by J. R. Ward
"I'm not sure what you're talking about," Jim said gently. Damn it, he wanted to go home with her--
"The guy has a halo, like you and me."
Cranking his head back around, Jim frowned. "Halo?"
Sissy rolled her eyes and made a little circle around her skull. "Can't you see mine?"
"No. There's nothing there."
"Oh. Well, I see them. And you've got one, too."
Sure, fine, whatever. "Listen, I hate to do this, but I've got to go."
Duke Phillips was looking around as if searching for him, and if Jim didn't make an appearance in the next nanosecond or two, the guy was going to be convinced he was losing his mind--not a good thing, considering Jim had been getting fucking nowhere with this soul yet.
"It's okay, you do you." Sissy glanced back at Adrian. "I think he and I are going for a drive. I need to clear my head. I feel ... really weird ... right now."
Jim ground his teeth. "Okay. Yeah, sure. I get it. I'll check in later, all right?"
"Sure."
She was the one who turned away, and she did not look back as she went over to his buddy. On Adrian's side? As she approached, the angel's face had a softness to it that Jim had never seen before.
Great. Just fucking wonderful.
Chapter
Fifty-two
"I was going to tell you sooner."
Cait put the brakes on as she came up to one of the cemetery's fleet of stop signs. Glancing over, she did not feel good about wherever G.B. was at in his head. He was staring out the side window, chin propped up on the knuckles of his hand, eyes narrowed coldly.
It was a reminder of how she didn't really know him.
"But honestly," she continued, unsure whether he was listening, "I didn't know where things were going."
Hitting the gas again, she tried to remember how to get out of the cemetery. She wasn't so hot with directions on a good day, and this had not been a good day. Left?
Why the hell not.
Turning the wheel, she felt the graves press in on her, a chill frisking the back of her neck.
"I'm sorry," he said abruptly. "I just ... I would have liked a chance to see what you and I could be together. That's all."
He didn't look at her. Just kept staring off into space.
"It's complicated," he tacked on.
"I haven't handled this well." She cursed under her breath. "It was so weird--I met both of you on the same night."
And it was odd to think they seemed to know each other a little--what were the chances? Then again, Caldwell was a small city--not as close-knit as a town, sure, but it wasn't a Manhattan or Chicago, either.
He rubbed his eyes. "This has just been a really strange couple of days."
"I'm so sorry I've added to the difficulty."
He didn't say much else on the way back to St. Patrick's, and though she hated to admit it, it was a relief to pull up next to the front door and put the SUV in park so he could get out.
Turning to him, she wondered what to say.
"Cait, I've got to tell you something--"
A phone went off, and the ringing was not hers. With a soft curse, G.B. shoved a hand into his suit coat, and as he looked at the number, he seemed annoyed.
"Hold on, I gotta take this." He put the thing up to his ear. "Hello? Yeah, hey, Detective, how are you? You were? I didn't see you during the service. Oh, yeah, thanks." There was a silence. "I have rehearsals today--I'm actually in trouble because I've been gone for so long this afternoon. Okay. Fine. Yeah, I'll come over again. Right now? All right, gimme a minute to get downtown."
When he hung up, he shook his head. "The police want to talk to me some more."
Boy, this day kept getting better for him, didn't it. "That's awful."
"Yeah, it is. Listen, I've got to go, but can we--"
"Absolutely. Just give me a call whenever you're free." The last thing she wanted to do was make him feel like he was an afterthought. "I'm going to be working at home tonight, finishing up the book."
"Okay. Thanks."
He got out as if he were distracted, but come on. The police were on his phone about a murder. How could he not be thinking about something other than his dating status?
G.B. walked off in a hurry, crossing the road and getting into an older-model BMW. As he tore off, he didn't glance at her as he passed by, but she sure as hell got a good look at him--and that chill went up her neck again.
The expression on his face was positively volcanic. He was furious, his profile shockingly ugly.
Shaking her head, Cait got out, walked up to the cathedral's grand entrance and pulled open the heavy doors. Inside the foyer, Sissy's art was still on display, and as Cait went over to start packing things up, the sound of her heels on the marble floor echoed loudly.
Funny, the space hadn't seemed so large with all the people in it. Empty now, the narthex appeared as big as a football stadium.
She'd left the portfolios in the coatroom, and it took her no time at all to load up the artwork carefully and leave it out in the open. Reaching into her bag, she went for her sketchbook, intending to rip free a page and write a quick note--
Damn it, she'd lost the thing, remember?
How was she going to--
"I'll let her parents know where it is."
Wheeling around, she found that janitor standing right in front of the double doors that opened to the pews and the altar.
"Oh, thank you. I don't want Sissy's things to get lost."
"Don't worry. I won't let anything happen to them." He nodded to the easels. "May I help you carry these out?"
"I can do it. But thanks."
The old man helped her anyway, allowing her to make only one trip.
As she closed her SUV's hatch, she turned to the man and felt the oddest urge to hug him. But that wouldn't have been appropriate.
"May I give you a piece of advice?" he said, smiling in a way that made his eyes nearly disappear under their burden of wrinkles.
"Please."
"Talk it out."
"I'm sorry?"
"You need to talk it out. If you do that, everything will be all right--eventually. If you don't, you're going to miss the life you want."
Poor old guy. Clearly dementia was setting in.
Not wanting to upset him, she patted his arm. "Okay, I promise. I'll do that."
Getting into her car, she gave him a last wave and took off, heading for home. She'd gone about three blocks when she figured out where her sketch pad was.
"Son of a gun," she muttered.
And she might as well go back and get it.
Rerouting didn't require a huge time suck, and she kept to the surface roads as she went toward downtown. Closing in on the thick of the city, she was relieved to find that the traffic was light; then again, it wasn't quite the tail end of the workday yet, rush hour still about an hour off.
Her parking space, the one nearly across from the Palace, was open again, and she parked smoothly and locked up. Waiting for a break in the flow of cars, she jogged across and hoped that her luck with janitors continued.
Nope. She was able to get into the public foyer, but the lobby was locked and empty. Going over to will-call, she peered in. Nobody was in the office--
The staff-only door opened wide and she turned. A police officer was coming out, and he paused to look behind himself like he was waiting for a colleague.
"Excuse me," she said to the guy. "May I go down to the office? I think I left something here the day before yesterday and I want to see if anyone picked it up."
"Do you know where you're going?"
"Just through this hall."
"Okay, g'head."
She walked fast down the corridor, passing by some other cops, probably the ones the uni at the door was waiting for. As she went along, it was ironic that she was yet again looking for a lost-and-found box. Maybe she'd have more luck than when she'd been on the search for her gold earring.
Comi
ng around the corner, she straightened her skirt as she approached the glass office. She was not looking forward to going rounds with that receptionist again, but who else was she going to ask?
It turned out that the reception space was empty, but as she tried the glass door, she was able to pull things open. "Hello?"
The desk was orderly, the computer screen displaying a slowly rotating Palace logo, the phone ringing quietly.
"Hello...?"
There were clearly more offices in the back, a rear hallway going off in two directions, but she didn't want to intrude--
Her foot hit something unexpected, her balance instantly going haywire as she tripped forward. Catching herself on the corner of the desk, she looked down. A cardboard box filled with personal effects was on the floor: Aluminum travel mug. Plant. Picture of--
Frowning, Cait knelt down. Without touching anything, she got close enough to see the image of two young women standing side by side on a beach, their arms around each other's shoulders. The one on the right was...
An odd foreboding brought her head up and around to the empty chair behind the desk.
"Can I help you?"
Cait jumped up. A man had come in, an exhausted, half-bald, used-to-be-good-looking man in wrinkled clothes.
"I--ah, I'm sorry to bother you. I was looking for the receptionist?"
He recoiled like she'd slapped him. "You didn't hear?"
Before she asked ... before he answered her ... she knew who had been killed. "No, no, I haven't..."
"Jenny's dead." He marched past her. "So unless you're applying for the position, I can't do anything for you."
And that was that. He disappeared down the inner hall, a door slamming shut a moment later.
Cait didn't stick around. Trying to find her sketchbook was such a low priority compared to what was going on here.
At least it was a relatively new one. The only thing in it ... had been those sketches of G.B.
By the time G.B. got out of his second round of questioning, he had reverted back to his old ways, the ones he worked so hard to hide, the ones that had gotten him into trouble before.
Unfortunately, his submersion into himself so complete, he was having trouble seeing what was ahead of him.
Fury, as great and wide a divide as it had always been, owned him.
Getting into his car, he grasped the steering wheel and tried to focus. He could feel a plan developing in his head, and he had enough sense to know that it wasn't a good one. It wasn't clean. It wasn't tight.
And he was in enough trouble already with the whole Jennifer thing. But he couldn't ... concentrate ... on ... anything else--
As his phone rang, he fumbled with the thing, dropping the cell in his lap as he took it out of his inside pocket. He answered without checking, without thinking--
"Hello, G.B." Female voice. Low. Seductive. "What are you doing, G.B.?"
The sound of the brunette he'd fucked in that basement workroom pierced through the veil of his emotions, the fog of his anger, the clouds of his past.
"I've been thinking about you."
As she spoke, he thought that he should say something back to her to let her know he was actually on the line--but she seemed to be already aware of that.
"What are you going to do about all this, G.B.?" she asked.
"About what?" he mumbled.
"What are you going to decide to do?"
God, how did she know? Because he was torn, the urge to act warring with the sense that it was in his best interest to let this shit with Cait go.
But his brother was in the way. His fucking goody-two-shoes brother was getting her. And he just couldn't let that happen.
The shit with that whole Nicole thing had been for fun. But he actually liked Cait.
"You know she cheated on you."
"Who ..." he asked.
"That blond you like so much. She fucked your brother last night."
He frowned. "How ... how do you--"
"You know she did. You saw him kiss her at the grave site. You think that happens between two people who are just friends? Don't be naive."
G.B. brought up a hand and started to rub his forehead, back and forth, back and forth, as if he were sanding the skin off. He had always hated Duke. Had come out of the womb detesting the guy. And yeah, sure, it had never been logical, but some things were so strong that you didn't need to understand them. They just ... were.
It was like he had a demon inside of him, and sometimes the evil needed to get out before it ate G.B. alive.
Like with Jennifer in the theater basement. A switch got flipped and ... everything else disappeared except the malignancy--and keeping that inside? Impossible.
Man, one of the single biggest satisfactions in his life had been taking Duke's boring-ass girlfriend away from him--seducing her right out from under his brother's nose. God, so fucking pathetic--the pair of them had been so "in love," parading around that college campus arm in arm, full of dreams. But there had been fractures in the relationship to exploit--Darling Nikki, as the song went, hadn't been quite the nicey-nice girl Duke had believed she was. What a skank. And she hadn't been on the pill--so when G.B. had poked holes in the condoms before he used them? Not long before she was nauseous every morning and then--oopsie! She'd had to tell her BF she'd cheated on him.
When Duke had found out, his first stop had been G.B.'s apartment--and the guy had beaten him so badly, he'd needed dental implants afterward. But it was so worth it--and the payback had lasted for years.
Was going to last at least until the kid was eighteen, right?
"G.B., I think you need to do something about all this."
Coming back to the present, he shook his head. The brunette was right. So fucking right.
"Go to the mall, G.B. Turn your car on, and go to the mall. The food court, G.B. Go there, and find your path. I'll be waiting for you at the end--and I've got a lifetime contract to offer you."
He blinked, thinking that was a strange way of putting things. "What...?"
"I'm offering you what you've always wanted, what you sing about--I'm prepared to give you eternal life."
"In the public eye?"
"You will be surrounded forever, G.B.--I'll take care of everything. I'll take care of you. Go to the mall, right now--think of this as your audition. Pass? And you're in like Flynn."
"I need to go to rehearsals."
"Like I said, I'll take care of it all."
"I don't understand how you--"
"You're boring me, and wasting time. Stop with the questions. Start with the actions."
The call was ended and he looked down at his phone. Man, those A & R people really did have a lot of pull, didn't they.
Before he was conscious of making a decision, he found himself driving, his hands and feet doing all the right things as he made turns and accelerated down straightaways and slowed down for other traffic.
The Caldwell Galleria Mall was a huge, sprawling expanse of stores that was surrounded by a Ford Motor Company production plant's worth of parking lots. He hadn't been there in years, but he remembered, back from his orphanage era, being brought here around Christmastime ... paraded around the red and green window displays ... unable to buy anything because he'd never had any money.
Which was what happened when you didn't know who your father was and you killed your mother in childbirth.
He and that fraternal twin of his had had such a great start, hadn't they.
The food court was around the far side, and he found a parking space that was pretty close to the doors. Walking like a zombie, he zeroed in on the entrance, passing by the smokers who were standing around the trash bins, and the mothers pushing infants around in strollers, and the next generation of bar sluts with their prepubescent legs showing under postage-stamp skirts.
Something told him to tuck his ponytail in under his jacket, and hunch his shoulders while keeping his head down. He didn't want any attention on himself, and sure as shi
t, there were probably fans here somewhere.
He entered through the side push doors, not the revolving center one, and hung back. There was quite a distance between him and the teeming trough area, a Kay Jewelers store, a RadioShack, and a Brookstone separating him from the stalls of high-calorie junk food. For a moment, his head cleared enough for him to wonder what the fuck he was doing considering rehearsal was no doubt waiting for him, but then, off to the right, he saw a pair of dark heads going along. One was about two feet shorter than the other, the boy who walked next to the man looking sullen, the man who was beside the boy wearing a hard expression.
G.B. inhaled, a strange feeling in his chest making him want to cough.
The brunette on the phone had been right. Seeing those two together?
Certainly laid a path out for him, nice and clean.
Dipping his hand into that inner jacket pocket again, he got a hold of his phone.
His heart rate skyrocketed as he thought about dialing. For some reason, he had the sense that the decision he was about to make was going to affect so much more than just the situation with Duke. And not in a good way.
Turn away, he told himself. Just stop this.
After all, why the fuck did he care about Cait and his brother? He was on the verge of getting noticed, about to finally make it...
No, you aren't, an inner voice pointed out. They're going to get you for that murder.
He blinked and thought about the follow-up by good ol' Detective de la Cruz, as it had turned out the guy was called.
They'd found something, hadn't they.
"Goddamn it," G.B. muttered. He should have stopped that shit with Jennifer. And he should be stopping this.
But come on, if he was going to go out, it might as well be with a bang ... right?
The brunette had a point. He knew just what to do.
Chapter
Fifty-three
Cait sat back at her drafting table and inspected the second-to-last drawing of the book. The puppy, who had gotten himself in trouble trying to hide his bone, was being scolded by his owner, the little five-year-old boy telling him he had to be careful down by the river so he didn't drown.
Which was the point of the whole series: It wasn't so much what life did to us, but what we tried to do to keep life from happening that caused most of our problems.