St. Nacho's 4: The Book of Daniel

by Z. A. Maxfield

  Al clutched his copy of the prospectus tightly in his hand. “Are you saying you won’t even consider this further?”

  “I’m saying that I’ve been uncomfortable with it from the very beginning. And my brother’s engagement party is unequivocally not the place to discuss it. I’ll see you in the office first thing Monday morning and we’ll talk about it there, but I have to tell you, I don’t want any part of a project like this.”

  “Well, well, well.” We all heard BreeAnna’s voice—loud and clear. “I think you’ve forgotten you signed away half your right to make that decision. I believe the project is sound, and I don’t have emotional attachments and sentiment to cloud my thinking. It’s going to be Al and me against you, and I think you’ll find it’s a little harder to throw your weight around now.”

  Stunned, I stepped back to gather my wits. She was right. I don’t know how long it took me to think things through; people argued around me. The action hit my senses in waves—too bright then dim, too loud and then quiet. I thought that was how it must be to drown. My chest felt tight, as if my heart physically stopped.

  I didn’t have to turn to know what I would see on Cam’s face, but I did it anyway. It was a compulsion, like picking at a fresh scab. It was surely a cure for the optimism I’d been feeling, because what I saw in Cam’s eyes made things very clear.

  I’d inadvertently brought Pandora’s box with me to St. Nacho’s, and Al had prized it open. It didn’t take that glimpse of Cam’s face to know that I’d find no hope there.

  “Come with me,” I told Cam. I expected an argument and I didn’t let him start one. I put my hand up before he had a chance to get a word out and hissed so only he could hear me, “If you don’t come with me right this second I will leave you and St. Nacho’s to deal with all the forces of rapacious greed by yourselves and you will surely lose.”

  “All right.” He followed me out into the darkness in silence. I made my way toward the boardwalk where we could be assured of privacy, and eventually we got to the pier.

  * * *

  “How could you do this to us?” Cam wouldn’t look at me.

  “I didn’t. I told you. This was Al’s idea. Apparently my ex-wife has taken it to her scant bosom in a unprecedented way.”

  “What did she mean, you signed away half your right to decide?”

  I sighed. “Just that I agreed to be fair with our assets.”

  He turned to me, surprise etched on his features. “You came clean about your infidelities.”

  I shook my head. “Not exactly.”

  “Yes, exactly. And now she owns half your company and half your power to put a stop to this thing.”

  “Half my interest. Yes. But the power? No.”

  Cam leaned over to put his elbows on the railing and dropped his head in his hands. He looked like he was going to be sick. “I can’t lose St. Nacho’s. I don’t know if I’d survive losing everything again.”

  “You won’t. I promise you won’t.”

  “You think you can promise that? You’re kidding yourself. Al is a nice guy but he only sees a balance sheet. Bree wants to punish you. I know you mean well, but—”

  “You are so wrong, Cameron Rooney. I don’t mean well. Not really. I have never meant well. I’ve done what I pleased.”

  Cam gave up a broken sob. “Oh, thanks for clearing that up.”

  I laid the flat of my hand on his back to sooth him. “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right, I don’t.” He tried to flinch away from my touch, but I didn’t let him.

  “I love two people in this entire world, and I’d lay down my life for both of you. If you think I’ll let someone threaten your home—if you think I’ll stand idly by and watch you hurt—”

  “It’s not your company anymore. They think it’s a great investment and maybe they’re right—”

  “Maybe they are. But that’s not what’s important to me.” I used both hands to turn Cam around to face me. “You’re important to me. And St. Nacho’s is important to a whole lot of people. And worse, I suddenly find myself in the awkward position of possessing scruples.”

  Cam laughed weakly at that.

  “This is what I do best, Cam. Better than Al, and Bree doesn’t count. She and Al may have the right to vote but that’s all they’ve got. I still have the contacts; the business is mine. Who’s going to trust Bree? She’s never done anything more with money than buy shoes. Who’s going to capitalize a Livingston Properties project if I am emphatically not on board.”

  “It’s good business. If they get that land…”

  “They won’t. I can see to it that they never will, and I will do exactly that, for you.”

  “What about Al.”

  “He’ll be disappointed.”

  “He’ll fight you. You’re friends.”

  “And I will always be his friend. His friendship is his to give or take away. But yours? I couldn’t bear to hurt you. I’m asking you to trust me.”

  Cam shook his head. “It’s my home…”

  “Can you trust me with this? Can you say you believe in me this one time, even though you have no reason to?”

  “A leap of faith.” Cam gazed into my eyes for a long time, and I swear, I swear he could see every lie I’d ever told. “You haven’t earned it.”

  I swallowed hard. “That’s why they call it faith.”

  He stared at me for a long time—too long—and then nodded. I kissed him like it was the last time I’d ever get to do it, because if I failed…

  Cam’s soft lips melted under mine until his mouth opened for me and our tongues tangled together. Our harsh breaths misted the moist salty air, and he pulled me toward him with such fierce desperation it caught me like a flash grenade in my gut.

  Cam’s dizzying, powerful kiss sent all my blood rushing to my cock. He gripped my hips and pulled me toward him until I could feel his nudge to life. I pushed back before I could be swept away by the sensual tide.

  We gazed at each other, breathless, hard, and hurting. He didn’t let go and I felt the connection between us throb through his fingertips.

  I could stop Al and Bree. I would stop them.

  “You’re my heart, Cameron Rooney.”

  Cam gave me a tiny shake. “You have a heart of your own.”

  “You make it beat.” I caught his hand and pressed it where my heart was thudding beneath my skin. “You warm it. Because of you it’s overflowing with some kind of peculiar audacity. I need to see myself reflected in your eyes. I need to see you smile.”

  “Daniel.”

  “Ah, jeez. When you say my name it’s like a jolt of electricity up my spine. What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know.” Cam grinned. “But that’s why I say it.”

  “I’ll fix this,” I promised. I had to go before I got sidetracked. I had to get out of town because I couldn’t save the day by standing on the St. Nacho’s pier—even though it meant leaving Cam’s embrace. “Tell Jakey I said hold on. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  “I love you, Cam. You big damn—”

  “I love you too, Daniel.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Four months later, I was dreaming of angels. They weren’t the fluffy, Valentine’s Day kind of angels, but the full-on, fire-and-sword-wielding Old Testament variety, which seemed odd to me. I’d never made the time to study my faith, and I could honestly say religion—what I’d seen of it—didn’t impress me much.

  There wasn’t anything to the dream itself. I was in the company of some hypermasculine, stern-visaged angel in an empty place—the thickest, blackest void. He pointed out the different constellations of stars as he knew them, but I couldn’t see anything because ugly black clouds roiled overhead.

  There was a loud banging sound, insistent and irritating, and the angel frowned.

  “What?” I asked.

  He said, “Even when you cannot see the heavens, the stars burn bright.”

  The d
ream faded, all except the drumming noise, and I realized someone was pounding on my door. The bell rang twice.

  I got out of bed and went to answer it, not caring particularly that I was only wearing boxers.

  When I opened the door Bree stood there, holding two coffee cups in her gloved hands. She was once again dressed in understated elegance, this time in a St. John knit suit and pumps. Jim stood behind her.

  “Morning.” I blocked the doorway, wondering if I was still dreaming. Or if I’d begun to hallucinate. Bree never brought me coffee when we were married. I couldn’t fathom why she’d be standing there offering me coffee now.

  “It’s afternoon,” she told me and stood her ground. “May I come in?”

  I wasn’t ready to let her by me so I stayed where I was. She’d have had to brush against my nearly naked, hairy form to squeeze inside, and I knew she wouldn’t do that.

  “I need to talk to you, Dan. Please let me in.”

  I couldn’t even remember the last time Bree had said please, so I stepped back, waiting. Before she moved forward, she turned to Jim. “You can wait in the car, Jim. I need to speak to Dan alone.”

  “All right.” He nodded. Apparently he was far more sanguine about being dismissed than I would have been, under the circumstances.

  I watched Bree enter my dingy, cramped rental and smiled at her obvious distaste.

  “You live here? It’s like”—she glanced around—“the floor sample room in a cheap furniture warehouse.”

  “It’s a crash site for the newly jettisoned. Everywhere you look, divorced people are bringing in single sacks of groceries and taking out small bags of garbage. No one meets anyone else’s eyes. It’s purgatory for the matrimonially deceased.”

  Bree looked up at the painting over the sofa. It depicted a road leading off through a stand of birch trees in autumn shades that matched the brown leather couch. “It came furnished?”

  “Can you imagine me buying a painting like that?”

  She shook her head and turned. Wordlessly, she offered me one of the coffees, then clutched the other between her hands.

  I took a sip. Vanilla latte. Nice. “Thank you for this. You didn’t come all this way to bring me coffee or redecorate my place.”

  “This isn’t your place. This is a furnished rental in San Jose, a city you hate.”

  “All too true. But it’s convenient, and cheap, and I find that it suits my mood. I only sleep here.”

  “It’s four in the afternoon.”

  “I sleep a lot.”

  She didn’t seem to know where to look and eventually her gaze fell to my hand. “Are you still getting physical therapy?”

  In truth I wasn’t. I was still doing the exercises that Jordan gave me as homework, but I wasn’t seeing a therapist. “I need to find someone here.”

  “Isn’t there a window of opportunity as far as the potential for healing? You should get on that.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Jake told me about your brother and sister. And your father…I’m sorry about your father.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You don’t mean that, really.”

  “Most of the time you think the worst of me. Pick a side, BreeAnna.”

  “Jake’s in touch with your other siblings. Your brother and JT postponed the wedding.”

  “Damn.” I didn’t want that. I’d never wanted that.

  “You left without a word, and you haven’t answered a single message. I can understand why you might not want to answer mine, but there are people who need to hear from you. It’s been months.”

  “My phone broke.” That was true. It broke when I threw it off St. Nacho’s pier.

  “You need to get a new phone and let your brother and Al know where you are. I practically had to hire a private detective to find you.”

  I scrubbed at my face. Even at four p.m. it was too early for that shit. “Yet find me you did. Would you mind telling me why? I just got up, and I need to piss.”

  Bree flinched at my crude language. “Get cleaned up and for heaven’s sake dress. You and I are going to talk whether you like it or not.” She glanced around, looking for a safe place to sit. Finding none, she steeled herself to balance on the edge of the leather sofa. It let out a loud, flatulent sigh as she did, and color flooded her cheeks.

  “I’ll be back.” I left her there to fidget and took my time getting cleaned up. I took a shower and shaved. When I came back out wearing a fresh pair of jeans and a rock band T-shirt I’d gotten at some club, she rolled her eyes. I sat down on the coffee table across from her, close enough to touch her—to breathe in the familiar scent of Chanel and woman. She didn’t move away. I took that as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

  “You look like a forty-year-old frat boy. You need to act your age.”

  “That’s not what the guys said last night.” I don’t know why I needed to be flippant with Bree. I didn’t care what she thought of me anymore, not really, but I was proud enough that I didn’t want her to see how far I’d fallen.

  I didn’t want her to see how much what had happened in the wake of Jake’s engagement party had cost me, personally and professionally, even though I assumed she was astute enough to guess.

  Then Bree did something I’d rarely seen her do in a strange place: she took off her gloves and laid them in her lap. When I glanced up, she clasped my hands in hers and held them tight. She gripped them tightly when I would have withdrawn them from sheer shock.

  “I know it must have seemed as though everyone you thought was your friend lined up against you.”

  “It didn’t just seem like that. Everyone did.”

  “Speaking for myself, I never understood how passionately you were prepared to fight—not until after the fact. I thought you were posturing for the sake of your image. You should have talked to me privately.”

  “And said what? That I truly didn’t want to invest in a venture because it would hurt people I care about?”

  “You could have let me know how you felt.”

  “Since when have you given a shit about me?” I asked bitterly. “Since when has making money taken a backseat to emotions for Al? For any of us? You wouldn’t have believed me if I’d tried.”

  “Neither of us realized how far you’d go to stop the project from going ahead.”

  I couldn’t help the way my lips twitched into a smile. I couldn’t hide what I was feeling, which was triumph. No one was going to underestimate me again. Ever.

  “I guess you didn’t count on my desperation.”

  “No. We didn’t.”

  “So maybe you can tell me why you came. Why you’ve disrobed”—I nodded toward her hands—“and what you could possibly want from me now that I have nothing left.”

  “You won, Dan. You beat us. You got what you wanted. Why are you hiding here in this dump as though you’re indigent?”

  “I can assure you, the indigent can’t afford to live here, Bree. And since I currently own a rather large parcel of land I can do nothing with, I will have to get a job, and soon, if I want to continue to live in this kind of luxury.”

  “You always make jokes when things get serious.”

  “Nobody needs a joke when things are going along just fine.”

  “You used every last bit of your liquid cash to get that property, and from what I understand, you’ve leveraged yourself even more. Why? Why did you do that for people who turned their back on you the second they thought you’d betrayed them?”

  “Because—” Crap. My eyes stung, and not for the world would I show Bree that she could still get to me. I got up and went to the sliding-glass door. The vertical blinds were dusty and tangled, but I pushed them aside to look out. It wasn’t the worst place to live. There was a parklike atmosphere beyond my back patio, complete with streams and a small play yard where the Sunday fathers took their children to swing and slide.

  At least I didn’t have kids.

  “Because?” Bree followed me. �
�Why, Dan? I need to hear you tell me.”

  “Because I loved them. Because making money doesn’t justify hurting people or destroying the environment. In the past I’ve looked the other way, and I just can’t anymore.”

  Bree’s hand landed on my shoulder and rested there. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me, Bree. Like you said, I won.”

  “I’m sorry because you think you’ve lost the very thing you were trying to protect.”

  “Yeah well. There’s a lot of historical precedent for shit like that. If nothing else, you have to love the irony.”

  She peered at my face. “You aren’t capable of subterfuge anymore. It’s fascinating.”

  “Now you’re just making wild assumptions.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She stood beside me and watched out the window for a while. “I’m sorry I didn’t stand by you when you wanted to block the project.”

  I laughed at that. “It would have made things considerably easier if you had, but at least you bought me out. That was the last little bit of cash I needed. I should thank you for that, if I didn’t already. Are you going to change your name when you marry Jim? It will be odd to see Livingston Properties without a Livingston at the helm.”

  “I won’t keep your name in any case.”

  “I see.”

  “I never should have had it in the first place.”

  Old news. “I’ve regretted using you for a long time. I hope you’ll agree I’ve been fair enough that we can both put it behind us now. LP can move on without that land and I can move on to…whatever’s next.”

  “How did you manage to get that land anyway? Al was furious. He says to tell you hello from Ellie and the girls, by the way.”

  I nodded. That was exactly Al. He could be professionally furious with me during the day, and at night we could still have cocktails and catch up as though we were back in school. That friendship wasn’t going anywhere, at least. Unless I let it die of neglect.