by Kylie Logan
I took a look at a photo of the kitchen with its prewar (pick a war, any war) appliances, pitted linoleum, and stained drop ceiling, and I cringed.
The rest of the file was filled with paperwork, and I glanced over it casually. Or at least I would have if I hadn’t come to the page where Levi listed past employers.
Yeah, his own PI agency was listed. So while he’d lied to me, he’d never lied to Estelle or to his bank. I wasn’t sure if this was a comfort or not.
According to the papers, he’d worked as an assistant at another private investigation firm prior to starting his own, and for a few years and right out of college (no big surprise, he listed his degree as criminal justice), he was a juvenile probation officer. In college . . .
I scanned the page, and it was a good thing I wasn’t sitting too close to the desk, or my jaw would have broken when my mouth fell open.
“Chippen—!”
My blood heated and caught my imagination on fire. Levi had worked his way through college as a stripper!
Thank goodness Hank wasn’t around. It would have been difficult to explain why I sputtered and grinned one minute then turned beet red the next.
Tell that to my brain. It glommed on to the picture that formed in my head (I refuse to go into details!) and refused to budge.
My hands trembling and my cheeks flaming, I shoved the photos and the papers back into the folder and slipped it to the bottom of the pile.
Yeah, like that would help me forget the juicy secret!
In an effort to at least try, I riffled through the rest of the file folders, looking for my own. Estelle had sold my house to me at about the same time Levi had bought his bar, so the papers were bound to be there. It would be interesting to take a look at the before photos of Bea & Bees. Maybe if I concentrated on peeling paint, I could forget the thoughts of clothes being peeled off.
I gave myself a mental slap and reached for my folder. Just like with Levi’s, all the paperwork was there, but—
“No photos.”
Disappointed, I chewed over the thought and briefly looked through a couple of the other files. Each and every one of them included pictures—insides of houses, outsides of houses.
But no pictures of any kind in Estelle’s file on the crumbling Victorian I would eventually call home sweet home.
“She put them somewhere else,” I mumbled to myself. “She dropped them.”
I got up and looked under the desk, and when I didn’t find anything there, I checked out the desk of Vivien’s former assistants. Nothing on top of it, obviously. Nothing in the drawers. I knelt on the floor to peer underneath.
Looking back at the incident, I keep telling myself that’s why I didn’t realize someone had walked into the realty office without me knowing. I was on my hands and knees, poking around under the desk. I mean, that had to be the reason, right? It couldn’t have had anything to do with those images of Levi that kept flitting through my head.
Levi in nice, tight pants and no shirt.
Levi with that chipped-from-granite chest of his sculpted even further by the artful use of stage lighting.
Levi stripping down to—
I finally realized I wasn’t alone when something smacked me in the back of my head and I oofed out a breath of surprise. Stars burst behind my eyes as I tumbled forward and my nose hit the carpet.
I’d like to say it was the last thing I remember, but honestly, the last thing I remember was thinking about Levi in collar and cuffs.
11
Collar and cuffs.
And tight black pants that ripped away . . . zip . . . like magic when Levi grooved to the grinding beat of music with a punishing bass line.
The same music pulsed through my bloodstream and pounded through my head, its tempo changing in an instant from smooth and sizzling to stuttering and discordant, but despite it, each of Levi’s choreographed movements was as smooth as silk and as hot as sin.
His muscles rippled in the same stage lights that added blue fire to his eyes. His bare chest gleamed. The music pulsated and—
“Bea!”
His bare chest gleamed and—
“Bea! Are you with us? Come on, Bea, answer me. Open your eyes. Bea!”
His bare chest—
Disappeared from my imagination completely when my eyes fluttered open and I found Hank’s nose just inches from mine.
“That’s better.” He must have been on his knees. I mean, that would explain how he was able to look at me up close, since I was lying on my back on the floor of Vivien’s office. Hank sat back, and maybe I was still imagining things, because I could have sworn he let down his guard long enough to breathe a sigh of relief. “You had me worried there for a while. I thought we lost you.”
“Lost. Stage lights and . . .” The music thumping in my ears wasn’t music at all. It was the pulsing sound of a police siren outside the real estate office. Though it was still daylight, the emergency flashers strobed over the ceiling. Red and blue. Red and blue. Watching them, my stomach flipped, and I squeezed my eyes closed for a second. “There was music.” Like it came from the far end of a long tunnel, I heard my own voice. It was fuzzy, floating. Kind of like my head felt.
The part of my head that didn’t hurt like the dickens.
“Don’t worry about talking.” A young man in dark blue pants and a crisp white shirt put a hand on Hank’s shoulder and, with a grunt, Hank pulled himself to his feet and the young man took his place. “I’m Jeremy,” he said. He had a thin face and a pointed chin, and ever so gently, he put a latex-gloved hand to my forehead. “You just lie still and don’t pay any attention at all to Chief Florentine. It’s more important for us to take care of you than it is for you to talk to him.”
“Except I have to talk to her.” Hank was out of my line of vision—which was pretty much the ceiling most of the time, with Jeremy moving back and forth, into and out of sight. From the rumble of his voice, I knew the chief was standing somewhere to my right and behind me, near Vivien’s assistants’ desk. The place where I’d been looking around when—
When I gasped, Jeremy appeared, his eyes dark with concern. “I started an IV. Just fluids to help you come around. Did that hurt? I’m sorry.”
I tried to shake my head to tell him I hadn’t felt the pinch at all, but instinctively, I knew that was a bad idea. There were elephants inside my brain. They were taking a Zumba class.
And I’m pretty sure they were wearing football cleats, too.
“Files,” I croaked, and when I did, Hank was right there looking down at me. “Looking at files.”
“Yeah, well, files are something we’ve got plenty of.” I couldn’t tell what he was referring to, but I saw him flash a look around the room that was so angry, I expected flames to shoot out of his nostrils. “Whoever hit you,” he told me, “ransacked the office once you were out like a light. Unless you left the place looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.”
“No.” I ran my tongue over my parched lips. “What—”
“Were they looking for?” Hank barked out a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “I wish I knew, Bea. I wish I knew.”
Jeremy listened to my heart, checked my blood pressure, and used a penlight to look into my eyes. “You might have a concussion,” he told me when he was done. “We can transport you to the mainland and—”
“Hank.” I wasn’t sure I’d get the support I wanted but even in my scrambled-egg brain, I knew it was worth a try. “Can I . . . I just want . . . home.”
“Figured you’d say that.” Sometime while Jeremy was checking me out, Hank must have made a call, because when he walked back into my line of sight, he was just sliding his phone back in his pocket. “It’s not up to me,” he said. “If Jeremy says it’s all right . . .”
“Jeremy says he’d be happier if she had someone to look after her,” the paramedic
said. “I know you live alone, Ms. Cartwright. And I won’t release you from care without some assurance that someone can be with you for the next forty-eight hours.”
“Kate. Luella. Chandra.”
It made perfect sense for me to suggest the Ladies of the League, but even in my muddled mind, I could tell that Hank wasn’t buying it. A second later, I found out why—and who he’d made that phone call to. The front door slapped open, then banged shut, and Levi stood over me, breathing hard, his face red, as if he’d run all the way from the bar.
He took one look at me looking back up at him and the panic in his eyes softened to concern. He dropped to his knees and took my hand.
“What happened?” He wasn’t talking to me; he was talking to Hank. “How did somebody get in here and—”
“Looking at files,” I managed to say, because maybe when I had said it the first time, Hank wasn’t paying attention. “My pictures weren’t there. And then someone came in and—”
“They’re after something,” I heard Hank grunt. “I left Bea here for an hour so I could go over to the coffee shop and found her knocked out cold when I came back. And the office . . .” I couldn’t see him, not from where I lay, but I imagined Hank shaking his head in disgust. “They’ve been through every scrap of paper in the place.”
“Just like . . .” I had a perfectly good point to make but I got that far and completely forgot what it was. How hanging on tight to Levi’s hand was going to help me remember, I wasn’t sure, but I did, and when he closed his fingers over mine, just like that, the idea popped out of the fog of confusion in my head.
“Just like at Vivien’s,” I said.
Hank’s mumbled reply confirmed it. It also told me that with Jeremy and the other paramedics around (I heard them talking), he didn’t think it was wise to discuss the details of the case.
Scrambled brain or not, I knew he was right.
“You should go to the hospital.”
It wasn’t like I had forgotten Levi was there; it was just that I thought it best to ignore the concern that glimmered in his eyes.
And the picture that formed in my head of him in those tight, tight black pants.
“What are you smiling about?” He leaned closer. “I just said I thought you should go to the hospital.”
I wiped the expression from my face. It wasn’t as easy to banish the picture inside my head. “I just want to go home.”
“Then I’m going with you.” He didn’t wait for me to tell him it was a terrible idea. He stood up and talked to Jeremy and I heard words like “physical and mental rest” and “nausea” and “unusual behavior” and “headache and dizziness and blurry vision” mentioned. I let it all float for a bit then settle. My eyes drifted shut then popped open when Jeremy said, “You’ll need to wake her up every couple hours, just to make sure she’s all right. If that’s going to be a problem, I’d suggest the hospital.”
“No problem,” Levi said.
“Problem,” I croaked.
The look Levi gave me was too sour to be a smile. “I think you can be pretty sure you’ll be safe. I’m not going to try anything with a woman who’s got a concussion.”
There was probably a snappy comeback I could have thrown at him.
And I planned to do it, too.
As soon as I thought of one.
Instead, I listened to Jeremy give Levi last-minute instructions and heard him promise that I’d get to a doctor first thing the next day. The next thing I knew, Jeremy unhooked me from the IV and helped me sit up.
“Still okay?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to risk a nod, so I told him I was good to go and braced a hand on the desk chair so I could get to my feet.
“Not a chance!” Levi didn’t offer and he didn’t give me a chance to protest; he scooped me off the floor and carried me out to Hank’s squad car. He put me in the backseat, then slid in next to me.
“You really don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” he said, and when he closed the door, Hank started off for the B and B.
I can’t say if we attracted any attention on our way out of downtown because I drifted off for a bit—not sleeping, exactly, but not fully awake, either. I gave myself over to the purr of the engine and the smooth feel of the car when it swayed around corners, and my head bobbed and landed on Levi’s shoulder. When Hank stopped the car in my driveway, I opened my eyes and regretted that I didn’t live farther from town.
“You’re not carrying me into the house,” I told Levi, who said he wouldn’t think of it, then wrapped his arms around me and carried me out of the car.
He set me down on the wicker couch on the front porch and ducked into the house, and just a minute later, he was back with my bed pillows, an ice pack, and a light blanket. Before he’d gone back down the steps to talk to Hank at the car, I was already asleep.
• • •
“Sorry. I promised I’d wake you every couple hours. I didn’t want to do it, but it’s important.”
The feel of Levi’s hand on my arm roused me from a sleep that was thankfully without any dreams. Waking up and looking into his eyes, the last thing I needed was the remnants of music and stage lights playing with my imagination. I burrowed deeper into the pillow and saw that the shadows were painted across the lawn from Chandra’s house toward mine. It was afternoon.
“You want something to eat?” Levi asked. “Jeremy said you might be a little nauseous, but if you think you can keep something down, I’ll get it.”
“No thanks.” I took the chance of shaking my head, and when it didn’t explode, I swung my legs off the couch so I could sit up. “I’m not hungry.”
“Good.” He’d been crouched in front of the couch and he got to his feet. “I’ve got some soup on the stove. I’ll go get you a bowl.”
“But I said—” It didn’t matter what I had said; he was already in the house.
And back in just a couple minutes with a tray. He set a bowl of tomato soup on the table near the couch, along with a glass of ice water and some crackers, instructed me to “Start eating,” and went back inside for his own lunch. Once he was settled in the chair across from the couch and I hadn’t taken a bite yet, he urged me to get going and started in on his own soup.
I was two bites in when a memory slammed into me and I sat up like a shot. “I have guests coming this afternoon!”
“I’ll handle them.” With his spoon, Levi pointed toward my soup. “Eat.”
“But—”
“The house looks great; the rooms are perfect. I saw the booking listed on your calendar and checked it all out while the soup was simmering. You’re all set. I even took some chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer so when they get here, they can have tea and cookies. I figured that’s what you’d do for guests.”
“But how am I going to—”
“You heard what Jeremy said. No physical or mental exercise. At least not until you see a doctor, and probably not for a few more days after that. So you’re not going to do anything. I’m going to do it. Whatever it is. Whatever you need me to do.”
“Breakfast. And dinner recommendations. And—”
“I’ll handle it.”
There was only one thing I could say. “Thank you.”
“Eat.”
I did, and the soup was delicious. “You found the stuff to make this soup in my pantry?” I finished the last of the soup in the bowl and licked my spoon. “Maybe you should be a chef instead of a private investigator.”
I knew it was a mistake the second the words left my lips. Not because neither of us knew the truth. We did, and nothing was going to change that. But because mentioning it put a damper on the afternoon, and Levi’s kindness.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because it was true and because he needed to hear it. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Not a
problem.” He finished his own soup, cleaned up the dishes, and took them inside. When he came back outside, he brought me a chocolate chip cookie. “I figure your guests won’t miss a couple.”
“Perfect.” The cookie was. So was the fact that he’d been that considerate.
He’d brought a cookie out for himself, too, and he chomped on it and sat down, but not in the chair where he’d eaten his lunch. On the couch, next to me.
“This is perfect,” he said on the end of a long sigh.
It was. The blue waters of the lake across the street. The golden sunshine that glimmered through the trees. The gentle breeze from the west that sent fat clouds scuttling high up over the water and made me think of sheep gamboling in a meadow.
“There’s nothing like summer on the island,” I said.
“You’re right. It’s great, but when I talk about perfect, I’m not talking about the weather. Or the island, either.”
When I turned—carefully—to give him a better look, I found Levi smiling. “It’s perfect because I can sit right here and talk to you, and in your condition, you can’t run away,” he said.
I threw back the blanket he’d settled over me. “I can try.”
“Oh, no!” Levi laughed and put a hand on my arm to keep me in place. “No quick movements, remember?”
“Going in the house doesn’t count as a quick movement.”
“Running away from me does.”
I settled back against the pillow and thought about how right he was. Though the island had been my home for close to two years, and though I loved it like I’d never loved any other place I’d ever lived, it never felt complete until I got to know Levi. Now, the two were inseparable. The island wouldn’t be the island without Levi. Home wouldn’t be home.
If I needed any proof, I only had to think about how miserable I’d been since we had the set-to about how I’d kept my real identity a secret from him and he’d kept his background hidden from me. The sun hadn’t been quite so bright all those weeks. Not like it was now. The breeze hadn’t been as refreshing. Yeah, my head hurt, and if I moved it too quickly, the scene in front of my eyes got blurry around the edges, like an Impressionist painting.