Inner Harbor (3 page)

“Idiot.” But he grinned as he pulled his briefcase out of the Jeep.

At the familiar voice, the barking turned into mad joy. Foolish bounded up with a delighted look in his eyes and wet, muddy paws. “No jumping!” Phillip yelled, using his briefcase like a shield. “I mean it. Sit!”

Foolish quivered, but dropped his rump on the ground and lifted a paw. His tongue lolled, his eyes gleamed. “That's a good dog.” Gingerly Phillip shook the filthy paw and scratched the dog's silky ears.

“Hey.” Seth wandered into the front yard. His jeans were grubby from wrestling with the dog, his baseball cap was askew so that straw-straight blond hair spiked out of it. The smile, Phillip noted, came much more quickly and easily than it had a few months before. But there was a gap in it.

“Hey.” Phillip butted a finger on the bill of the cap. “Lose something?”

“Huh?”

Phillip tapped a finger against his own straight, white teeth.

“Oh, yeah.” With a typical Quinn shrug, Seth grinned, pushing his tongue into the gap. His face was fuller than it had been six months before, and his eyes less wary. “It was loose. Had to give it a yank a couple of days ago. Bled like a son of a bitch.”

Phillip didn't bother to sigh over Seth's language. Some things, he determined, weren't going to be his problem. “So, did the Tooth Fairy bring you anything?”

“Get real.”

“Hey, if you didn't squeeze a buck out of Cam, you're no brother of mine.”

“I got two bucks out of it. One from Cam and one from Ethan.”

Laughing, Phillip swung an arm over Seth's shoulders and headed toward the house. “Well, you're not getting one out of me, pal. I'm on to you. How was the first full week of school?”

“Boring.” Though it hadn't been, Seth admitted silently. It had been exciting. All the new junk Anna had taken him shopping for. Sharp pencils, blank notebooks, pens full of ink. He'd refused the
X-Files
lunch box she'd wanted to get him. Only a dork carried a lunch box in middle school. But it had been really cool and tough to sneer at.

He had cool clothes and bitching sneakers. And best of all, for the first time in his life, he was in the same place, the same school, with the same people he'd left behind in June.

“Homework?” Phillip asked, raising his eyebrows as he opened the front door.

Seth rolled his eyes. “Man, don't you ever think about anything else?”

“Kid, I live for homework. Especially when it's yours.” Foolish burst through the door ahead of Phillip, nearly knocking him down with enthusiasm. “You've still got some work to do on that dog.” But the mild annoyance faded instantly. He could smell Anna's red sauce simmering, like ambrosia on the air. “God bless us, every one,” he murmured.

“Manicotti,” Seth informed him.

“Yeah? I've got a Chianti I've been saving just for this moment.” He tossed his briefcase aside. “We'll hit the books after dinner.”

He found his sister-in-law in the kitchen, filling pasta tubes with cheese. The sleeves of the crisp white shirt she'd worn to the office were rolled up, and a white butcher's apron covered her navy skirt. She'd taken off her heels and tapped a bare foot to the beat of the aria she was humming.
Carmen
, Phillip recognized. Her wonderful mass of curling black hair was still pinned up.

With a wink at Seth, Phillip came up behind her, caught
her around the waist, and pressed a noisy kiss onto the top of her head. “Run away with me. We'll change our names. You can be Sophia and I'll be Carlo. Let me take you to paradise where you can cook for me and me alone. None of these peasants appreciate you like I do.”

“Let me just finish this tube, Carlo, and I'll go pack.” She turned her head, her dark Italian eyes laughing. “Dinner in thirty minutes.”

“I'll open the wine.”

“Don't we have anything to eat now?” Seth wanted to know.

“There's antipasto in the fridge,” she told him. “Go ahead and get it out.”

“It's just vegetables and junk,” Seth complained when he pulled out the platter.

“Yep.”

“Jeez.”

“Wash the dog off your hands before you start on that.”

“Dog spit's cleaner than people spit,” Seth informed her. “I read how if you get bit by another guy it's worse than getting bit by a dog.”

“I'm thrilled to have that fascinating tidbit of information. Wash the dog spit off your hands anyway.”

“Man.” Disgusted, Seth clomped out, with Foolish slinking after him.

Phillip chose the wine from the small supply he kept in the pantry. Fine wines were one of his passions, and his palate was extremely discriminating. His apartment in Baltimore boasted an extensive and carefully chosen selection, which he kept in a closet he'd remodeled specifically for that purpose.

At the Shore, his beloved bottles of Bordeaux and Burgundy kept company with Rice Krispies and boxes of Jell-O Instant Pudding.

He'd learned to live with it.

“So how was your week?” he asked Anna.

“Busy. Whoever said women can have everything should be shot. Handling a career and a family is grueling.” Then she looked up with a brilliant smile. “I'm loving it.”

“It shows.” He drew the cork expertly, sniffed it and approved, then set the bottle on the counter to breathe. “Where's Cam?”

“Should be on his way home from the boatyard. He and Ethan wanted to put in an extra hour. The first Boat by Quinn is finished. The owner's coming in tomorrow. It's finished, Phillip.” Her smile flashed, brilliant and glowing with pride. “At dock, seaworthy and just gorgeous.”

He felt a little tug of disappointment that he hadn't been in on the last day. “We should be having champagne.”

Anna lifted a brow as she studied the label on the wine. “A bottle of Folonari, Ruffino?”

He considered one of Anna's finest traits to be her appreciation for good wine. “Seventy-five,” he said with a broad grin.

“You won't hear any complaints from me. Congratulations, Mr. Quinn, on your first boat.”

“It's not my deal. I just handle the details and pass for slave labor.”

“Of course it's your deal. Details are necessary, and neither Cam nor Ethan could handle them with the finesse you do.”

“I think the word they use, is ‘nagging.” '

“They need to be nagged. You should be proud of what the three of you have accomplished in the last few months. Not just the new business, but the family. Each one of you has given up something that's important to you for Seth. And each one of you has gotten something important back.”

“I never expected the kid to matter so much.” While Anna smothered the filled tubes with sauce, Phillip opened a cupboard for wineglasses. “I still have moments when the whole thing pisses me off.”

“That's only natural, Phillip.”

“Doesn't make me feel any better about it.” He shrugged his shoulders in dismissal, then poured two glasses. “But most of the time, I look at him and think he's a pretty good deal for a kid brother.”

Anna grated cheese over the casserole. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Phillip lift his glass, appreciate the bouquet. He was beautiful to look at, she mused. Physically, he was as close to male perfection as she could imagine. Bronze hair, thick and full, eyes more gold than brown. His face was long, narrow, thoughtful. Both sensual and angelic. His tall, trim build seemed to have been fashioned for Italian suits. But since she'd seen him stripped to the waist in faded Levi's she knew there was nothing soft about him.

Sophisticated, tough, erudite, shrewd. An interesting man, she mused.

She slipped the casserole into the oven, then turned to pick up her wine. Smiling at him, she tapped her glass on his. “You're a pretty good deal too, Phillip, for a big brother.”

She leaned in to kiss him lightly as Cam walked in.

“Get your mouth off my wife.”

Phillip merely smiled and slid an arm around Anna's waist. “She put hers on me. She likes me.”

“She likes me better.” To prove it, Cam hooked a hand in the tie of Anna's apron, spun her around, and pulled her into his arms to kiss her brainless. He grinned, nipped her bottom lip and patted her butt companionably. “Don'cha, sugar?”

Her head was still spinning. “Probably.” She blew out a breath. “All things considered.” But she wiggled free. “You're filthy.”

“Just came in to grab a beer to take into the shower.” Long and lean, dark and dangerous, he prowled over to the fridge. “And kiss my wife,” he added with a smug look at Phillip. “Go get your own woman.”

“Who has time?” Phillip said mournfully.

• • •

A
FTER DINNER, AND
an hour spent slaving over long division, battles of the Revolutionary War, and sixth-grade vocabulary, Phillip settled down in his room with his laptop and his files.

It was the same room he'd been given when Ray and Stella Quinn had brought him home. The walls had been a pale green then. Sometime during his sixteenth year he'd gotten a wild hair and painted them magenta. God knew why. He remembered that his mother—for Stella had become his mother by then—had taken one look and warned him he'd have terminal indigestion.

He thought it was sexy. For about three months. Then he'd gone with a stark white for a while, accented with moody black-framed, black-and-white photographs.

Always looking for ambience, Phillip thought now, amused at himself. He'd circled back to that soft green right before he moved to Baltimore.

They'd been right all along, he supposed. His parents had usually been right.

They'd given him this room, in this house, in this place. He hadn't made it easy for them. The first three months were a battle of wills. He smuggled in drugs, picked fights, stole liquor, and stumbled in drunk at dawn.

It was clear to him now that he'd been testing them, daring them to kick him out. Toss him back. Go ahead, he'd thought. You can't handle me.

But they did. They had not only handled him, they had made him.

I wonder, Phillip,
his father had said,
why you want to waste a good mind and a good body. Why you want to let the bastards win.

Phillip, who was suffering from the raw gut and bursting
head of a drug and alcohol hangover, didn't give a good damn.

Ray took him out on the boat, telling him that a good sail would clear his head. Sick as a dog, Phillip leaned over the rail, throwing up the remnants of the poisons he'd pumped into his system the night before.

He'd just turned fourteen.

Ray anchored the boat in a narrow gut. He held Phillip's head, wiped his face, then offered him a cold can of ginger ale.

“Sit down.”

He didn't so much sit as collapse. His hands shook, his stomach shuddered at the first sip from the can. Ray sat across from him, his big hands on his knees, his silvering hair flowing in the light breeze. And those eyes, those brilliant blue eyes, level and considering.

“You've had a couple of months now to get your bearings around here. Stella says you've come around physically. You're strong, and healthy enough—though you aren't going to stay that way if you keep this up.”

He pursed his lips, said nothing for a long moment. There was a heron in the tall grass, still as a painting. The air was bright and chill with late fall, the trees bare of leaves so that the hard blue sky spread overhead. Wind ruffled the grass and skimmed fingers over the water.

The man sat, apparently content with the silence and the scene. The boy slouched, pale of face and hard of eye.

“We can play this a lot of ways, Phil,” Ray said at length. “We can be hard-asses. We can put you on a short leash, watch you every minute and bust your balls every time you screw up. Which is most of the time.”

Considering, Ray picked up a fishing rod, absently baited it with a marshmallow. “Or we could all just say that this little experiment's a bust and you can go back into the system.”

Phillip's stomach churned, making him swallow to hold
down what he didn't quite recognize as fear. “I don't need you. I don't need anybody.”

“Yeah, you do.” Ray said it mildly as he dropped the line into the water. Ripples spread, endlessly. “You go back into the system, you'll stay there. Couple of years down the road, it won't be juvie anymore. You'll end up in a cell with the bad guys, the kind of guys who are going to take a real liking to that pretty face of yours. Some seven-foot con with hands like smoked hams is going to grab you in the showers one fine day and make you his bride.”

Phillip yearned desperately for a cigarette. The image conjured by Ray's word made fresh sweat pop out on his forehead. “I can take care of myself.”

“Son, they'll pass you around like canapés, and you know it. You talk a good game and you fight a good fight, but some things are inevitable. Up to this point your life has pretty much sucked. You're not responsible for that. But you are responsible for what happens from here on.”