Desirée flinched, then lifted her chin to face the behemoth who stomped outside to confront her. “It’s a free country, Troy.”
“I thought I ordered you to stop hanging around the bar when you showed up here the other day.” He crossed his arms over his chest, looking half genie and mostly scary with his bulging biceps and shaved head.
Bailey frowned. Troy appeared angry and Desirée defiant, but there was something else buzzing beneath the surface of their conversation. Something hot and-
“We don’t want you here,” Troy stated.
Apparently unwelcome.
“I don’t want you here,” he clarified.
Very unwelcome.
Desirée blinked, swallowed, and despite her mulish expression, Bailey had the distinct feeling she just might cry.
To preserve the younger woman’s dignity, Bailey slid her hand through her elbow. “We’re on our way,” she said, guiding them both toward the parking lot.
Desirée looked back, just as the bar’s door slammed shut. Bailey felt her flinch again. Then she slipped free of Bailey’s arm to wrap her arms around herself in a sad self-hug.
“Thanks,” she said, her winsome smile now turned wry. “I thought it was bad when Tanner was mad at me, but then I met Troy and…I don’t know why I let him get to me. Especially when he doesn’t bother trying to soft-pedal the way he feels.”
Bailey lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes you don’t have any choice.”
“Yeah.” Then she reached out and touched the top of Bailey’s hand. “And speaking of men with chips on their shoulders, I saw Finn’s SUV parked at the north end of the beach.”
Bailey stopped her Passat behind Finn’s big, black car. It was a no-moon night, and with her headlights off the darkness wrapped around her like a blanket. A safe blanket.
She could go home.
No. She couldn’t leave him out here alone.
At Trin’s, she’d changed out of her work clothes, and she realized she should have changed back, because her high-heeled sandals were impractical sand gear. She slipped them off as she reached the beach and let them dangle in one hand, shoving her other inside her jacket pocket to grip her cell phone.
The sand was slippery cold against the soles of her feet. Her toes curled into it as she gazed up and down the beach. The only clear thing she could see was the white froth of the incessant waves.
There! she thought, squinting. There was movement.
A spark pierced the darkness and then kindled into a small fire a quarter mile down the beach. Still gripping her cell phone in case it wasn’t the man she was looking for, she headed for it. As she drew closer, she noticed the pallets and other shadowy pieces of wood piled nearby, enough to keep the darkness at bay all night long.
When she neared, Finn didn’t look away from the fire he’d started in the cement circle. He was sitting beside it, a flask in his hand. As he lifted it to take a drink, the light of the flames flickered yellow and red against its silver surface, a bright contrast to his black eye patch, the dark night, the murky ocean with its ever-changing frothy skirt of white sweeping back and forth, back and forth, across the wet sand.
Bailey’s shoes dropped from her suddenly sweaty hands. She followed them down to the sand, leaving that ring of fire between her and Finn. She filled her chest with a long breath of the cool air, tasting the salt on her tongue and wishing it was words instead.
When she’d thought about finding him, she’d never thought about what she would say once she did.
Comfort, she told herself. She was here to offer sympathy, provide support, be his friend.
Somehow make the loss easier for him.
Flames glinted against the flask again as he brought it to his mouth for another swallow. “Go away.”
She jerked at the sudden sound of his hard voice, and flashed back to poor Desirée and her reaction to Troy’s rejection. But it wasn’t the same at all, she thought. The sexual, romantic part of her relationship with Finn wasn’t unrequited, it was O-V-E-R.
So she dug her butt into the shifting sand and refused to be scared away.
Finn said nothing more. Through the flames she saw him reach out to the pile of fuel and grab another piece. He tossed the length of wood into the blaze. It had twigs and leaves attached, and as they caught, they crackled with the sound of candy wrappers, then smoked like a wizard’s spell.
But not the kind of alchemy that worked magic. Finn remained silent. She didn’t know what to say herself.
Maybe companionship was enough.
“Go home, Bailey.”
He thought he didn’t even want companionship, then. But she was stubborn too. “I’m fine. The fire is keeping me warm.”
More minutes of brooding silence followed. He drank. She waited. Then he picked up another length of wood and fed it to the leaping flames. Took another swallow. Added more wood to the fire.
Finally Bailey couldn’t take the tension. “She was a wonderful woman,” she offered. “I’m sorry I didn’t know she was so ill.”
He hesitated, flask in his right hand, wood in the other. Then his left arm dropped, the piece of fuel slamming into the fire.
Sparks exploded, and Bailey flinched, but kept on talking anyway. “You didn’t say a word about that, Finn.” It was the first thing that had struck her when Trin told her the news. “You insisted she was going to get well. Didn’t you know-”
“I know what the doctors said.” He hurled a second piece of wood into the blaze. Embers sprang high, as if trying to escape.
“Then why-”
“Because I didn’t want to think about it, all right?” He swigged from the flask, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Or believe it?”
Another piece of wood crashed into the fire. Silver turned red as he brought the drink to his lips again.
She dug her fingers into the sand, though the unstable stuff offered nothing solid to hang on to. “It’s no crime to grieve, Finn. Grief is normal, natural-”
“Oh, I’m done with grief.” His voice was more caustic than the acrid smell of smoke in the air. “I’ve been living with it grinding my guts into sausage meat since I woke up in the hospital and found out that Ayesha was dead eleven months ago.”
He tilted his head back and sipped again from the flask. “There’s nothing left inside of me for it to chew on.”
The wind off the ocean fluttered the ends of Bailey’s hair. “Then you don’t need to be out here all alone. Let’s go back to my house…or to the bar. Tanner’s there.”
“I can’t deal with Tanner’s guilt tonight too.”
Oh, Finn. “Your grandmother wouldn’t want you to feel guilty. You know that. You know you didn’t have the power to stop what happened to her.”
“But then there’s Ayesha.” He tossed another piece of wood into the crackling blaze even as he took another drink. “You can’t say I didn’t fail her.”
Confused, Bailey shook her head. “What could you have done about that either?”
“I was her supervisor.” He stared at his reflection in the surface of the flask. “I should have seen something. Sensed something.”
She lifted her hand, sand sifting between her fingers. “You couldn’t have known about that assassin. You can’t read some murderer’s mind who shows up out of nowhere.”
“Oh, baby, you’ve got it all wrong.” He shifted his gaze from the booze to spear a long, thin stick into the middle of the blaze and watch it light up.
It looked like an accusing finger, she thought, and Finn had pointed it toward himself.
“You’re right that I couldn’t know the assassin was going to pick that target, that day, that time,” he continued. “But I knew Ayesha. And I should have suspected what she might do.”