Page 19

I closed my eyes. Willed him to go away.

“You okay?”

I opened my eyes. “Great. How are you?”

Finn’s footsteps echoed on the tile as he came up behind me. “It’s your head?”

Right. Because Finn had been through this with me before. And I truly couldn’t bear to think about that Finn while I dealt with this Finn.

“I’m fine. I just need to take something.”

His brows, dark in contrast to his hair, drew together. “I thought you were taking something? I thought you took monthly injections.”

“And yet you say I never tell you anything.” That was sheer bravado because I had to close my eyes and swallow another wave of nausea. I gripped the counter tightly, dipping my head and locking my jaw. My entire mission in life was reduced to not throwing up in front of Phineas Scott.

His hand landed lightly on my back, warm through my damp jacket. “What do you need, Keir? Talk to me.”

A shaky laugh escaped me.

“You need to lie down. Let me help you upstairs.”

I opened my eyes, stared at him in disbelief. “I can’t leave . How’s that going to look?”

His expression was one of complete non-comprehension. “It’s going to look like you’re not feeling well. Which ought to be obvious to anyone who sees you. Your face is grayer than your eyes.”

“Thank you for noticing…” I closed my eyes again, hung my head. He was right. I desperately wanted—needed—to lie down.

“Keiran.” Finn’s voice was still kind, but I recognized the This is the law speaking! note. “You’re done for tonight. No one’s going to think less of you because you’re ill.”

“ I’ll think less of me.” Besides, people wouldn’t think I was ill. It was a conference. People would assume I was drunk. If there was any justice in the world, I would be drunk.

To my shock, he leaned in, his whisky-scented breath warm against my ear. “You care about appearances. Picture this: you, in your beautifully tailored tuxedo, passed out cold in the banquet room.”

I raised my head to glare at him.

Finn’s gaze was steady, serious, kind. The kindness was the reason, against my better judgment, I’d let myself start to care.

In the midst of these jumbled reflections, the wet counter seemed to give way, the room tilted sideways.

“Whoa…” Finn caught my arm, saying under his breath, “Okay. Going up.” He said it like an old-fashioned elevator operator.

This time I didn’t—couldn’t—argue. My eyes rolled back and I was vaguely aware of Finn sort of ducking down, so that my arm fell across his shoulders.

He locked his hard, muscular arm around my waist, and straightened.

After a confused stumble, my feet found the floor, and I woozily allowed myself to be steered out of the restroom.

Finn held me up with a kind of impersonal efficiency that made it easy to detach myself from the proceedings and simply follow his lead. One foot after the other. The floor was still seeming to dip beneath me, and I had to hang on tight.

We must have taken a service hallway because we awkwardly navigated a corner and suddenly it was quiet and the lights were dim.

No one around to witness me stumbling along like a drunk on his last legs.

Beneath my lashes, I could see the carpet heaving up and down and two pairs of dress shoes narrowly avoiding colliding with each other.

My vision tunneled, but I had the impression that Finn spoke to someone and then we got on a… service elevator?

Where the hell were we? Flickering fluorescent light…steel walls…the faint hum of machinery…and, distressingly, the smell of detergent and distant kitchen grease.

My knees buckled. Finn’s grip tightened. “Hang on,” he coaxed. “Just another minute.”

I closed my eyes, turned my face into his shoulder, and the feel of his arm around me, the lingering scent of his shower and aftershave were familiar and comforting.

Tears stung my eyes, and I told myself it was the migraine, but it was also that I missed him so much, that I wanted so much more than kindness, that I wanted time to rewind to that sunny afternoon in my loft apartment when I had stupidly, foolishly believed my dreams were coming true.

The giant box of elevator lurched to a hard stop, and I gasped as nausea rose once more.

Finn squeezed me. “Just about there,” he promised.

The door rolled up and we stepped out into another quiet service hallway. It felt like we’d been wandering through a maze for hours. But then we rounded a corner into another empty hallway and the door to Grand Bay Suite was right there.

It seemed like a miracle.

“Thank you. I’m okay now…” I let go of Finn, feebly pawing my pockets for my room key.

For a terrified moment I thought I’d dropped it downstairs, but Finn, still keeping his arm around my waist, reached into the front pocket of my trousers with casual familiarity and withdrew the plastic key card.

He tapped the key card to the door lock, the sensor turned green, and he shouldered open the door, helping me inside.

I winced at the wall of bright light.

The living room lights were blazing and my gaze fell on a trail of discarded shoes…socks…jeans…sweater…T-shirt…boxers leading from the entryway to the bedroom.

“If publishing doesn’t work out you could always try out for quick change artist,” Finn remarked.

Hand up to shield my eyes from the light, I reeled away from him, heading straight for the little guest bathroom off the entry hall, slamming the door behind me.

A dreadful couple of minutes passed while I tried to cough up the pain—there was nothing left to offer to the porcelain god—just more shaking and sweating and heaving.

The harsh glare of the overhead light made it a special kind of hell.

For a weird second, I felt out-of- body, like I was standing over myself watching that shuddering, sick misery.

“God oh god oh god…”

I was praying that Finn had gone while the going was good, but when I wobbled out of the bathroom, I could just make out his shadow moving around the suite, drawing the drapes. The lamps were all out. There was only a sliver of moonlight to light the way.

I said huskily, “Thanks, Phineas. I really am okay now. I just need to—I need to sleep.”

His shadow walked up to me and wrapped warm arms around me, folding me in, and I let go. I leaned against him and started to cry.

I didn’t want to. He was the last person to whom I wanted to show weakness.

It wasn’t—obviously, I felt terrible, but this wasn’t even the worst migraine I’d had.

That particular honor belonged to the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2016.

This—this was a contender, for sure, the experience made more richly mortifying by Finn being there to witness it all.

But really, it was just the cumulative effect of…

everything. Finn on the beach that morning.

The day’s revelations compounded by the previous day’s revelations and the stress of the merger-that-was-really-a-buyout and someone wanting to blackmail me or maybe kill me, no, probably kill me…

being in Steeple Hill again, in that house again…

There’s something wrong with you.

And no wonder.

Finn’s arms tightened and he whispered, “Keiran, Keir, don’t. Shhh. Keir. Shhh . Let me help you.”

I pulled myself together, drew back, wiped my face. “I…I just miss my cats,” I got out.

No. Well, yes. I did. But no. That was not what this was. Pain makes you crazy. That’s the truth.

His face was a white blur, but I felt his astonishment. “You…”

But there was a certain truth in it. In a hard to explain way, my two rescue Siamese, Wing Ding and Sing Song, symbolized everything good in my life. The comfortable, civilized life I’d worked so hard to build—in some ways, to build out of thin air.

The life I’d had two days ago before the universe started to unravel.

“Well, you’ll see the cats in a couple of days, right?” Finn’s tone was reasonable, just as if this conversation hadn’t gone completely off the rails. His hands moved reassuringly on my back, smoothing the dampness of my shirt

I wiped my face again. “Yeah.”

“And they’re with the sitter. They’re safe.”

“Yes.” I pressed the heels of hands to my forehead as if I could push the pain back into the box.

“After you have a sleep, you can call the sitter and ask them to take a…a proof of life pic so that you can see the cats are fine.”

I knew he was teasing me. But his tone was kindly, like he was reasoning with a small child. He was also coming up with practical solutions for someone in distress, and I could appreciate that.

“Yeah. Thanks. I’m sorry I’m being an ass.” I sucked in a breath. “Everything’s okay now. You should get back.”

“Yep. On my way. Let me just help you get settled.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue, so I nodded, blinked the tears from my eyes, and we headed for the bedroom, Finn guiding me around the obstacle course of the small dining area.

Outside the glass doors the moon hung low over the bay, half-shrouded in fog, its light threading through the mist like bullet holes between weathered slats.

The building seemed to sway gently as the waves below rushed rhythmically against the pilings beneath the balcony.

As I stared, a single gull wheeled past, a gray ghost in the gloom, like a silent-winged omen of—

Finn pulled the drapes across the glass doors with a single sweep.

The suite plunged into a soothing dusk. The vibration of the city beyond the windows faded to nothing.

I sank onto the edge of the bed and began to pluck at my bow tie with stiff fingers. It seemed an unreasonably complicated operation when all I wanted was to curl up in a ball. My skull felt like it was being crushed in a vise.

“Here.” Finn was back at my side, brushing my hands aside, picking expertly at the knot. “Let me.”