Barefoot Bound: A Barefoot Bay Undercover Prequel

by Roxanne St Claire

  Immediately he was blinded by the smile of the unnaturally cheerful Ivy League intern who worked the main reception desk. “Good morning, Mr. Rossi.”

  “It’s Gabe, Harvard.”

  “It’s Erin, sir.”

  He notched his chin in acknowledgment of the correction. “Vivi here?”

  “She’s in her office.”

  Time to get this show on the road. “That’s where I’ll be.”

  “Umm…” She held up a hand. “Maybe don’t go in there now.”

  He slowed his step as he headed toward the back. “She in a meeting?”

  “Her husband’s in there.”

  “And I can’t go in?” He snorted softly. “Don’t tell me she’s ovulating and Special Agent in Charge of Baby-Making marched over from the bureau for a quickie.”

  Erin deepened to the color of her famous school’s not-so-impressive football jersey. “Not exactly…” She looked pained. “It’s family stuff.”

  “It’s all family stuff in this joint. The name—one of them, anyway—is on the door, and half the clan takes up the offices. I’ll pop in and check their temperature.” He headed down the hall to the second to last office, where Vivi Angelino Lang, though he’d never actually heard her use her married name, worked as the vice president of the Guardian Angelinos.

  He tapped once but didn’t push open the door, although he didn’t really expect to find Vivi and her husband, Colton Lang, in flagrante, no matter how bad they wanted a baby. Which was pretty bad, he sensed, and getting worse since Zach and Samantha announced they had a kid on the way. Then Marc, Gabe’s older brother, and his wife, Devyn, pumped out number three, having done one and two in a single shot. And, hell, Vivi was nothing if not competitive. Not to mention pushing her mid-thirties and deafened by the ticktock of the biological clock.

  Well, he wasn’t about to make her day any better with his announcement.

  “It’s Gabe,” he said when neither one of them answered his knock.

  The door whipped open, and instead of his ebony-eyed cousin, his always-serious brother-in-law, Colton Lang, stood there. A bruiser of an FBI agent, Colt had mellowed in the four years he and Vivi had been married, and pretty much fit into the family now.

  He used his sizable body to block Gabe’s view of the office.

  “Not now,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ll tell you later.”

  “Tell him now.” Vivi stood and stepped out from behind her desk, her face blotchy and wet.

  “Shit,” Gabe muttered, moving right past Lang. “This is more than a fertility fail.” He went straight to her, the soft spot he always had for his cousin feeling bruised at the sight of rare tears.

  “It’s Uncle Nino, Gabe.”

  His heart dropped, hard and fast. “What’s wrong?”

  “He has cancer.”

  Fuck. “What?”

  “I think.”

  Gabe blinked and let himself fall into a guest chair, the view of Back Bay out the windows blurred behind Vivi’s tortured face. A million questions battled for head time, but he just stared at her, waiting for more.

  Vivi sniffed and leaned closer to her husband. “I mean, he hasn’t told me or anyone—”

  “Then how do you know?”

  She glanced at Colt, and he nodded, picking up from there like the tag team they were. “A call came into the office late the other night, and Vivi answered. A woman asked for Nino, but she refused to leave a name or number.”

  “So, of course, I traced the call,” she added.

  “Of course you did.” But Gabe’s sarcasm fell flat.

  “I was curious who would call Nino here.” She swallowed, her expression pained. “The call came from the Sheppard Oncology Center.”

  The words stabbed him, but he shook it off. “Where is that?”

  “It’s a small treatment and chemo center associated with Mass General.”

  Chemo? “But that doesn’t mean he has cancer,” Gabe said, knowing he was digging for a rationale that probably wasn’t there. “Doesn’t he teach a cooking class down near the hospital or something? At a senior center? Maybe he’s dropping off biscotti for the patients.”

  “No, it gets worse. He was supposed to come in the next day to have lunch with me, but he canceled.”

  A little sting of impatience grew. “Lunch? Why don’t you give him something to do, Vivi? He was really helpful doing research on that Holt situation.”

  “Because the client owned a chain of restaurants, and all Nino knows is food.”

  “Try something else,” Gabe said, the old argument easily rising to the surface because, hell, it was easier to fight about the known than speculate about the unknown.

  “He’s too old and tired to work, Gabe,” Vivi said softly, not taking the bait.

  The impatience grew to frustration. “He is not old!”

  “He’s in his eighties. Could be eighty-nine, for all he knows.”

  “Could be eighty-one. He looks seventy-five and acts sixty and thinks like a damn teenager.” They really didn’t know how old Nino was because he’d been born on a farm in Italy and no one had bothered with paperwork.

  Vivi shook her head, not listening.

  “He loves when you give him shit to do,” Gabe continued. “Hell, he’ll file papers as well as that Harvard co-ed out there.”

  “He doesn’t want to file. He wants to cook and garden and reminisce about his life.”

  “And do something productive, Vivi.” How could she not see that when he did?

  Lang held up his hand. “You two are way off topic. There’s more.”

  Of course they were. Anything was better than this topic. “What else?” Gabe asked, his teeth clenched because he really didn’t want to know anything else.

  Vivi nodded. “He sounded really weird when he canceled lunch and, of course, I had that Sheppard Center call on my mind, so I called the house, and Aunt Fran told me he’d gone to town to see me, even though he’d canceled.”

  “So Mom lied?” The very idea was laughable.

  “Of course not, so I did exactly what you would have done.”

  “You went digging around this Sheppard Center instead of finding Nino and asking him.” It wasn’t a question, because he knew his cousin. “I’d’ve done the same thing,” he admitted.

  Lang, ever the by-the-book FBI agent, looked skyward, as he usually did when his wife and her crew went off-the-book.

  “What did you find?” Gabe asked.

  “Nino.”

  “In chemo?” He choked on the words.

  “I don’t know what he was doing there, but he went in the side door while I was sitting in the parking lot. The door chemo patients, not guests, use.”

  Gabe exhaled hard. “There might be another explanation.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Gimme one.”

  “He’s visiting a friend?”

  “Why wouldn’t he tell us?” Vivi asked. “No reason to hide it from Aunt Fran or any of us. He tells Zach everything.”

  And Gabe. Fact was, if the old man had a dying friend, Gabe would know it. They didn’t have secrets. He even knew where Gabe had been this past weekend, which put him in an elite class of one among the rest of the family.

  Unless his grandfather believed that Gabe—or anyone else in the family—couldn’t handle the truth. Which, based on the burning sensation in Gabe’s chest right now, might not be too far from wrong.

  “I’ll find out,” he said, pushing up to a stand and stabbing a hand through his hair. “That old fucker loves me enough to tell me if he’s dying.”

  “Don’t tell him I spied on him, Gabe.” Vivi reached out and grabbed his arm, squeezing. “You know how he is about his dignity.”

  He searched her face, thinking about that. “How long was he in that…place?”

  “I waited about half an hour, and he never came out. I had an appointment and couldn’t stay.”

  “He’s home today?” G
abe asked.

  “I think so.”

  “All right.” He took Vivi’s hand and pressed it between his. “Chill out, kid. I’m going out to Sudbury to talk to him.”

  “Call me.”

  He nodded and gave Lang’s hand a shake.

  “Did you have something else to talk to Vivi about?” Lang asked. “I know you’ve been out of town for a few days.”

  Gabe hesitated, looking from one to the other. He wasn’t about to make Vivi’s day suck any more than it already did. “Nothing important. I’ll call you.”

  He left, hustling around the corner to run smack into his youngest sister, Chessie, who was moving through the halls as she moved through life: too damn fast.

  She let out a soft shriek as they bumped, her glasses falling from the top of her head where they spent almost as much time as they did on her nose.

  “Gabe! I didn’t know you were back.” She scrunched up her pretty features and narrowed blue eyes that matched the ones he saw in the mirror every morning. The only blue eyes in the entire clan always gave Chessie and Gabe a secret bond, along with their mutual love of fast cars and kick-ass technology.

  “I’m back, but not for long.” He eyed her for a minute, remembering his plan to possibly steal her away from this place so she could use her unparalleled computer skills. She’d love the challenge, and maybe the move.

  And, most important of all, he trusted her almost as much as he trusted his grandfather.

  “What?” she asked, brushing back her thick black hair and running her figer over her teeth as if she’d gotten ruby red lipstick there. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “Just wondering if…you’re happy.”

  Her eyes widened at the unexpected question. “Like, right this minute or with life in general or what?”

  “With your job.”

  She glanced from side to side as if it was a taboo topic. “Why?”

  If he said a word to her now, she’d tell Vivi and shit would hit so many fans the walls would turn brown. “Just curious. Are you?”

  “Happy enough,” she said vaguely. “It’s not the Bullet Catchers, but…”

  “The Bullet Catchers?”

  “You know, that security firm down in New York.”

  “Of course I know it.” He was on speed-dial with the owner, who was sending him his first client. Another fact that would kill Vivi, since the competition between the two security firms was fierce. “We have a cousin who works there, remember? Johnny Christiano.” The Bullet Catchers were bigger, better, badder, and about a thousand times more profitable than the Angelinos, but the rivalry had started early and gotten more heated with each passing year.

  Chessie leaned closer and whispered, “That Lucy Sharpe lady called me.”

  Oh, she was a busy one, that Lucy. But tapping great talent was how she built her little dynasty. She’d done her level best trying to get Gabe to work for her, but blood really is thicker than water, and Vivi would have drawn his if he’d taken the job. “What’d she offer?” he asked.

  “She just said she wanted to talk.”

  “And you did?”

  Chessie averted her gaze. “I just went down to see her operation. Gabe, they have a war room that practically brought me to tears.”

  “So build one here.”

  She gave him a look that said they both knew the Guardian Angelinos weren’t there yet. “Good to have goals, though.”

  “Is that your goal?” he asked. “To work for the Bullet Catchers?”

  She gave him a look. “First of all, I love my job and would never leave Vivi and Zach. Then there’s the minor problem of my boyfriend.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re still seeing that douche-sack.”

  She glared at him. “Please don’t tell me you think you have a right to an opinion on who I date.”

  True. “So what’s the problem?”

  She sighed, obviously torn about confiding in him. “I was thinking if I move out of town, it might, you know, make a point.”

  “What point are you trying to make?”

  She lifted her left hand and flicked her ring finger.

  “Chessie!” He almost spit. “First of all, you’re, like, twenty-three.”

  “Nice, bro. Try thirty.”

  Really? When the hell did that happen? “Second, we don’t allow dickheads in this family. Vivi already pushed the limits with Lang.”

  Her jaw dropped. “I love Colt!”

  “Now you do, but remember what a stick he had up his ass before we broke him in?” Except they all knew who broke him in—Vivi. “Anyway, ultimatums don’t work, Chess, trust me. It only makes a guy run farther.” Which, come to think of it, was a good idea with Chessie’s bonehead boyfriend, Matt.

  The intern stuck her head around the corner. “Chessie, the IT rep is here for your meeting.”

  “Thanks, Erin. Tell her I’ll be right out.” She scooted past Gabe, then paused. “Why did you ask if I was happy with this job, anyway?”

  “Just curious.”

  She gave him a look any sister would give her lying brother. “Gabe.”

  “What?”

  “I know you’re a spook of the highest order. Did you somehow figure out I went to New York and met with that Sharpe woman?”

  Half of Gabe’s game was the fact that they all thought he was more badass than he could ever be. Which was exactly the way he liked it. “Guess you’ll never know.” He gave her a wink and headed out to his car.

  Chapter Four

  Something stank, and it wasn’t Nino’s world-class chicken cacciatore—not that anything that old man cooked smelled bad. But the kitchen of the rambling two-story colonial was freakishly empty. Sure, it was midweek and Mom and Dad were off doing whatever the hell they did now that their nest was essentially no more than the family gathering place on Sunday afternoons for football and Nino’s gravy. Dad was golfing, probably, and Mom was likely at lunch with a bunch of old ladies in hats.

  But where the hell was Nino?

  Gabe crossed the family room to peer out the French doors that led to the patio and sloping hill and down to a lake that was the site of hundreds of lazy summer days and plenty of wild games of ice hockey in the winter. No sign of Nino on the bench Dad had built for his father to rest while gardening.

  The garden itself, not much more than a brown shadow of its summer glory, seemed unnaturally empty. In the fall, Gabe would often find his grandfather in his precious vegetable patch, turning the soil with a pitchfork, laying down mulch in preparation for winter.

  But the garden was empty.

  Gabe pressed his fingertips on the glass, staring at a single leaf as it fell from the oak and fluttered to the ground, its days complete. He refused to get sucked into morbid, maudlin analogies about that.

  Still…if his grandfather died…

  Gabe swallowed hard. Nino wasn’t going to die. He couldn’t. This whole family would be as bare as that tree without the old man, who somehow made every one of them think they were his favorite.

  Gabe turned and shot another look at the kitchen, where he fully expected Nino to be doing what Nino did—cook like a god who put every moron on TV to shame. Mario Batali, my ass. Nino Stinkin’ Rossi was the man.

  But where was the man?

  A foreboding he didn’t like or want wended its yellow-bellied self up Gabe’s spine and settled at the base of his neck, throbbing like a motherfucker of a headache. Ignoring it, he walked through the house to stand in the oversized entryway, Mom’s fussy-plush living room on one side, the giant dining room on the other.

  He could practically smell the pesto, hear the laughter and bickering, tenderness and teasing as comforting as the food and family. At the center of it all, the man who was a father, a grandfather, and a great-uncle—connected in one way or another to everyone who ever lived under this roof.

  Slamming down a pang of emotion, Gabe positioned himself at the dead center of the two-story entryway, looking up t
o be sure he was directly under the chandelier. He’d been about seven years old when he’d discovered that there was something in the shape of the curved stairway, the height of the ceiling, and the position of the floor vent that allowed him to hear almost everything happening in the house if he stood right…in…this spot.

  Back when they were kids, he could pick up the bass notes of whatever bubble-gum music Nicki, Vivi, and Chessie were playing in their room, or the beeps of an ancient version of the Mario Brothers video game that Marc was zoned out on. And he could always hear the insults being hurled between Zach and JP—those were audible anywhere.

  He could even hear Mom and Dad’s conversations from the office down the hall, discussing a legal case he was wrangling, or an issue with one of the kids. And, of course, the low hum of the TV in the family room and the clatter of pots and utensils while Nino whipped up gourmet meals.

  If Gabe stood in that one place long enough, he used to be able to know what every one of the six other kids and three adults in that house were doing. This spot had launched his uncanny ability to identify where sounds came from, then pushed him to want to know how to use heat and smells to track people and discover things that were not meant to be discovered. Obviously, he was born to be a spook.

  But today, the walls of the Rossi home weren’t ricocheting any secrets, and even if he grabbed his thermal imaging camera from the car, he wouldn’t find the heat of a person in this place.

  But then he heard it. The softest whisper of a voice, then silence, then a voice again.

  Was that coming from the basement?

  Gabe shifted without making a sound, moving closer to the floor vent to listen again, his hunch instantly confirmed. Nino was in the basement and…talking. He didn’t hear another voice so, was he on the phone?

  What the hell was he doing down there? Since Mom had moved the laundry room upstairs a few years ago, no one ever went down there except to play pool on Sunday afternoons when the family was together. Nino never went in the basement; he hated the steep stairs. So why would he be there now, when no one was home?