it took death to do it. This guy was dangerous. She should walk out right now before she started thinking she could fix this. No one could fix this. It would be stupid to try.

He glanced over at her, his eyes now visibly clouded. “You gonna leave, or what?” The slur was back. He was weaving on his feet. But as he considered what he’d just said, a frown inserted itself between his brows.

She felt uneasy at the thought too, but shrugged. “Soon as I hit the bathroom.”

“Women. Always have to pee.” He motioned to the bathroom with a wave of the bottle.

“Thanks.” She looked in at the bathroom. There was an old claw-foot tub with a showerhead jutting out from the wall and a torn shower curtain on a rail, a sink, and a toilet. The mirror over the sink was freckled with age. She shut the door behind her.

“Leave right now, you fool,” she whispered as she looked at her smudgy reflection. Her cheek was a disaster area, red and swollen. There were probably a thousand reasons why she should leave.

But there were some reasons to stick around, too. Like finding out why the hell this guy had drawn her all the way across the country. There were lots of other men she could have had a needy, hormonal rebound affair with. That really built guy at the car repair shop would do anything for her, including marriage or armed robbery, just to drive her Maserati. There was that guy in her Ancient Egyptian history class, too.
A little young, but cute and eager.
But no, she had caught a glimpse of
this
guy on TV, and it was all over for some very strange reason. And it wasn’t because he was her one true love. Drew Tremaine did not do drunken derelicts.

He probably hadn’t raised a power. See above, not the one true love. One incident where she might have re-created the future she thought she had seen did not count as a power. She was
naïve
to have even considered it long enough to fly to Miami.

All this meant she had no business here. She should just admit she’d gone a little crazy and cut her losses. She’d waited all her life for true love and a power to emerge. She could wait a little longer. But going back to LA? Almost anywhere else was better.

Here, for instance.

What if the alcohol is obscuring who he is? Maybe he really is the One.

Do not listen to little voices in your head.
He absolutely was
not
the One.
A guy named Dowser?
And he looked Italian. He couldn’t have Merlin’s DNA. Merlin was a Celt.

Still, she just couldn’t leave someone who had saved her from a really bad situation at great personal cost in the middle of nowhere without a car, unable even to walk into town because he was hurt. She bet there wasn’t even cell reception out here so he could call a cab.