“Do you think she’s safe with you?” he asks.
“What?”
“Mara. Do you think she’s safe with you?”
I narrow my gaze, sip my drink.
“I’m asking you a question. Do you think now that you have her in your possession that she’s safe?” There’s something urgent in his tone. Something hard and old.
My jaw tightens. I know where he’s going. “No,” I answer.
“Then you are wiser than I was.” He leans forward to take the bottle and pours himself a hefty glass full.
“Who is she?”
“Who was she,” he corrects and drinks a long swallow. “Kimberly.” His reaction isn’t what I expect. I don’t know if it’s the surprise of seeing that photograph or what. He’s rattled. Visibly upset. And he isn’t quite looking at me.
“Who was she to you?” I push.
“My fiancée.”
“The baby—”
He doesn’t answer but I see the tightening of his jaw, the twitch of his eye.
This isn’t the same man I’d met days before. He’s not the asshole who saved my life then threw me out of a moving vehicle. Not the same cool, collected dick dismissing us to fuck his maid as he casually gave me the location of a Russian mobster to kill. This man before me is simply human. And I see the cracks of his humanity. The brokenness of him.
But I steel myself. His pain has nothing to do with me. And this is about saving Mara. So, I reach for the photo, open it, study it. “Too bad. She was good looking,” I say. Dick move, I know.
He doesn’t comment. Just drinks.
“You all seem like you’re having a good time while a kidnapped girl sits just a few feet from you.”
“I didn’t know who she was. And I didn’t know Felix Pérez. Hell, I didn’t realize there was a photograph. I’m guessing a still taken from a video.”
It does look that way. But like his pain, I don’t give a shit. “You didn’t know him? Because you seem chummy to me. What were you doing there if you didn’t know him?”
“Business that doesn’t concern you,” his tone is firm, the mask of that other Jericho St. James back in place.
“Anything having to do with Pérez concerns me.”
“Not this.”
“What about Mara? You saw her and did nothing?”
“She didn’t seem distressed.”
“No? So, she didn’t stand out at all as not really belonging there?”
“Like I said, I didn’t know anything about her, not until after.”
“After what?” I ask, tossing the photo back onto the coffee table making sure it’s face up, so he has to look at it.
His eyes lock on it and there’s that crack in the exterior again. “She was eight weeks from delivering.” It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about the pregnant woman. “She was so excited. So happy. It was all she could talk about.” He takes a sip of whiskey. “But she never got to experience any of it. She was killed not a full week after that ill-fated visit to Pérez.”
He’s quiet, his pain palpable and immense. He then shifts his gaze to me and again I see the slight difference in the color of his eyes, the deep gray of one and dark blue of the other. How whatever is going on inside him makes the one go darker and the other lighter.
“My meeting with Pérez was on behalf of a client. I used to practice law but I’m sure you know that. Kimberly and I were traveling at the time and, well, I regret having brought her. If I’d left her at the hotel…” he trails off, shakes his head. “But I was naïve then.” He swallows more whiskey. “Stupid even. And she paid for it.”
His eyes lock on the woman and I see his regret.
“We were at a café a few days later. It was the morning we were due to return to the states. Just having breakfast on the beach. She wanted to feel the sand between her toes one last time, she said.” He smiles a rueful smile at that. “We had thought about building a house there. Beachfront. Made plans and even looked at some land.” He looks at me, face hard again. “Never make fucking plans. Never,” he advises.
“What happened?”
“I went inside to pay the bill. She was gathering up her things. I realized when I got to the counter, I’d left my wallet on the table and returned. She must have noticed it before I did because she was walking toward me as I got outside, flip-flops in one hand, a big smile on her face,” he pauses here. “She got in the way,” he finally adds. He shifts his gaze away, pushes his hand into his hair like he’s going to pull it out. “Fuck. She just got in the fucking way.”
He collects himself after a moment and turns back to me.