*****
Dowser toweled down after his shower. He’d made it a cold one. That helped. He looked in the mirror. His reflection was probably pretty normal for a drunk who’d had the crap beat out of him three days ago. The bruises were going green around the edges. The scabs were puckering and hard. The alcohol had left bloodshot eyes with dark circles and a drawn look. His hair and beard were still streaked with gray. When had he gotten this old?
He heard her come in. He pulled on his jeans and opened the door. He just had to keep his thoughts straight for a few minutes here. He could survive that. She looked great. Her throat had a glow of sweat on it from her walk. Her red blouse was now tied up under her breasts leaving her midriff bare. Her flat belly disappeared into the band of her jeans. Uh-oh.
“You look better,” she said, putting down a load of papers and envelopes on the table.
“I feel better.” He finished toweling his wet hair, briskly. Not going to think about her. “So, uh, thanks for what you did for me. And since I’m okay now, you’re free to go back to Miami and get on with whatever you were doing.” That jogged his memory. She’d wanted to hire The Purgatory.
She bit her lip, thinking. “Uh, I don’t think I should do that.”
“I’m fine now, really.”
“You’ll just go into town and buy booze. And ... and tomorrow is Thursday.” She brightened. “You have a job to do, so you have to stay sober.”
“A job?” He frowned.
“Yeah. That guy, St. Claire, said he was coming back on Thursday so you could go treasure hunting. Which is tomorrow. You need the money, remember?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Why else would I put up with a prick like St. Claire?”
“So, since your car is still down by the boat.…” She was grinning now. “I’ll just stay until I can take you in tomorrow and see you get to your job, sober and chipper and raring to go. Then you can pick up your car when you’re done, and I’m out of your hair.”
One more night. She wanted to stay one more night. Only now he was feeling better, and she was doing things to him even now that made him want to untie that knot under her breasts and pull her into his body where he could feel her bare skin against his. Could he stand it?
But suddenly, he didn’t want her to leave either. He watched her, gray eyes alight, a grin on her face. Naïve as she was and so bossy she had actually tied him up to keep him away from booze, she seemed more alive than anyone he’d met since Alice. He felt like she was pulling him back from the brink in more ways than one.
He didn’t want to pull back from the brink. He didn’t.
“Okay. One more night,” he growled. “Only I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.”
“Deal,” she said, her smile sunny as she ignored his foul mood. “I brought up your mail.”
He stared at the pile on the table. Yeah. He’d actually forgotten they were out there.
“There are quite a few envelopes from the same place. They must want to get in contact with you pretty badly.”
“They do.” He hoped that was damping enough.
She was not one to be dampened though. “Don’t you want to know what’s in them?”
“I know what’s in them.”
She frowned. After a pause she said, “There’s no use avoiding bill collectors. They’ll just take your boat. And if it’s a summons, they send the sheriff.”
Okay, she might not be a stone-cold bitch, but she was nosey as hell. “They’re checks. So nobody’s going to come after me if I don’t cash them.”
Her eyes widened in surprise, and she blinked several times, looking around. “If ... if they’re checks, then maybe you wouldn’t have to take jobs you don’t want. I mean, if the checks are big enough.”
“They’re big enough. But cashing them is worse than working for St. Claire.”
“Oh.”
“Can we move on from my personal business?”
“Right.” She stared at him for a minute, probably wondering what she could possibly do to get him to explain. Wisely, she realized she was stymied. “I’ll get dinner on.”
He would bet money she’d retrench and broach the subject again. Stubborn. Well, she had just met her match. “I’ll change the sheets.”
*****
“Hardwick can’t find a drawing of the sword,” Jason said.
The old woman concentrated on breathing. She had an oxygen mask now. Could he be lying to her? “Hardwick knows what will happen if he fails,” she managed.
With satisfaction, she saw Jason go pale. “He’s got the picture of the prow of that other wreck. The famous one everybody’s been looking for,” he said hastily. “He can overnight it.”
“Yes. But he keeps looking,” she said. “For the sword.”
“Hardwick,” Jason said into the phone in a low voice. “Do the overnight, but uh, keep looking for a picture of the sword. No, it’s absolutely necessary or the guy can’t find it. She ... uh ... really wants it badly. Yeah. Yeah, that bad.” He looked up. “He gets it. He’ll find a picture.”
*****
She was a good cook. He could taste food for the first time in months. They’d washed up the dishes together. But now the evening stretched ahead and all he wanted was a drink. Gin, rum, whiskey, anything. He found his eyes darting around the little cabin as she turned on the lights. Damn. Five miles into Sugarloaf and he could be upending a bottle in twenty minutes, because he wouldn’t even have to find the distributor cap. She’d given up hiding it.
“Want to play cards?” she asked sharply, peering at him. “I saw a deck here somewhere.”
“What games do you know? Old Maid? Go Fish?”
She put her hands on her hips. “I prefer five-card stud if there’s only two of us, but we could probably manage Texas hold ’em since that’s all the rage.”
He snorted. “Like Ms. College Preppie knows how to play poker.”
“I have brothers.” As if that explained everything. She got the deck of cards from the top of the chest of drawers in the corner. “What are the stakes?”
He thought about playing for booze, but she’d never go for that. Tempting though. He was Delta Force. Poker was practically part of the training. It was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. “How about strip poker?” Damn! Why had he said that? He’d never survive a game of strip poker. Especially if she lost.
“Nothing doing, wise guy,” she said, sitting down at the table. “We can use those shells piled on the porch.” She raised her eyebrows as she shuffled the cards. She was a good shuffler.
“Not much of a game. If you can’t afford to lose money....” Stupid. Playing for money wouldn’t be right when he was sure to win. Even he wasn’t that low.
She stopped her shuffling and looked up at him, speculating. “How about we play for answers? To the question of the winner’s choice.”
He only let his mouth smile a little before he stopped it. Now that was more like it. He’d find out everything there was to know about her. Boyfriend, why she was here, her heart’s desire, everything. And he wanted to know everything. “Answer has to be true and complete?”
She nodded, looking like the cat that ate the canary. She’d be a terrible poker player with that face. “True and complete.”
“You’re on.” He pulled up the only other chair to the table and tossed the mail onto the floor. “We pay up after every hand.” She nodded and flipped the cards into surprisingly neat piles in front of each of them. He picked his hand up. Not much—a pair of jacks. Enough to open. “Three.” She flipped three cards his way.
She was looking at her own cards. Pretty good poker face after all. “Dealer takes two.” She was probably trying to complete a straight or a flush. He liked his odds.
Lady Luck wasn’t with him. He got nothing in his draw. But when she drew hers, her lips made a small moue of disappointment before she caught herself and went blank. He still liked his odds. Let’s see what kind of a gambler she was. “I bet a question.”<
br />
“I see your question, and I raise you a question.”
Bluffing. But game. She’d have to be punished for that, he thought, thoroughly enjoying the prospect. “I see your two questions, and raise you a question.”
An uncertain look crossed her face. She was too frightened to push it. “Call.”
He laid out his jacks.
“Too bad,” she said, and laid down three twos.
He stared at them. “You’re kidding, right?” She’d won with shit-ass twos.
“Absolutely not.”
Okay. This did not mean she was a good player. She’d just had a lucky first draw. But this wasn’t how he’d planned the game. He looked up at her, eyes hard. “Go.”
She shuffled for a minute, cocking her head as she thought. Three questions. She got three questions out of her crummy three twos because he’d raised her. Reckless, as it turned out.
“Let’s start with an easy one. What’s your real name?”
Like that was easy. He took a breath. “Michelangelo Redmond.”
She smiled. It turned into a grin. He was used to that. “I bet your buddies call you Mike. Let’s see if I can guess. Italian mother? Father....” Her eyes got big. “Redmond is an Irish name, isn’t it, or maybe Scottish?”
“Is that your second question?” He shouldn’t have given her an out, just answered.
“No,” she said hastily. Her gaze strayed to the stack of envelopes. The ones from Redmond, Inc. She was remembering what he’d said about them. She turned those clear, gray eyes on him again. “What are those checks for?”
He swallowed. Okay, a deal was a deal. True and complete. “They’re a stipend from my father’s company.” True, but not complete. “My company, since he died.”
Her eyes went wary. Then she actually looked relieved. What was that about? “Okay, so why don’t you want them?”
He just knew it would get to the complicated stuff. Damn her. Three twos, for God’s sake. “Because he was an overbearing tyrant who pushed me into the company when I was seventeen, and thought he could force me to be like him.”
She nodded. “That’s why you joined the army, I’ll bet. It probably, how would you say it? ‘Frosted his ass.’ So you tried out for Delta Force, just to push his nose in it. I’ll bet it’s pretty hard to get accepted into that program. He no doubt hated that you were constantly engaged in dangerous missions because you were risking his dynastic aspirations. And you never wrote him. Maybe you wrote your mother.” She raised her eyebrows.
She was way too good at filling in the blanks. “No freebies. Deal.”
But the result of that hand was just the same. He watched her dubious expression and raised her up to three questions only to find that the girl had a full house, tens and queens, which beat two pair. He tossed his cards in. She was so inexperienced she didn’t actually know when to be confident and when to be cautious. He’d better start playing more conservatively. Even if all she had was luck, it could get bad. How long before she’d want to know about Alice?
She smiled at him and shuffled, which she seemed to do while thinking. “Only child?” she asked.
That was easy. He nodded. And just to show he was honorable, he’d give her the rest. “Well, kind of. My older brother died when he was twelve. I was eight.”
“Mother?”
“Same car accident.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s really hard. So you must have liked your stepmother, since I guessed correctly that you wrote to her while you were in the army?”
She knew she guessed correctly? Maybe he was the one who had a problem with a poker face. “That’s three,” he said, using the lilt of her voice that made it a question against her.
She realized she’d been had and frowned. “No wonder your father was so focused on you succeeding him.”
“My deal.”
She tossed the deck over. Then she grinned. “If you think that will make a difference in the outcome, by all means deal.”
He managed to get two questions off her with a spade flush. “So, who was the boyfriend at UCLA?”
She blushed with shame. That was hard to see. He wanted to know, but hurting her turned out to be painful. She took a breath. “Professor of Medieval Studies.”
He steeled himself to ask the next question. She had no qualms about prying into his private pain. She’d already proved that. So why should he? “Why didn’t it work out?”
She closed her eyes. “Because he was the campus Lothario and never had any intention of having more than a fling with me before he moved on to the next student.” She fell silent and he began to shuffle the cards. “Even Jane knew,” she said with disgust, and then seemed to lose all control. “And she’s a wonderful friend of course, but she’s really sheltered and shy, and even she knew, and it was me who turned out to be naïve.” This last was said with such despair in her voice he almost winced. She looked away.
“Happens to everybody,” he said roughly, not knowing how to comfort her.
“Not to me. I was always sure of who I was.” She looked up at him. “I bet it never happened to you.” She slumped a little in her chair. “I was a total fool.”
“You think it wasn’t foolish to join the army just to show my father I hated him?” He snorted. “I almost got killed so many times I lost count.”
She got a speculating look in those gray eyes. “But you weren’t. You must have been good at what you did.” She waved a dismissive hand. “And anyway guys with a strong personality have to break away from a domineering father. Either that or be broken by him.”
“Who says I wasn’t broken? I still can’t take the Goddamned checks from Redmond, just because it’s his company, even though he’s dead. That’s nothing if not stupid.” He ran his hands through his hair. It was stupid, wasn’t it? Not just stubborn, but self-destructive. Like the drinking. “Then there’s the fact that I’m an alcoholic. That’s real broken.”
*****
It was the first time he’d admitted what he was, and Drew knew it was a big deal. She saw it in his shocked expression. His problems made her own mourning over being made a fool of by a pathetic college professor who preyed on graduate students seem childish. She’d been relieved when she knew he was well off financially, just as she was. But that relief was gone now. She chewed her lips. They were both staring at the deck because they were too raw to look at each other. “He’s not the reason you drink,” she said finally.
“No.” He picked up the cards and started to deal. He wasn’t going to say anything about Alice. And really, why should he? She wondered how to bring it up, or whether she should go for how he got his scars. Both seemed so horrible, they were something she couldn’t ask him to talk about at all.
She knew she had him in the next hand. She drew the fourth ace when she replaced her two discards. She pursed her lips. They always went for that. He still didn’t get that she was playing on his certainty that she couldn’t play poker. He should have realized by now. She’d been sure she would only get a couple of hands out of the “I’m so transparent” ruse. Maybe he did know and didn’t care. He seemed determined to bid up the questions. She stopped the escalation by calling at four. Probably should have stopped it sooner. She didn’t want to ask any more questions.
His full house was queen high. But he hardly seemed surprised when she showed her aces. “I should have known.” He took a huge breath and blew it out. “Okay, shoot.” Like it was a firing squad, and not just some personal questions.
Well, she was going to give him a by. “What was your greatest adventure?” Best to get this onto a more cheerful note.
He didn’t hesitate. “The day I married Alice.”
Well, that didn’t work out so well.
The look on his face softened with the memory. He continued of his own accord. “I could hardly believe she wanted a big, rough guy like me. She was so soft. That was all an illusion, of course. She was stronger emotionally than I ever was. I met her on leave in Dub
ai. I’d just been released by the Taliban in return for a boatload of their men. I was in pretty bad shape.”
Well, she’d gotten both answers at once. Taliban. No wonder he had all those scars. The horror of being tortured.… She realized how bad it must have been for him to be tied up while he suffered with his detox. He’d probably had flashbacks. Drew was suddenly so ashamed of herself she didn’t know how to face him.
“Alice was there pitching some Arab prince for money for her charity,” he continued. “A girl. I thought somebody had a screw loose to send a girl to an Arab country on business.” He was looking out the window into the night. It had started to rain. The drops clattered on the tin roof of the cabin and the wind whipped the dim foliage outside. “But of course, no one could refuse Alice.” A smile touched his lips. “That prince ended up giving her twice what she asked. And she … she was good for me. Alice had a way of healing your soul. I had intended to re-up but instead I chucked Delta Force and followed her back home like a puppy.” He tore his gaze away from the tossing fronds lashed with rain. “The wedding was… good. I joined her charity work and I was happy.”
Drew still felt bad, but this was what she wanted to know. “What did the charity do?”
He shook his head, smiling in memory. “We got lost kids back where they belonged. Turned out I could find them. Then I, and a couple of my ex-Delta buddies, would go in and get them. A little planning or a satisfying scuffle was usually involved. Then Alice would just ... I don’t know ... make them whole.” He turned his eyes up to her. “I mean emotionally. That was her psychic gift. She just talked to them and held them and then they were fine, no matter what had happened to them.” He shrugged. “Then we’d give them back to their families.”
It was all so clear. Alice was a Psychic Healer. He was a Finder. She had healed him psychically after his own ordeal, and then they used their gifts for others. “You were good together,” she said, keeping her voice level. True love. Drew wanted to cry.
“Yeah.”
He's A Magic Man (The Children of Merlin) Page 11