HiddenDepths (14 page)

“Who was he?”

The girl did a double take. “You’re asking me? Like how
would I know? Anyway, don’t get all heart-attacky or anything. I won’t say
anything if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Andrea gave a metaphorical as well as physical nod to fate,
her loose hair falling in her face. Freddie had sent someone else. Of course he
had. And now maybe Evan would get dragged into it. Hurt even.

So much for her plan of hiding out here.

Almost subconsciously, her hand went to the bandage
underneath her T-shirt. She was healed.

She was. Physically anyway. But Evan was unwittingly
providing fodder for fresh wounds, and even worse, she was letting the danger
potentially come close to him. Now that she was thinking straight—sort of—she
needed to get away from him before either of them did any further damage.

“Listen, I meant to go back with Evan but he left before I
woke up,” she lied blithely into the scowl occasioned by the reference to her
and Evan sleeping in the same vicinity. “I need to get back, though, and I
can’t wait for him to come back and take me. So do you think you could help me
out and give me a ride back to town?”

Having a woman on Evan’s island didn’t make the girl very
friendly, but getting one off it seemed to certainly seemed to please her. The
girl smiled for the first time, the effect of it making her fresh beauty even
more appealing, incredibly enough. Andrea fought the stab of jealousy she felt
at leaving Evan to this girl’s unfair charms.

“Yeah, sure. My boat’s at the dock. I was going to tell him
about his mom and see if he needed anything, but since he’s not here I guess I
can drop back another time.”

Andrea felt certain the girl would, with maybe even more
ammunition than a tank top next time.

“Do you need to go back to the house to get anything?”

“No. I’m fine.” She reached in the pocket of her jacket, or
rather Evan’s jacket, for the thin-tipped marker pen she knew was there and
scribbled out a message to Evan on his own chair. It’d wash away in the
rain—she wouldn’t leave any permanent damage, to his chair or anything else—and
she didn’t want to take the time to leave him a note at the house.

“Hey, so what about the guy with the picture?”

“Oh that? I guess it must be somebody else.”

They walked back in silence to the dock. Andrea climbed into
the speedboat, just managing to sit on one of the cushions against the side
when the girl gunned the boat up and took off.

“I’m Cassie, by the way,” she shouted over her shoulder into
the wind.

“Babs,” she responded spontaneously, figuring it sure as
hell wouldn’t matter at this point what name she gave. She didn’t plan on
seeing this girl, or this corner of the world, ever again.

The spray of the ocean on her face washed away the blood caused
by biting through her lip at that thought.

* * * * *

A helicopter was such an ostentatious mode of transportation
that Evan couldn’t recall ever having arranged to take one of his own free will
before. But desperate times called for desperate measures. He needed to get
into Manhattan to see Michael as soon as possible and he only thanked God that
Miss Prentiss Jr. assured him that his oldest brother was in the office and
could see him this morning. Since he had not wanted to spook the real Miss
Prentiss, in a manner of speaking, with setting up a meeting in advance, he had
just called from the mainland once he docked his boat. He was worried somehow
Andrea might have been able to discover it if he had contacted Michael’s office
while on the island. And overhearing him making the appointment wasn’t what he
meant.

He was falling deeper and deeper into Andrea Prentiss,
whatever the hell her real name was, and he didn’t know what inadvisable or
uncharacteristic thing he might say or do next while she had her big blue eyes
trained on him. He was liable to just blurt out that he was going to see
Michael to get his take on this whole situation.

Who knew?

Colleen Grady stood at attention off to the side of the
helipad on the Reynolds Industries headquarters building in Manhattan as the
rotors slowed and Evan stepped out onto the roof. The pilot had radioed ahead
as to the precise timing of their arrival and then assured him he would just
wait until the meeting concluded. Normally Evan would have told the pilot, part
of Michael’s fleet of ever-at-the-ready-for-extremely-high-compensation
minions, to chill out and get a burger or something, but he was too preoccupied
for his usual laid-back niceties. He wanted the pilot there and ready to take
off and back to Maine as soon as he was done with Michael. This urgency to be
back to Andrea now that he had let her out of his sight was unsettling.

He shook Michael’s new assistant’s hand.

“Mr. Reynolds would have come out himself to meet you, Mr.,
er, Reynolds, but his, I mean, Miss Donald was, I mean she—”

“That’s fine. No problem,” he cut her off.

Miss Grady had stepped into her predecessor’s shoes, but
clearly uneasy is the head who wears the crown. The poor girl looked frazzled
and about five years older than the last time Evan had seen her. The day Andrea
disappeared, as a matter of fact. He hadn’t been back to Michael’s office
since. The meeting he had attended with the private eye Michael hired to find
Andrea had been held at Michael’s apartment.

“Right this way, Mr. Reynolds,” the secretary said
unnecessarily, gesturing for Evan to precede her from the elevator out to the
hallway of Michael’s floor. As if he was likely to forget this place.
Deliberately, he averted his eyes from the office where he had made love
to—fucked—Andrea that last time. It was still dark, though. He had not been
able to shake the feeling all this time that his treatment of Andrea that day
had something to do with her disappearance. He knew now that it clearly went
far, far deeper, but he felt no more reassured by the fact.

Just the thought of the knife wound she had shown up bearing
on his shores made him feel sick. Maybe if he hadn’t been so childishly
petulant with her that day she might have confided in him then, not run away.

They’d no sooner made it into Andrea’s old office, the
anteroom to Michael’s, than he could hear his brother through the door that
stood ajar.

“Miss Grady.” The tone was curt and authoritative with more
of a snap in it than Michael had used with her predecessor.

Evan could just make out Vanny’s low tones before his
brother enjoined, “Don’t tell me to calm down, Vanny. This is just the kind of
thing I’m talking about. Yes, I asked her to go get Evan, but she doesn’t have
to leave her post unattended while she’s doing so. The phone has been ringing
off the hook, as you well know.”

Good manners should have caused him to slow-walk it into
Michael’s office to pretend he hadn’t heard that exchange, but frankly he just
didn’t give a shit at this point and the secretary herself looked beyond
embarrassment, just wearily tightening her mouth. Let Miss Grady deal with her
boss as best she could. Apparently he wasn’t the only one mourning the absence
of Andrea Prentiss all this time. It looked as if Michael, Vanny
and
Miss Grady had been doing so as well with equal measure.

Vanny slid one hip off the desk where she had been perched
and turned to them, saying to her fiancé over her shoulder, “God forbid you
pick up your own phone once in a while.” She beamed at Evan and held out her
hands. “Hi there, stranger.”

He took her hands and kissed her lightly on her cheek. “Hi, Vanny.”
It still surprised him how warm the woman his brother had fallen for was. She
tugged him into a full-fledged hug as Michael got up from behind the desk.

“Evan.” Michael shook hands with him before turning in a
frosty tone to his secretary and saying, “Miss Grady, who do you suppose
answers the phones if you get up from your desk and don’t either arrange for
another girl to watch them or switch them over to the switchboard? How many
times have I told you about that?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Reynolds. I thought I had switched them
over.”

Vanny let go of Evan to link arms with Miss Grady in a
conspicuous show of support. “Oh don’t listen to him, Colleen. He’s been a bear
all morning.”

Michael transferred his glare from his secretary to his true
love while Vanny walked the girl out and closed the door behind her.

“Vanny, really, you undermine my authority when you
intervene with Miss Grady.”

But Vanny had made her way back to him and slipped an arm
around his waist, pecking him on the cheek while simultaneously winking at
Evan. “You know I’m just trying to keep the poor girl from committing hari-kari
on company premises and costing you a fortune.”

Michael’s stern look dissolved, right then and there, into a
very un-Reynolds-like grin and he kissed the top of her golden curly head. “I
wouldn’t be a bear if you’d just make an honest man of me like you said you
would
ages
ago.”

“It’s only been a few months and these things take time,
Michael. You know that.”

“Translation, Miss Grady is not carrying her weight in this
whole endeavor,” he told Evan. “She’s the one who is supposed to be taking care
of this long-overdue wedding. Damn that Miss Prentiss,” he said to Vanny with a
big smile, and though it was a frequent joke between them from what Evan could
see in the time since Andrea had left, he did not manage to tune it out as he
usually did and instead cut to the chase.

“That’s why I’m here.”

Vanny glanced at him in surprise. “You want to help us with
our wedding?”

“No.”

Evan wasn’t sure how much of the truth he had planned to
tell Michael, but suddenly it felt all wrong to tell him the whole truth.
Witnessing his brother’s easy domesticity with his soon-to-be-wife, Evan felt
he would be betraying whatever hope he had of achieving that same intimacy with
Andrea if he disclosed to Michael she was on his island. Sure, the woman he had
set his sights on wouldn’t even tell him her real name and might disappear at a
moment’s notice or show up with completely unexplained life-threatening
injuries, but hell—details, details. He could still be making wedding plans
with her someday too, if he didn’t fuck up everything.

Andrea had been wrong, dead wrong not to involve her very
powerful boss in whatever trouble she was in, to not enlist him as an ally, and
instead to run away. Even if Evan hadn’t been in the equation, she was wrong
not to secure Michael’s protection and Evan would be wrong, he was wrong, not
to try to secure it now on her behalf.

But Jesus, he just couldn’t.

So he said instead, “I want you to get me a meeting with
Fredrico Stavros. As soon as possible.”

Vanny and Michael traded a shared look of apprehension mixed
with pity. Once Andrea had disappeared, he had never come right out and confessed
to them the full extent of his relationship with the vanished girl, but he was
sure Miss Prentiss Jr., if not his father, had filled in the blanks.

“Stavros is a dead end, Evan.”

“I don’t believe that. She looks, looked, too much like
Stavros’ wife. I don’t believe that could be a coincidence. Or that it was a
coincidence she disappeared on the day that resemblance was mentioned.”

“Other things were happening on that day as well, Evan,”
Michael pointed out. “Maybe you’re underestimating those.”

He shook his head. “She didn’t disappear because I, ah, was,
ah…”

“Banging her?” Vanny supplied.

“Vanny,” Michael admonished swiftly.

She laughed. “What? I meant it in a good way. Of course she
wouldn’t run away because she was banging Evan. I’m sure you’re just as good in
bed as your big brother, Evan.”

“Vanny, for Christ’s sake,” Michael chided but there was no
bite in it and the side of his mouth was turned half up. “And for the record,
I’m not sure ‘just as good’ is quite appropriate. I do have a number of years
of experience to my advantage.”

“Ah, but youth!” Vanny teased.

Michael seemed content not to rein her in, which kind of
made Evan like his brother even more.

“Just take my word for it,” Evan continued, “she didn’t run
away because of what happened between us. I may not have been sure about that
before, but I am now.”

“Why? What’s happened?” Michael, ever one to get right to
the point, asked.

“Nothing.” Not being straightforward was trickier than he
had thought. He never realized what a Boy Scout he was in terms of telling the
truth. “I just… I just am sure, okay? So I could try to get an appointment with
the guy Stavros, but I’m sure you and Dad can get me one faster.”

“What’s the hurry?” Vanny’s soft voice held questions she
for once seemed to be too diplomatic to ask.

“I want to get to the bottom of why Andrea disappeared. I
intend to. I will,” he finished strongly. “So will you help me?”

“Of course, Evan, if that’s what you want,” Michael agreed
easily. “I’ll even go with you.”

“No. I want to do this on my own.”

“Big surprise,” Vanny said and he glanced at her. So much
for diplomacy. “Look, I know it’s none of my business—”

“Don’t even try to get her to end that sentence there,”
Michael advised. “She never does. There’s always a ‘but’ involved.”

“
But
, Evan, you seem to have handled being part of
this wild family of yours by pushing everybody away and doing everything on
your own.”

“No really, Vanny, don’t be shy with my brother. Just tell
him what you think,” Michael deadpanned and she pursed her lips at him.

“What I
think
is that when it counts, you shouldn’t
be afraid to take help, Evan. To ask for it even. There may have only been my dad
and me in my family, but I know that’s what family’s all about. Being able to
ask for help if you need it.”

Evan smiled at her gently. “I am asking for help. I need
Michael’s help to get me in front of Stavros. The sooner the better. Okay?”