The dark-haired woman blinked. Smiled. "You're very much alive, chere."
"Stay with me."
"I will. Even if you don't know I'm here," she assured him as his mind clouded and the heavy smoke drifted back over him.
"Are they trying to kill me?"
"They're healing you. Protecting you," she murmured. The buzzing sound began again, etching what would turn out to be his first tattoo into his biceps.
"Who left you to die?" she asked when he woke again, even as she laid a cloth across his forehead and chest. The scent soothed him, the sound of her voice more so.
"It was my only way out."
"You didn't answer my question."
"There are things you're better off not knowing." He glanced at his biceps. "You tattooed me?"
"It's an old custom to ward off evil. It's a charm. We have to press it with charms to keep the spell working, like we did before it healed. It's called a gad-a guard. It's a Voodoo charm that protects against harmful spirits. Some people say you can rub the herbs over the healing tattoo, but the right way calls for it to mingle with your blood. And you, my friend, need all the protection you can get."
The knife remained poised over his arm. He'd never let anyone with a knife get this close to him, but she mesmerized him. "Go ahead."
Fascinated, he watched as she used the tip of the blade to cut him so gently he didn't feel it. He watched the thin line of blood emerge from the ink, watched her graceful fingers press the herbs along the cuts and murmur what sounded like a small prayer of thanks.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked.
"Because you needed help. That's what we do here."
"Not in my world."
"You're not in that world anymore," she reminded him.
The reality was, he'd never escaped it. The call he'd been waiting for for over a year came on a Thursday at twelve fifty-three p.m.
He'd packed, told Josie he was going to visit a friend from the Navy who was having a rough time. And for the first time since they'd met, he'd been forced to lie right to her face.
She believed him because he was a damned good liar. The last words he'd ever said to her had been full of lies.
And the job . . . that goddamned job . . .
It should've worked out like this one. Perfect. Instead, it backfired terribly and would haunt him forever.
The blood on his hands was her blood. He could feel her in his arms, tried to choke out her name but couldn't.
Gunner was still holding Josie when Mike and Andy came in. He wouldn't let go, not until Mike forced him back so he could check on his daughter.
Gunner couldn't look either of them in the eye.
"She was dead when I got here," he said, his entire body numb with grief. "There was nothing I could do."
"She's been gone for at least twenty-four hours," Andy said. "Where the hell were you, James?"
"In hell," he echoed. "I went back to hell."
And Josie had paid the price.
Six minutes. Avery wasn't sure she was really breathing. She was flushed, sweaty, her hands holding tight to the glass, trying not to slip on the cellophane.
She didn't know a lot about flowers, beyond the ones Gunner had etched onto her body, a riot of pink and white flowers that trailed along her rib cage, licked her breast. Magnolias were the state flower of Louisiana, although she hadn't known that at the time she'd lain down on his table and allowed him the intimacy of etching something permanent into her skin.
At the time, they were simply beautiful.
He marked you. Pushed you away but marked you to make sure you couldn't be with anyone else without being reminded of him. And then . . .
And then this.
"We can't trust him. He's been gone too long," Jem had said, just a week earlier. "He's not the same man."
Then again, Avery wasn't the same woman either.
She desperately tried to picture Gunner doing this, sending her these beautiful, graceful white orchids and planting a bomb at the same time. Orchids died and rebloomed, but she knew it took time and patience. There was a lot of waiting and hoping. The message was sadistic.
Unless Gunner hadn't been the one to plant the bomb.
"You're really willing to give him the benefit of the doubt," she whispered to herself angrily. She swallowed hard. Sweat dripped into her eyes and she blinked it away because she couldn't do anything else.
But the way he'd touched her the other night . . .
The room was lined with Gunner's sketches, the first things she'd noticed besides the man himself when she'd first burst in here on Dare's behalf. She would take it all with her, all the portraits and the photographs, the tattoo guns, any last memories of the man she'd have.
Suddenly, strong hands were dragging Gunner off the beach, away from the choking thickness that lodged in his throat. He was shoved into a seat, an oxygen mask placed over his mouth, and told to fucking breathe.
Drew Landon was standing over him.
My hero, he mouthed, and Landon shot him the finger.
"I'm not letting you commit suicide."
"That's not what I was doing," Gunner muttered. Landon held up his wrists and showed him where he'd been cutting into his own wrists. The cuts were hard to see because of the tattoos there, and Landon was cleaning and bandaging him, something Gunner thought was possibly the oddest thing ever.
Or maybe this is all a smoke-inhalation-induced dream.
Landon was muttering as he cleaned Gunner up.
Gunner in turn pulled the mask off. "You let me go. Why bring me back? There are plenty of men who can do what I do."
"You're wrong. You were the best. I think you still are. Your father might've thrown you away, but I never did."
"Not until I fucked up."
"You broke a rule, and you paid for it."
"And then you paid your men to try to beat me to fucking death. So I paid, Landon."
Landon furrowed his brow, as though he wasn't sure he wanted to say what he was thinking. But finally, he said, "You can't play dead forever unless you really are."
Gunner shook his head and refused to think about that piece of his past. Because going there would bring him over the edge and he was already barely hanging on. He still didn't know if he believed Landon had anything to do with Josie's death, but he blamed the man just the same. Landon knew that and shrugged it off as easily as he did everything evil that tried to touch him.
One year, one month and four days was all Gunner had gotten with Josie. He'd disappeared and stayed dead for over ten years, until Avery showed up at his door.
She'd walked in and he'd known she was dangerous from the second she'd kicked the asses of two drug dealers on the street in front of the tattoo shop.
"I'm not playing dead to anyone but the people I want kept out of this."
"You've said your final good-bye to your female friend then?" Landon asked.
She let you go. Didn't even protest when you got out of bed and left. And he knew she'd been watching. "What the fuck-you're having me followed?"
"I don't need to, James. I know you better than you know yourself. You've finally given in."
"How do you know that?"
"Because you're here. I didn't have to track you down."
"And you would've," he muttered.
"Because I need you, yes." Landon shrugged. "You fucked up after I gave you a second chance and then you ran. You thought I'd just let that go?"
"I don't think for you. I have no fucking idea what makes you do what you do."
"That's not true, James, and you know it."
"I didn't fuck that mission up," Gunner said tightly, wondering why he bothered. "I don't care what you believe, but I would never take a chance like that."
"Then why run?"
"A lot of fucking reasons. You killed Josie and set me up to take the fall. If her father hadn't covered for me . . ."
Landon shook his head. "I told you that I had nothing to do with that. Nothing."
"And you didn't order the shit beat out of me?"
"No." Landon sighed, reached out and put a hand on Gunner's shoulder. "You disappointed me. I got rid of you. When the opportunity for you to redeem yourself came up, I gave you the second chance I knew you wanted. You fucked that up. I promised I'd find you and I keep those promises. Always."
Landon's hand lingered on his shoulder, then moved slowly down his biceps. Gunner willed himself to stand there under the touch.
"I like the new look."
"I didn't do it for you."
Landon smiled. "You didn't miss anything about working for me?"
Landon was better to Gunner than Powell had been. Didn't hit him. Treated him like an adult. Taught him things.
Lured him in, let him think he was doing things for the greater good.
"I'm not like your father," was what Landon used to say, and Gunner wanted to believe that so badly that he talked himself into it.
"I never smuggled humans who didn't want to be smuggled. I don't play with life like that."
Gunner knew that-Landon had lost his mother and sister to human traffickers, which fueled his obsession with stopping as many of them as he could. It's what made believing he was doing the right thing so easy at times for Gunner.
Landon did, however, move people around like chess pieces on his own personal board, and Gunner reminded him of that. "You take out people to further your business."
"That's what business is all about," Landon said. "Stay with me tonight."
"Landon."
"Guest room, James. I don't want anything more from you that you're not willing to give."
"Well, that's a first," he muttered.
"I don't want to break you, Gunner," Landon told him, using that name for the first time ever. "I don't think anyone ever could."
He wouldn't tell Landon that one person could, that maybe she already had.
Gunner pushed himself up from the table. "Call me James," he said before he walked out of the sliding glass door and back into the smoke.
Three minutes. Avery desperately tried to remain calm and was failing. Her hands shook and it was getting harder to hold on to the vase. None of this made sense.
Memories flashed in her mind, almost too quickly for her to hang on to any of them-Gunner, holding her while she'd cried. Gunner tattooing her. Gunner, in her bed . . .
She avoided talking about anything that could be construed as asking him to stay. Instead, she asked, "Why tattoos?"
"Tattoos are like a resume," he explained. "They're where you've been, where you want to go. In some cultures, they tell everything about you, if you've been to prison. If you've killed."
He went quiet then, and she asked, "What do yours say?"
"More than you want to know."
But she did want to know. She thought on those final hours, about how Gunner had remained under her, how he hadn't struggled or moved. How she'd been the one to finally roll off.
He hadn't wanted to let her go. And she'd forced his hand, let him slide out of bed and dress and leave as casually as if he'd be back that night for dinner.