hours.’’
The next twenty minutes were a whirlwind of getting him out the door. Before he left, though, he took her hand and turned it palm up so he could kiss the tattoos at her wrist, a stylized lizard’s head beside a cluster of circles that looked like a Pacman gone wrong. His own tattoos, consisting of a matching Pac-Man beside a tribal-looking eagle’s head, were covered by the sleeve of his starched shirt and suit coat, but she knew they were there, knew the symbols bound them together just as surely as their white-gold wedding bands.
The tattoos, like their relationship, had come from a half-remembered night of carousing in the Yucatan. They’d awakened in her hotel room, two strangers who’d obviously made love, with dirty feet and fresh tats that, oddly enough, hadn’t hurt. Patience could only assume that she’d chosen the tattoos, placing them where Hannah said the Nightkeepers wore their bloodline glyphs. The lizard was her bloodline signature. The eagle, she guessed, had come from his last name, which was now hers. She didn’t know about the Pac-Man.
He smiled as he linked his fingers with hers and leaned in for a last, lingering kiss. ‘‘Miss me.’’
It was a command, not a question, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she pressed her cheek to his and hung on a moment longer than usual. ‘‘Back atcha.’’
Then he left, striding down their flagstone walkway with his garment bag and computer case slung over his shoulder. Uncharacteristically, Patience stood at the front door, watching as he backed his Explorer out of the garage and drove off with a beep-beep and a wave.
She couldn’t help feeling that she wasn’t going to see him again.
When the alarm went off before dawn, Sven grabbed for the clock, intending to chuck it at the nearest wall. He came up with his cell phone instead, and realized that was what’d been ringing.
‘‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’’ He flipped the thing open, squinting into the too-bright light in an effort to make sense of the caller ID, but last night’s drunk hadn’t yet turned into today’s hangover, and he couldn’t see the letters.
Didn’t matter, though. His so-called partner was the only a-hole likely to be calling at this hour, and if Fontana was calling postparty, he’d be too blitzed to make a lick of sense. He could wait. Besides, it was already too late to answer—the damn call had gone to voice mail while Sven was staring at the display.
Head still drumming with the backbeat from last night’s dance music, he dropped the phone on the floor and rolled over, dragging the bedsheet with him. The motion earned a feminine, ‘‘Hey!’’
Surprised, Sven rolled back and did the squinting thing again, this time making out a pouty brunette.
She crooked a finger and slid him a look as she shimmied her torso in a fake shiver. ‘‘Can I have the sheet back? I’m cold.’’
‘‘Take it.’’ He tossed it in her direction, too out-of-it to decide whether she was actually cold, or sending him a green light. ‘‘I gotta pee.’’
Okay, even woozy he knew that wasn’t a great line. But by the time he’d taken care of business and splashed some cold water in the direction of his face, he’d regrouped and was ready for a second—and hopefully more memorable—assault on Mount Brunette.
‘‘Hey, babe,’’ he said as he strolled into the bedroom. ‘‘I was thinking—’’ He broke off when he saw that the bed was empty.
Figuring on writing it off as her loss and catching another few hours of shut-eye, Sven was headed back to the bed when he heard female voices out in the main room.
Voices, as in more than one female.
Suddenly really, really wishing he could remember the night before—and hoping he could talk them into round two—he pulled on a pair of swim trunks and strode through the door into the main room of his beachside apartment.
And stopped dead at the sight of the girl, or rather the woman, standing in the open doorway. Sunlight spilled in behind her, gleaming on her dark, white-streaked hair and outlining her boy-slim, athletic body.
She might have been wearing shorts, a tank, and sandals instead of jeans and a work shirt, but he knew her instantly even through the fog in his brain. The gut-punch was unmistakable.
‘‘Cara?’’
She didn’t say anything, just let her gaze roam around his apartment, where surfboards and dive gear were piled atop depth charts and the odd artifact, competing for space amid what he liked to call creative clutter but suspected she would see as garbage.
The brunette—who was still wearing his sheet, for chrissake—looked at Sven, brow furrowed. ‘‘This your girlfriend or something?’’
‘‘No,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘She’s—’’ Then he broke off, because he’d never been able to figure out what to call her. She wasn’t his sister, not really. She wasn’t his friend, either, not now, anyway. She was—
‘‘I’m his little sister,’’ she said, apparently not sharing an ounce of his dislike for the term. Focusing on him, she said, ‘‘Get dressed and pack your things. We’re leaving.’’
Sven’s gut iced over. ‘‘Is something wrong with Carlos?’’
‘‘Yes and no.’’ She paused, and for a second he thought he saw a crack in the disdain she was projecting like plate armor. ‘‘Look, please don’t ask me to explain. Just pack.’’
The brunette pouted and turned to him. ‘‘Are you going to let her talk to you like that?’’
The look in Cara’s eyes said,
And the hell of it was, he did.
Sven nodded slowly. ‘‘Yeah. I am.’’ He glanced at the brunette. ‘‘Get dressed and get out. Apparently I have a
