She’d come down here to forget.
And she had to get drunk to do it, because just looking at that incredibly blue water made it almost impossible.
That color reminded her of one thing, and one thing alone—the most amazing pair of eyes in all of creation.
The eyes of Max “Shame” Schaeffer.
The man she’d loved since she was just a little girl.
The man who hadn’t picked up the phone the one time she’d needed him.
She clenched a hand into a fist and bit her inner cheek hard. It didn’t keep her mind from spinning back, though. She found herself thinking about a rainy night. And then, another night a few weeks later. It hadn’t been raining then.
Her breathing hitched.
She pressed her fingers to her left eye in sensory memory as her mind spun it all back up, churning the bits and pieces from that time like sand in an hourglass.
“Here you go, senorita. Ice water. Margarita on the rocks coming up next.”
She jerked, startled, and met Jorge’s eyes. He hesitated as he went to put down the water. “Senorita Steele, are you...ah...what is the word...are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Jorge.” She gave him a tight smile and tossed back the rest of her watered-down margarita. “The heat. I think it’s getting to me.”
Concern washed over his leathery face. “Should we have somebody escort you back to the resort? The sun and heat can be brutal when you are not accustomed.”
“No.” She took the water he’d just put down and lifted it to her lips. “I probably just need more water. I’ll be fine.”
He waited another moment before he finally straightened and moved on, his tray full rainbow of drinks.
She stared at her water, focused on the ice cubes and tried not to think about the cold sweat that had broken out across her skin.
Chapter Four
Shame
“NO. I HAVEN’T TALKED to her.”
Shame overheard Con’s comment, but he didn’t pay it much attention. If it applied to him, well, Con would have seen fit to tell him. Since he hadn’t, then Shame didn’t see any point in listening in, although the terse conversation between Riley and Con—his two best friends—was clearly a tense one.
“She hasn’t called me back, damn it. It’s been three days.”
“She’s a big girl, Ry.” Con took the tray from the woman who appeared at the end of the bar and said, “Wait right there.”
After he deposited the burgers and fries, Con returned to Shawntelle and gave her a smacking kiss that had more than a few people whooping it up.
Shame hadn’t been surprised when she’d appeared back in Ballz & Bellz a while ago. She’d moved in with Con and when one of the other servers in the pub had asked her about it, she’d said she’d decided she liked small-town life.
She was now working part time in the pub, although Shame suspected she and Con spent half their time flirting.
No. He wasn’t jealous or anything. Not like he’d want to spend hours staring at anybody all dopey-faced.
A heart-shaped face slid up from the back of his mind, eyes laughing at him, then smiling. And her mouth...
Stop it. You’re getting her out of your system, remember?
“Doesn’t it bother you at all that our baby sister took off to Mexico without any warning and hasn’t called—”
Shame slammed down the bottles he’d been stocking along the back of the bar. Spinning on his heel, he glared at the two brothers. Con met his gaze levelly, but Riley didn’t even look at him.
“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.
Con frowned at him. “Nothing, Shame.” Then he turned to Riley, talking to him in a low voice.
It wasn’t low enough.
His muttered, “We can talk about this later,” had Shame’s every instinct on edge.
“Is there a reason you can’t talk about it now? Ry just said she’s down in Mexico and you haven’t heard from her in days.”
He hadn’t seen Charli in weeks—too many of them—but it was for the best. This was the first he’d heard of her taking off to Mexico. He didn’t like the fact that Con didn’t want to talk about it, either.
Shame strode over to the brothers, ignoring the woman at the bar who tried to flag him down. He hardly ever worked with the customers. He’d bus tables, wash dishes and stock, but interacting with people was more than he cared to do.
The only reason he came in and worked the twenty hours a week he did was because Riley and Con had put it into the contract he’d signed without telling him and he hadn’t paid it any attention. He hadn’t worried about them screwing him out of money. He hadn’t thought they’d try to make him actually interact with people.
Assholes. Friends could be total assholes.
“Why in the hell is she down in Mexico anyway? She’s trying to finish her stupid internship,” he pointed out. Immediately, he felt bad. Charli was so close to finishing up her residency and would soon be a doctor. He knew how much that meant to her. She’d talked about it ever since she was a kid. She’d been ten years old and he’d been thirteen while she sat on the bed behind him, carefully cleaning up the wounds on his back from yet another beating. She hadn’t asked how it had happened. Con had been poking around looking for the right stuff to use on the wounds and she’d found him, then followed him and pushed her older brother aside, saying he was ‘contaminating the clean bandages.’
He’d also been hurting Shame like hell.
Charli hadn’t been near as rough, not that Shame would ever tell her that.
She’d talked the entire time about how she’d be a doctor and if he ever got hurt, he could just come to her.
Most of his life, when he was hurt, she was the one who came to mind.
But he didn’t go to her.
He couldn’t risk it, because the hold she had on him was too great already.
Still, he knew her dreams of being a doctor, and if she’d skipped out in the middle of her residency...
“She was given time off from work,” Con said, his voice short. He gave Shame a dark look and shook his head. “Leave it alone.”
“Why was she given time off?” Riley was the one to ask the question.
Con and Charli had always been the closer of the siblings. They’d been younger, closer together in age, and while Riley had been off working to take care of them, Con had been at home actually cooking for Charli and making sure she had clean clothes to wear to school the next day.
All of the Steele siblings loved each other. There was no denying that. But there were certain bonds that just went...deeper.
Con slanted a look at Riley and shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Shame could tell Con was lying.
So could Riley. Shame saw it in the man’s eyes.
“Doesn’t it seem sort of weird that she takes of like this?” Shame pressed. “And then for her not to call. Y’all never go more than a couple of days without talking to each other.”
“She talked to me.”
The words came from the most unexpected place.
Shame swung his head around and looked at Shawntelle. She’d slid behind the bar and stood there, filling a glass with soda water. After adding a twist of lime, she glanced up at him and shrugged. “I called her this morning and she answered.”
“She talked to you?” Riley asked.
There was no denying it.
He sounded put out.
Shawntelle took a sip of her water and shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe her phone was off when you called, Ry. I don’t know.”
“Her phone was off? And when she was done talking to you, it never occurred to her to return my calls?”
Riley was thinking the same thing he was. Bullshit, Shame thought sourly.
He was tempted to pull out his phone then and there, but he didn’t.
He’d call her later.
He didn’t call her very often, but when he did, she always answered, usually on the first ring.
If not the first, then the second.
He’d call her and figure out what was going on. Once he did, he’d tell her brothers and Riley could stop being a mother hen.
He’d do it just to be a friend, too.
No other reason.
He’d gotten her out of his system, after all.
Decision made, he went back to stocking the bar.
HE DIDN’T CALL HER while he was working.
He knew better than that.
No, he waited until he got home. Once he was inside, he tried not to think about the times he’d had Charli here, and how much emptier the place seemed without her.
It hadn’t been like that before. He hadn’t bought this house with a lover in mind, hadn’t anticipated things would change so much after a few short encounters.
Now he was already thinking of selling it, but then he’d have to find another place that suited him and that wouldn’t necessarily be easy. This place had been ideal when he’d been ready to own a home—a basement for a gym, a bedroom, a decent kitchen and a couple of spare rooms that he could do whatever in the hell he wanted with.
One of them was an art studio.
The other...well, he didn’t always want to think about what he’d made the other into. His prison. His dungeon. A reminder of what he’d escaped. A reminder of what he’d never become.
That was the room in the very back of the house, built on like an afterthought, and he didn’t even have to see the door unless he was specifically looking for it. It was kept padlocked. Not just locked, but padlocked, so he didn’t have to worry about anybody going in there unless he allowed it. And that would never happen.
He ignored the odd urge to go into the room—it came and went more often than he liked. Instead, he went into the living room and sat down, pulling out his phone.
He’d call Charli.
She’d tell him what was going on and then he’d hang up.
She always told him things he didn’t want to hear, as if she was drawing him into the web that was her warmth and light. This wouldn’t be any different.
After a couple of minutes, he had himself hyped up enough and reached for the phone and punched in the number. He refused to let himself program it into his phone, although he knew it by heart.
It rang once.
He ignored the hitch in his chest.
It rang twice.
He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself.
But then there was a third ring, and a fourth.
By the time it had rung six, then seven times, he was scowling.
The eighth ring had him worried.
Then it went to voice mail and without thinking, he snapped, “Answer your fucking phone, Charli.”
Chapter Five
Charli
THE SIGHT OF THE NUMBER had her heart racing.
She almost answered.
Each time the phone rang, she had to clench her hand into a fist to keep from doing just that.
She wasn’t ready to talk to him.
If she could get herself to the point of acceptance, she might just acknowledge that there was no point in talking to him ever again. Except maybe to tell him goodbye.
That was what she needed to do.
Tell him goodbye, let her brothers know she was tired of things, that she needed a change, tired of staying in the small town where she’d grown up, hoping the man she’d always loved would one day notice her. She should move. If she got away from him, permanently, it would be easier to move on.
Some part of her knew that.
It was just so hard to actually do.
Especially when she saw him so often.
And now he was calling...
Abruptly, she grabbed her phone and brought up the internet. Ignoring the little icon at the top of the bar letting her know she had missed calls—like eight of them—she did a search for realtors.
Her sharp, agile brain wasn’t fazed by the influx of hits, or even the costs. She didn’t make much as a resident, but she’d been working since she was sixteen and she was, after all, a genius. That carried over to numbers. At one point, she’d almost told her brothers they didn’t have to do what they did out of any need to take care of her, but she’d decided they felt like they had to.
Riley still had no idea that she knew how he’d provided for her.
Con, she believed, suspected, but she had no intention of cluing them in.
The male ego was a weird thing.
It didn’t bother her that they felt the need to take care of her. She understood it—the urge, at least. It had been hard on all of them, losing their parents. Riley’s way of coping had been to focus on taking care of his siblings. Con had coped by turning into more of a charming bastard, and, like Riley, he’d doted on her.
Charli had focused on school...and some odds and ends. The stock market had almost lured her away from medical school. Not out of any desire to be rich, but because she loved the edge of it. The money was a thrill, but she didn’t need money to be happy.
But by the time she was twenty-one, she’d earned enough to pay for more than half of what hadn’t been covered by her scholarships. Riley had been so focused on what her regular education had cost, he was unaware of all the extra classes she took and she was quietly paying those down, letting him handle what he needed to handle.
Now, at twenty-five, she had the money she needed to take this trip to Mexico, and enough of a nest egg that she could put a down payment on a house and not hurt, money-wise, while she finished up her residency. Actually, she could spend the next two years down here in Mexico and not lift a finger.
Charli hated the fact that she was tempted.
She hated the fact that she’d run down here to hide.
But she had.
It wasn’t just from Shame, though, and that was the one thing that let her keep her chin halfway up. She’d needed the time. To heal. To breathe. To accept. To grieve over a loss she hadn’t even realized was happening until it was too late.
“It was a sign,” she told herself softly, finally selecting a website.
She knew where she wanted to live.
Immediately, Shame’s face flickered through her mind.
Scratch that—she knew a place where she thought if might be fun to live. Simple and small, and that would be a welcome change after dealing with the upkeep of her parents’ old place for so long.
She could move to Louisville, see about transferring her residency to one of the bigger hospitals there, and she already knew the suburb where she’d like to live.
The train cars in Germantown had been overhauled completely and designed to serve as apartments.
She’d seen them online months ago but then, she had still been convinced she could get Shame finally to admit what she’d always believed to be true.
Now she was the one doing the admitting.
The only truth was that she needed to move on.
When the caboose apartments came up as available, she clicked on the link.
It took her to a website and she stared at the phone number for ages before she finally tapped on it.
“It’s time,” she told herself. As she shifted on her lounge chair, a twinge in her lower belly jolted up, a persistent reminder to be careful how she moved.
She took it as another sign.
The phone rang and when a man came on the line, she said, “I was wondering if any of the train cars are still available for rent.”
Chapter Six
Shame
“I NEED SOME TIME OFF.”
Shame planted one hand on the doorjamb and stared into Riley’s office. His plane didn’t leave until seven, so he had time, but if Riley decided to be an ass, he’d just go on to Louisville and wait his time out at the airport.
“Why?” Riley didn’t even look up from the computer.
“I found out where Charli is. I’m going down there to find out what’s going on.”
Riley looked up slowly. His eyes darkened, mouth going tigh
t. Finally, he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.
A wiser man—or somebody who wasn’t Shame—might have taken note of the big biceps that bunched under the short sleeves of the T-shirt. Shame just braced a shoulder against the door and waited.
It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize the look in his old friend’s eyes. He did.
He just wasn’t sure what the deal was.
Nobody seemed to give a flying fuck about the fact that Riley and Con’s baby sister—the apple of their fucking eyes—had disappeared for parts unknown. Or at least, for Playa Del Carmen, a strip of beach down in Mexico, just a little south of Cancun. A bit quieter, a little bit more scenery, but still, it was Cancun. It was Mexico. She’d gone alone to an all-inclusive resort and she’d booked an open-ended trip. He knew, because he’d paid damn good money to find that out, as well as damn good money to find out some other information.
Of course, some of the money he’d paid had been...well, he wouldn’t call it a waste. He’d invested it, hoping for a return. But sometimes, an investment didn’t yield much of anything.
So far, he hadn’t gotten much of a return on anything except the resort in Mexico. She had booked one of the high-end suites and she hadn’t specified when she’d leave.
That had made him mad with jealousy, because as far as he knew, she didn’t have that kind of money.
It also worried him, because how was she affording it?
The one person he’d gotten to talk to him at the resort had assured him that she hadn’t been seen with anybody, but that didn’t mean much. He could just be getting jerked around, or maybe there was nothing for him to find out.
But that was bullshit, because there was something for him to find out.
Meaning—answers.
There was something going on with Charli and he’d damn well find out what it was.
It didn’t have anything to do with the few brief interludes they’d shared or anything else. He was forgetting about those, because that was the best thing to do.
He was going to find out what was up, because she was Con and Riley’s little sister and they were his friends. He took care of them, because they’d taken care of him. That was what friends did.
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