Chapter Thirty-Seven - James
“What’s this place?” Sasha asks as I pull into the Palm Destiny Resort valet.
“What’s it look like?” I ask back. I gauge how much time until sunset and come up with an hour and a half, maybe. Merc could live a little closer to town if you ask me, but whatever. So far Harp and I have not had a proper sunset. But this restaurant is on the top floor and has a view of the pool, palm trees, and the mountains—so it faces west. The perfect sunset is within our grasp. Even if I do have to share it with Smurfette.
“A hotel,” Sasha says dryly. “Why are we at a hotel if we’re going out to eat?”
I look over at Harper as we wait for the valet to finish up with the car in front of us. She said she wants to have dinner with me and celebrate shit. Like families do, that’s the way I took it. And while the Smurf in the back is not part of my plans for the future, she’s a partner for now. So she’s family too. “The lionfish wants seafood, so seafood she shall have.”
“This looks like a place you need reservations, James. I bet we can’t get a table.”
“Reservations. Pfft. Please, Harper. A little bit of faith.” The valets appear, opening doors for the girls, and I get out and shake the hand of the guy on my side. I slip him some cash. “Park it outside where you can see it, please.”
And then I walk around the dirty piece-of-shit Hummer and take Harper’s hand. We’re not dressed up, and the top-floor restaurant typically requires top-floor attire, but they won’t be turning me away. I lead the girls inside and then take them over to a seating area filled with plush couches and chairs. “Watch TV for a sec, will ya? I’ll be right back.” I peck Harp on the cheek and go looking for my contact. I bypass the front desk, the concierge, and all staff wearing anything that resembles the kind of uniform required when you work with customers, and instead head straight for the door that says, Housekeeping, Employees Only.
I bump right into a large older woman wearing a maid’s uniform. “Can I help you?” she asks cautiously in her thick Spanish accent.
“I’m looking for Raul,” I reply back.
She eyes me with suspicion, making the lines on her forehead come together in a v pattern. “Who is asking?”
“Six.”
“OK,” she says, sucking in a breath, like she’s preparing for terrible news. “I am tonight’s Raul. What you do need?”
“Dinner,” I say with a smile. “For three, top floor.”
She laughs. “Dinner?” She laughs again. “Dinner,” she repeats, shaking her head. “Whew, I OK with dinner. I do dinner for you, Mr. Six.” It comes out Meester Sex, but that’s just fine with me. I bet she thought I had a body cleanup job for her. She’s a maid, after all. That’s what Company maids do. “You go upstairs,” she says, scribbling something down on the back of a business card that has a sailing yacht on it and says, Tate Global Engineering. She hands me the card and I flip it over to read the script. Company Man. “You go up, I tell them you coming.”
“Thank you,” I tell her as I leave the way I came in. When I get back to the lobby Harper and Sasha are huddled next to each other as they watch TV. They could be related, that’s how alike they look right now. Long blonde hair. Sasha has blue eyes, and Harper’s are brown, but they both have petite features. Small noses, small mouths, and lean bodies from years of being outdoors.
“Let’s go, girls.” I wave them to me and they both come quickly. “What’s wrong?” I ask them.
“Harper thought she saw someone she knew outside.”
“Who?” I ask as I hold the elevator doors open for them.
“I don’t know,” Harper says, looking over her shoulder. “He just looked familiar. Some guard we had on ship. But that’s silly. He was a personal guard, and they never leave the ship.”
We’re silent as the elevator takes us to the top-floor restaurant. She’s probably imagining things, but I don’t like the new vibe in the air all of a sudden. The doors part a few seconds later and before us is the grand dining room. The maître d’ smiles widely, even though we are not dressed.
Being Six has certain perks. Getting your ass kissed by a glorified waiter is not usually up there with my top ten, but right now, it’s number one. Because I just want Harper to have a nice evening.
“Your table is waiting, sir,” the maître d’ says. And then he waves us forward to the waiter. We are taken to the far side of the restaurant and seated in front of a window with a view that impresses even me.
“Wow,” Sasha says as she takes a seat facing the window. “I bet the sunset is fantastic.”
I look over at Harper and smile. I sure the fuck hope so.
The waiter calls off the day’s specials and Harper’s eyes light up with the mention of fresh fish flown in daily on the weekends. The waiter takes drink orders and as soon as he leaves Harper leans in and kisses me on the cheek. “A fish taco stand this is not.”
“No fish tacos for you, baby. Not unless we’re sitting on the sand in some Third World beach and washing it down with a bottle of beer.”
“That sounds just as good as this.”
“Yeah, but there’s no beach here, so fish tacos are out. Now what’s it gonna be?” Both girls look over the menu and that makes me smile inside as well as out. They can both use a nice normal dinner for once. I’m pretty sure Harper has not had a sit-down dinner since she left the ship. And Sasha… well, I doubt she’s ever had a formal dinner like this. I glance down at the menu, opt for my usual, and then turn to Sasha. “You gonna get the buffalo burger?”
She shoots me an annoyed glare. “Why would you assume I’d want the buffalo? Because I’m from Wyoming?”
“You were in Wyoming, James?” Harp asks.
“No, I found Kamikaze Smurf camping out in the middle of Colorado.”
“Alone?”
Sasha lowers her head and pretends to be busy with the menu. “It’s a long story,” she mumbles.
“Harper,” I say to distract her away from the long story. “What are you getting?”
“Hmmm, the grilled mako shark with pineapple rice, I think. How about you?” She smiles sweetly at me as the bright sun hits her at an angle and illuminates her bronzed shoulders.
I lean in and grab her thigh, then fist my hand in her hair. “Fuckable. You are simply. Fuckable.”
“Hello?” Sasha says. “I’m right here.”
And then the waiter appears and I rattle off my order. “Chilean seabass for me and the mako shark for this lovely lady.” The waiter nods and murmurs something about good choice. I’m making him nervous but I don’t care. “Sasha, what’s it gonna be?”
“The buffalo burger.” I hold in my snicker, but she hears it anyway and shoots me a glare. “What? It’s the only thing on here I recognize.”
I turn back to the waiter. “The buffalo burger for lovely lady number two.” He nods and retreats.
“Pffft, like you really think I’m a lovely lady,” Sasha says.
“I think you’re a little shit who has no idea how good she’s got it right now. Better?” I shoot back.
“James,” Harper admonishes me with a kick under the table. “Be nice.”
“This is me being nice.” Her hand on my thigh captures my attention and all thoughts of Sasha disappear. “Harp”—she giggles—“don’t start something you can’t finish. They have a men’s room here too.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Oh, I don’t need a dare to fuck you in a public restroom, darling.” She tries to withdraw her hand but I capture it before she can, and then I slide it tight up over the top of my thick hard-on. “You do this to me, you pay the price.” I place her hand on the table and lean in to her ear. “If you do it again, I’ll take you right here on the table. Don’t test me.”
“Oh my God,” Sasha says. “La-la-la. I can’t hear you.” She closes her eyes, covers her ears, and shakes her head. “La-la-la…”
“So, Sasha. What’s your job in the Company?” Harper asks, changing the subject and managing to make me more uncomfortable than I just made the Smurf.
“Nah,” I say, waving a hand at Sasha. “We’re not talking shop tonight. This is down time.”
“I disagree, James,” Harper says. “I saved her life this morning and I hardly know anything about her. We’re living in the same house and we’re traveling together. So I want—”
“No,” I interrupt. “Not—”
“Hunter,” Sasha says, ignoring me and cutting me off at the same time.
“You’re a girl. You’re not a hunter,” Harper says with a laugh.
“I am a hunter. My dad raised me to be a hunter and he was in charge of training all the hunters before this current group. So I’m even legitimate.”
Fuck.
“You’re not the first Six, James,” Sasha sneers at me.
“Conversation. Over. Let’s move on to something else.”
She redirects her attention to Harper. “I’ve been trained to hunt. I’ve been around the hunters my whole life. Not you,” she says to me. “They kept you away. But some of those guys you killed this past year? They were my friends.”
“Friends? Please. How many times could they have been passing through Wyoming? Or picking up guns from a western gun show? A handful at the most.”
“If you say so,” she says sweetly.
I might not know her all that well, but I know her well enough to understand what that means. “You’ve got another secret you’d like to share?”
“I have lots of secrets.”
“Um,” Harper interjects. “You’re right, James, let’s talk about something else.”
“No,” Sasha says. “Let’s talk about secrets. I’ll tell you one of mine if you tell me one of yours, James.”
“James,” Harper says, turning to me and placing her hand on my thigh. It’s a diversion this time. “I don’t want to hear secrets, OK? Secrets are darkness. Secrets keep the darkness alive. I hate secrets and I don’t want to know them.”
I remove her hand from my thigh and place it back on the table, never losing eye contact with Sasha. “Sorry, baby. This is too good of an opportunity to pass up. You first, Cocky Smurf.”
Sasha smiles broadly and then turns her head and shoots me a sideways glare that makes her look every bit the hunter she claims she is. “OK. My secret is…” She smiles over at Harper now. “I met someone special last summer.”
“Who, a boy?” Harper asks, eagerness in her voice. Apparently this is a secret even Harper can get in on.
Sasha has to bite her lip to stop her smile. “Yes.” She slowly pulls her gaze from Harper and redirects it to me. “Nicholas Tate.”
The entire restaurant goes silent. Or maybe not. Probably not. I think it’s just that I stop hearing everything because the only thing I do hear is an echo of those two words.
“Pardon me?” Harper says. “My brother went to see you?”
Sasha is still looking at me. Her mouth moves and if I was a little bit closer to her, I’d slap my hand over it to stop her secret from spilling out. But I’m not. So it does. “He’s come to see me a bunch of times.”
“You’re lying,” Harper says. “How would he find his way to Wyoming?”
“Does it matter how?” Sasha asks. “I mean, really, that’s not even in the top million most important things to ask about what I just told you.”
“What should we ask then?” I finally come back to reality to deal with what she’s saying.
“Oh no. Not until you tell me your secret, James. Then if you want to keep playing, we can. But now you owe me.”
You owe me. She said the same thing on the plane when she told me Harper was not at home.
“Make it a good one, Tet. Because mine was a bombshell.”
I take a deep breath and look over at Harper. She’s gone white. Her perfectly tanned face is sheet white. “Have you seen him lately?”
Sasha shakes her head, like she’s saying no. But that’s not what she’s saying. “No more questions until I get a secret from James. And don’t lie, James. I’ll know.”
I have so many questions. And I want them all answered. But I have very few secrets, at least none that can be revealed at this table right now. I roll them around in my head and make a decision. “You want to know why Merc isn’t around? The details? Not what I told you earlier.”
She weighs this internally and then gives me a slight nod. “That will do for starters.”
That will do for enders too. Because that’s the only one I have that won’t ruin everything. “The person who killed your father was US Senator Channing.”
She swallows, and then nods. “I knew that.”
“You did not know that. You guessed it, but now you know. Because I just told you. My turn. Who—”
But then the wait staff is here with our food, looking very uncomfortable as they serve us. I wait until the food is all on the table and then we all thank them like the polite people we really aren’t.
“That conversation is over,” Harper says. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s just eat.”
She’s on the verge of tears and I’m instantly sorry. I lean in and whisper, “Just enjoy your dinner. I’m sorry if I’ve ruined it. I just wanted you to have a nice night.”
“It’s not ruined, James. It’s fine. I just… I just want to talk about normal things tonight.” She picks up her fork and cuts into her shark steak. It flakes apart like it’s supposed to and she smiles when it touches her lips. “This is really good fish for being out in the middle of the desert.”
“I caught a shark once,” Sasha tells her.
“Me too!” she says excitedly. “Deep-sea fishing was something we did a lot.”
“I’ve never caught a fish in my life,” I admit.
“What?” Even Sasha joins in on this conversation. I’m sure she’s thrilled about being better at fishing than me. And as is starting to become the norm, we drop the deep dark secrets and talk about nice things to make Harper happy. Growing up on megayachts. Growing up on cattle ranches. Growing up on the beach.
There’s no mention of the Company. It’s a dirty world we live in. It’s dangerous and deadly—we know this.
But we don’t have to talk about it right now.
Those secrets aren’t going anywhere. We’re carrying them around on our backs like a cross.
Or, maybe more fittingly, an albatross.