“It’s late and we’re alive and I love you, so let’s dance.”
Uh-oh times infinity.
Dave took both of my hands in his, spread his arms wide, pulled us around in a ragged circle, and tripped over my foot.
It’s not pretty when a man who’s six-three hits the sidewalk like a skyscraper crashing to the earth, but Dave hauled himself back upright and tried again.
“Sorry, I only know dancing from the movies, I think you’ll have to lead.”
He stood waiting for me to take charge of this disaster show, which was not happening.
“You can’t dance, honestly? I thought you filthy rich billionaires were trained from birth to waltz all night long –”
“No, never learned – I’m not a high society type, you know that. So go ahead, show your loyal cook exactly how we’re supposed to do this without crashing.” He waited some more, and boy, was he doomed for disappointment.
“Dave, I don’t know how to dance either. No idea, no clue. Whatsoever or at all. It’s something people do that involves spinning around and dipping and stuff, but I’m clueless as to how it actually happens.”
“But bars are all about music and people, so I figured you’d know –”
“Nope, but at least I can change a tire.”
Dave grinned. “You got me. So how about we just make this up as we go and see what happens?”
We tried. We spun and stumbled, cars splashed past, and strangers laughed at the two dizzy goofballs falling all over each other on the sidewalk. Dave’s huge hulking feet stomped all over my instep, I kicked him in the shins without meaning to, and I’m not sure how he managed to almost put his elbow in my eye while trying to twirl me, but he found a way.
We didn’t improve with practice. We did, however, get much worse, and it didn’t help that I couldn’t stop giggling.
Dave spun himself into a tree. I tripped over a bicycle rack. We tried moving in super-slow circles so at least we wouldn’t hurt ourselves, but we ended up stumbling over a curb and into the street. I thank the gods of silliness to this day for the reflexes of the taxi driver who screeched to a halt just in time, and I don’t blame him a bit for shouting some ripe British obscenities at us – I’m pretty sure I heard ‘bloody’ and ‘bollocks’ in there somewhere – because we had to be the most idiotic traffic hazard he’d come across all day.
“Dave?”
My alleged dancing partner picked himself up off the sidewalk for the millionth time. “Talk to me, or at least don’t collide with my shins again.”
“Dave, this dancing thing was a sweet idea, but I have a better one.”
“I’m game for any idea that doesn’t involve us collecting more bruises.”
“Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.”
I took his hands and steered us through a ragged half circle that brought us up against a bench. I then stepped up onto the bench so we stood eye to eye.
I wrapped my arms around the warmth of his body and pulled him close against me. I leaned my forehead against his, I breathed him in, and I listened to the hissing of the rain all around us. “Maybe the movies lied to us about dancing, but I know this is the part where they say, ‘kiss me, you fool’.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I held him, he held me, and we tasted each other long and slow and sweet. I opened my mouth against his, his tongue teased between my lips, and we kissed until there wasn’t anything else. Wet, sighing, melting together and breathing as one in the rain, we loved each other with our mouths and our hands and the heat of our bodies.
People spilling out of a nearby restaurant as it closed hooted at us and we ignored them; my phone buzzed again in Dave’s pocket, and we ignored that too. A cop with nothing better to do advised us in an accent of extreme boredom that we really should take the show back to our hotel room, but we decided not to hear her.
It should have lasted forever, but nothing does.
The world will only stand for being ignored so long, and then it comes for you with sharp teeth.
Dave lifted me off the bench and settled my feet onto the ground. He sank his hands into my hair in the rain and gripped tight, I stood on tiptoe and stretched up to him, and we kissed long and hard and deep one more time in the rain.
Then they came for us.
We tasted each other and horns blared, headlights sliced through the darkness, and two black Hummers sent up sheets of water as they swerved out of traffic and bounced up onto the sidewalk on either side of us. We fell apart and lurched back from whatever was going on, Dave pulled me behind him because his first instinct was to protect me – and then the driver’s door of the closest vehicle flew open and I recognized Mr. Herndon, one of our bodyguards.
His phone clamped to his ear, the bodyguard talked as he hurried toward us. “Yes, Ms. Dallstrom, we’ve located them and we’re making the pickup now – yes, ma’am, here he is.”
He thrust the phone into Dave’s hand. Dave stared at the phone for a second as if he didn’t know what it was, and then he held it to his ear.
“Sis? What’s going on, is –”
Four other bodyguards swarmed around us, while three more men on the Dallstrom Defense Systems payroll glared at the small crowd gathering on the sidewalk. The gawkers wondered what sort of late-night show they’d happened upon, a few took pictures for no reason I could see, and the security guys closed in around us, looming over me and cutting off my view. I clung to Dave’s arm, gasping and confused and sure of nothing except that I didn’t dare let him out of my sight.
The guards pressed forward, trying to hustle us aboard the closest vehicle – but Dave planted his feet, clamped one hand on the door frame, and stood out there in the rain, staring at his reflection in one of the windows as he listened to his sister. His eyes were wide, his breathing a rushed whisper.
Kristen’s voice was a faint echoing babble on the other end of the call and while I couldn’t make out the words, I knew that woman never babbled. Ragnarok and the End of Days and the Mayan Apocalypse could all happen at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Kristen would stay on top of things somehow, and she definitely wouldn’t be caught babbling.
Dave’s voice yanked me back to the here and the now and the real. “We’re on our way, just hang on and we’ll be there in a few hours.” A hesitation, more I couldn’t make out on the other end, and he spoke again. “We’ll deal with this, Sis, we’ll handle it somehow, I promise.”
Another breath, another silence, and Dave spoke to Kristen one more time before hanging up. “I don’t know how, but we will. We’re heading out now, I’ll get back to you once we’re in the air.”
Dave handed the phone back to Mr. Herndon, but he didn’t climb right into the waiting Hummer. Instead, he turned and stood staring off into the distance at nothing while the guards fussed and the rain fell.
“Dave?”
He shook himself like a big bewildered dog, and then looked around for me as if only just remembering that I was there.
He stared at me, blank and lost.
“Dad had a heart attack an hour ago. He’s alive, but only by inches. We have to go.”
I had no idea what to say, so I babbled the first thing that came into my head.
“Dave, he’s the toughest old bastard on the planet, he’ll outlive us all.”
He didn’t.
21
Einar Dallstrom lived for five more days.
The toughest old bastard on the planet slid in and out of consciousness, fighting his failing heart like a tiger and madder than hell at the idea of his own body getting the better of him. He clawed his way fully awake here and there, usually to curse at the nurses and demand things. Once he found the strength to throw a plastic pitcher full of ice water at the leading cardiac specialist in the country, even though the guy was only trying to tell him the truth that there wasn’t any hope, not really.
Einar Fucking Dallstrom was not having any of that crap.
But he didn’t have a choice, n
o one does. When it’s your time, not even forty billion dollars and all the righteous fury in the world will buy you one more minute.
Kristen and Dave and I lived in the waiting area of the cardiac intensive care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, whenever we weren’t violating every rule in the book about visiting hours by staying right at his bedside. We bullshitted our way into staying with him more often than not – I knew a few tricks for getting your way with critical care nurses from Mom’s months in the hospital – and we waited.
We waited with him, he knew we were there now and then, and occasionally he talked to his son and daughter. Sometimes what he said made sense, and other times … well, not so much.
He chewed out Dave one afternoon because a company plant in Buenos Aires wasn’t meeting its production quota on jet engine parts, and why the hell wasn’t his son down there making those people get with the program? The next morning, semi-conscious and confused but still angry, he told Kristen that at fifteen, she had no damn business sneaking out of the house to party with her friends, which he seemed to think had happened just the night before.
Once at three a.m., when Dave was sleeping for a few stolen minutes and Kristen was on the phone with some company asshole in Singapore who didn’t understand about time zones or how the world was falling apart, Einar Dallstrom talked to me.
Curled up in a chair at his bedside and half-asleep myself, I almost didn’t hear him over the beeping monitors.
Not until he made a weak fist and thumped it against the bedrail.
“Goddammit, Kansas, wake the fuck up.”
I lurched all the way awake and looked over to see him staring at me.
“What’s up, Mr. Dallstrom? Do you need the nurse, or can I –”
“No, I do not need one of those fluttering bitches in here, and you can tell me where the hell my son and daughter are …” His voice trailed off, he coughed, and his head lolled to one side. Air rasped in and out of his lungs, two of the monitors pinged and beeped faster, and I reached for the button to call a nurse whether he wanted one or not – but then his hand clamped down on mine and he stopped me.
“No.”
That one small effort exhausted him. I waited while his breathing steadied, I wondered if I should go grab a nurse anyway or maybe pull Kristen away from her phone call, and then he found his voice again.
“So are they here? They were here before, Kristen wouldn’t let me talk, said to rest, but I’ll be resting for good soon enough, right?”
What could I say? “It looks that way. As for Dave, he’s sprawled over a few chairs in the waiting area trying to sleep for two minutes, and the last I saw of Kristen, she was walking up and down the hall talking to some manager in Singapore who apparently can’t handle his own avionics division without somebody here holding his hand over the phone, or something like that.”
“Just as well they’re not here, I need to talk to you.” His head fell back on the god-awful stubby little rock-hard pillow they give you in hospitals and he gasped, fighting for the strength to keep going. “Damn worthless doctors said just last week I had another six months left at least, maybe even a year …”
What? “Wait a minute – you knew you were sick? Because maybe you missed the memo, but you’re supposed to tell people about trivial little things like terminal illnesses, the last I looked.”
He rolled an eye in my direction. “Fuck no, let people know you’re weak and they’ll destroy you.” He coughed again, a nasty wet hacking sound, and added, “That goes double when you’re in bed with monsters, and why do you think I tried to pull that stupid engagement dodge on David? I was ninety-nine per cent sure he’d blow it off like he did, but I had to try, to keep him and Kristen and everybody safe when I was gone.”
“Safe from what?”
“If you’re lucky, you’ll never find out. There’s a lot of shit you have to do to protect your own, so people can sleep safe under their covers at night, but it’s all going to fall apart now, and you know why?”
I shrugged, not bothering to say that I had no clue what he was talking about. Maybe it was just some weird paranoid raving brought on by the five million or so meds being pumped into his failing body, who knew?
A nurse stuck her head in, one of the good ones who busted her ass for her patients and who also didn’t much care about humoring Daddy Dallstrom’s temper. “Ms. Hamilton, I’m not liking the readings I’m getting on Mr. Personality here – his oxygen levels and blood pressure are dropping into the basement, and the rest of his vitals are all over the place. So I’d appreciate it if you’d step out for a bit, Dr. Mendoza is on his way down to take a closer look and maybe later –”
Something told me it wasn’t the meds. “Not later, now – it’ll take the doctor a couple of minutes to get here anyway, so give me two more minutes and then I’m out of your hair, I promise.
She gave me her sternest stare. “One minute and thirty seconds, Ms. Hamilton.”
Dave’s dad spoke up the instant she was gone, as if he knew time was running shorter by the second. “You have to promise to look out for David, you have to promise right now. I know I do shit for showing it, but I love him and he’s a good boy, but he’s too soft. Too soft and honorable and decent to do what I’ve had to do, and what I’ve had to do is the only way I know to keep out the fucking monsters and wolves –”
He gagged, he coughed again, another monitor shrilled, and he had to be out of his mind, didn’t he? I mean, monsters and wolves? Were dragons after us too?
Bullshit, Cassie. That sour old bastard may be dying, but he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
I had no idea what I was talking about, but that’s never stopped me before. “Dave will think of something, Mr. Dallstrom, he’ll find a better way, a decent way to keep us all safe, I know it.”
I sniffed, I rubbed at my eyes, and I thought about how much I hated death and hospitals. I thought about how Mom’s machines had beeped and pinged and then gone silent, at the very end.
There’s nothing quieter than a dead person’s hospital room, and that’s what this was going to be soon.
I kept yapping, having no idea of what to say and saying it anyway. “I love Dave and I trust him to do what’s right.”
“What’s right will get you all killed. What I’m willing to do, what I’ve done for the last thirty years, is the only way.”
I knew Dave. I trusted him in my heart, and I trusted him with my heart. “Dave will find a better way and if you don’t agree, then you don’t know your own son. What is it that you do, anyway, that’s it’s the fucking one and only way?”
Great, Cassie, curse at the dying man. Mom and Dad would be so proud.
He turned his head sideways on the pillow, because he didn’t have the strength left to lift his head and look at me. He pinned me in place with those fading eyes and while Dave and Kristen talked to him a little bit over the next couple of nights before the end, the next few moments were the last time Dave’s father ever spoke to me.
“What do I do? Little girl, I will do anything to protect my family, my company, and this country.”
Then Dr. Mendoza bustled through the intensive care unit’s doors and swept on into the room, the nurse herded me out, and Einar Dallstrom stared past them to say one last word to me.
“Anything.”
***
I thought I knew Dad’s secrets.
The under-the-table deals with foreign governments, the alliances with third-world warlords, the sharing of classified weapons technology with dictators – I thought I knew all the darkest things he’d done.
I had no idea.
Dad did talk to me and to Kristen over the next two nights. He told us enough to put Kristen in tears, and she was no crier. On his last night, he sent her out of the room and he told me the rest.
The truth, all of it, was so much worse than I’d ever imagined.
Cassie would leave if she knew.
That loving, honest, tough-as
-nails country girl who was so much more than I could ever deserve would curse my name, she’d leave, and she’d never come back.
It didn’t matter that none of it was technically my fault, that I’d never spilled a drop into that ocean of blood with my own hands, that I’d had no voice or control or say in any of it.
I had my father’s name, I lived a life that he’d paid for with the lives of so many innocent people, and once he released his last gasping, ragged breath and didn’t breathe in again, it would all be on me.
It had to end. I had to protect my sister. I had to protect Cassie, and I had to protect myself from losing her.
I had to save us from the monsters and I could only see one way to do it.
I didn’t build Einar Dallstrom’s nightmare kingdom, but I was going to burn it to the ground.
22
The funeral was not what I would have expected for the going-away-forever party of a billionaire. You’d think someone with forty billion dollars would check out with a spectacular river of mourners a mile long, even if the estate had to pay them. You’d expect black horses drawing a black carriage, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing sad songs in the rain, a speech by the President, and maybe elephants and dancing girls.
Einar Dallstrom went away with maybe twenty people watching. There was no music. An older-model black hearse that looked like the funeral home’s ‘B’ team carried his unremarkable pine coffin to a hole in Graceland Cemetery that was the same as the hole everybody else goes into. A minister said a few bland words about forgiveness and judgment and the better world waiting beyond this vale of tears. No one listened. Traffic rumbled past in the streets outside the cemetery’s green sanctuary, planes buzzed overhead on their way to and from O’Hare, and a faint siren howled far away.
Just another day in Chicago.
Kristen shook the hands of mourners and accepted their condolences. Tears brimmed full in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, but she wouldn’t let herself break down. She nodded thanks to this person and that for coming, she doled out the occasional hug, and she wore a brave smile. I could feel her breaking inside, but she refused to show it.
No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance Page 23