Erin and Zander didn’t speak after that but paid their waitress and walked the short distance to the bar the kidnappers had designated, just to check it out. It was closed at ten A.M., but it looked credible enough, with fresh paint on the front and a carefully painted sign. The street was well traveled and, as promised, the Playa del Sol was only about a block from their hotel.
“We’ll tell the front desk we’re checking out late today,” Zander said as they walked back to the Camino Real. “No use just cooling our heels someplace else in the city.”
Erin nodded. Since the stop-start of the aborted hostage handoff, Zander had become as prickly as razor wire. She supposed she wasn’t helping that, clutching him the way she was, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t let him break free from her grasp until they got back inside their room, but Zander stayed close beside her even then, dialing his phone as soon as the door settled shut behind them. “Reymundo, my man!” he said brightly, and Erin looked up at him, surprised at the change in his voice. “Yeah, we noticed that. Did they even make the attempt? No? Not so good.” Rey was talking at a rapid-fire pace, and Zander nodded. “Agreed. Yes. Six o’clock, Playa del Sol. Yeah? Well, our lucky day, then, isn’t it.” Another nod. “I look forward to it, my man.”
He disconnected, and glanced down at Erin, finally seeming to unwind a notch. “All right, it sucks that we have to keep playing this game, but Rey knows the place and he thinks it’s a good location, too. Safe and pretty public, though it doesn’t officially open until later in the evening. We should be in and out of there, no problem. Still, since we’ve got some time on our hands, tell me this: Self-defense—have you had any training at all?”
“Well, define training,” Erin said. “I’ve had a few classes, but with my size, my best options seem to be run, scream, or my preferred combination of run and scream. I’m also a fan of your suggestion to carry a whistle with me everywhere. Even with a good swift kick to the balls, or a stiletto to the instep, I don’t apparently have enough mass to really make a difference in super-ninja hand-to-hand combat.”
Zander considered that. “Well, I’m not showing you how to shoot a gun,” he said. “Not now. Maybe when we get back, but we’ve got hours here, not days. That’s not going to help you.” He walked around her, almost as if considering her for the first time. “Man, you really are small.”
“Hey!” Erin said, not sure if she should be affronted. “You used to like small just fine.”
“Oh, I’m a big fan of small,” Zander agreed, a grin playing around the corners of his mouth. “But now I need you to think big. He held up his two fingers. “See this? Show me yours.”
Erin frowned at him. “Um, okay.” She held up her fingers in a vee, frowning as Zander bent his fingers at the knuckles so that they formed a tight, two-fingered, vee-shaped stump.
“Do that,” he instructed, and she obligingly bent her fingers down.
“Um, this is kind of awkward.”
“Just go with it. Now, take your other hand and touch right here. Don’t press hard.” He indicated a place on his throat, beneath his Adam’s apple, right where the clavicles came together. Erin frowned at him but did as he asked, wincing as her fingers found the sensitive spot on her own neck.
“Okay, that actually hurts even when I’m not pressing hard,” she said, palpating the small bump.
“It should,” Zander said. “It’s where your vocal cords are located. Now come here—no, no, keep your fingers bent.”
Frowning, Erin approached Zander with her hand cramped into the correct position, mistrust evident in her gaze. Her nervousness increased when he angled her arm up, bending it at the elbow, her equally bent fingers now positioned directly over his vocal cords. “You’re not strong, and you’re not big. But understand that if you need it, with enough force, this move can kill someone. Let me guide you.” He pushed her arm back, then extended it fully, so that her knuckles dug into the tender spot above his collarbone at the base of his neck. “It’s just a jab, but it’s the hardest jab possible, okay? You gotta imagine that you’re shoving your two knuckles all the way to the back of the guy’s neck. That’ll fracture his vocal cords.”
“Fracture them!” Erin exclaimed, and Zander nodded.
“Fracture them. So you have to hit it hard. When vocal cords get fractured, they swell. When they swell, it cuts off the attacker’s breathing and he dies. It takes a few minutes, but in the meantime he’s wheezing his guts out, and you can get away.” His smile was grim, but his eyes were steady. “Unless you’re James Bond, no attacker is going to worry about killing you when he’s choking to death.” He positioned her arm again. “Now try it.”
“Zander—”
“Try it. Just go easy, you know.” He cracked a smile. “Not too hard on ol’ voice box.”
He had her attempt the move while they were standing, in a struggle where she broke free for only a moment, and while Zander was on his back and side. Then he positioned a few pillows on the bed and had her climb up on those, punching them with all her strength until her arm was sore. When he finally called it off, Erin still wasn’t sure. “I don’t know that I’ll have the kind of leverage I need to get a really good punch in,” she said, and Zander held up a finger.
“Jab. Not a punch. A jab is a move that is tight into your body, then out. And honey, I’m hoping you don’t have any need for this move, regardless. But you can remember it, right?”
She grimaced. “I certainly remember what it does.”
“That’s my girl.” Zander fell onto the bed beside her, breathing out a heavy sigh as he turned to her.
“What?” she asked. Her heart gave a funny little sidestep, which had nothing to do with the exertion of defending herself against pillows, and everything to do with the way he was watching her. There wasn’t heat in his gaze, not exactly, but there was a depth of emotion that reminded her of long summer days and naps on the beach, of Zander watching her with total absorption.
Now he smiled a little, nodding to her. “So I was about to ask you a question, when we finally got that call this morning. And I find I still want to know the answer. What do you do with your time these days, Erin Connelly, when you’re not off saving your mother in Mexico?”
She frowned at him. “What?”
“Your job. You have a job, right?”
“Of course I have a job. I have two of them. The brownstone and the art gallery.”
Zander’s brows lifted, and a smile teased at his mouth. “And what do you do at the art gallery? You show your own work there these days?”
Erin fixed her gaze on Zander’s face, her mind straying to her work for the first time since they’d left Boston. He had the most beautiful mouth, she realized. Not full or fleshy, but not bitten down and hard, like his father’s had been. It was sensuous, she decided. The kind of mouth that looked best done in oils, where the extra intensity of the pigment could give a hint of—
She shook herself. He’d asked her a question. “Art gallery,” she repeated. “No, I don’t show my work there yet, but my job is good…really good. I got it right after graduation, but I’d worked summers there while I was at school, so I knew everyone. I help curate the art as it comes in, contribute on the decisioning for what paintings we show, and work with the customers.” She smiled, realizing she was babbling but not quite able to stop herself. “We just put on a show of contemporary painters in the city that required a whole new method of staging the art, since some of them no longer confine themselves to canvases. They paint on bits of metal, wood, industrial scrap—it was a really powerful show.”
“But what about your own work?” he asked. “I seem to remember—you liked to do portraits, right? Painting people?”
“I did. I do,” Erin said, nodding. Something in her chest was threatening to give way, and she kept an inner hold on it. Zander was just being polite, trying to take her mind off what was happening in just a few hours, maybe even to help her ease off the adrenaline rush of the vocal-cord smashing technique. She didn’t disagree with the strategy but—
“So were your paintings in the show?”
“Oh, no.” Erin shook her head. “I’m not known at all in the community, Zander, and this show was for more established painters.”
He wrinkled a brow. “But how do you become established if you don’t get your work shown in the galleries?”
Erin felt a twinge of embarrassment at the question. “It’s partly my fault, I guess. I just haven’t taken the time to do a lot of painting once school finished, and I need to have a body of work before any gallery will consider me—even my own. I started taking on boarders last year and…all of that just takes a lot of time.” That wasn’t the whole story, though. Something had been missing from her paintings for the past few years, something vital. She’d done well enough to finish her degree, to get passing notice and nice compliments, but no one was breaking down her door to buy her canvases. Her work just didn’t…inspire that kind of response. “I need to get back to painting in a serious way. I just haven’t,” she said.
His expression only got more confused. “But wait, isn’t painting what you really want to do? Isn’t that your dream?”
Zander reached up and pulled Erin down beside him, sighing with satisfaction as she half-sprawled on his chest. “You were too far away,” he said, and she laughed.
“Don’t talk to me about far away. You’re the one who works halfway across the world.”
“Nuh-uh-uh,” he said. “No changing the subject. You were talking about your paintings, and I want to know more.”
Erin shrugged against him. “There’s not much to tell. I have paintings, canvases. I have a whole portfolio of work. It’s what got me my degree.”
“But you don’t have enough of them to show?”
“Well, no,” she said. “And I’m not focused on that right now. I’ve been working a lot of hours. The brownstone needs some repairs done, and I may be losing one of my tenants.”
“Got it. And you think the brownstone is more important than your artwork?”
He could feel her frown even if he couldn’t see her. “I didn’t say that!”
“But what are you saying?” Zander rolled up onto his side, so they were facing each other. “The Erin I knew talked of nothing else other than getting her degree and hanging her paintings in galleries, business places, coffee shops, even private homes. She wanted to put them in hospitals and kids’ rooms, paintings of people that made other people stop and see themselves, see the ones they loved in the expressions of absolute strangers.”
“Wow.” Erin blinked at him. “I can’t believe you remember me saying that.”
“I remember a lot of things,” Zander said, his smile serious. He did, too. He remembered Erin’s face the moment after he’d kissed her for the first time. She’d been surprised—he’d been surprised. They’d been walking down the trail toward the lighthouse and she’d stepped up on a rock so she was almost his height, and he’d just stopped and pulled her to him. When he’d lifted his lips from her mouth, she’d stayed there a moment longer—her eyes still shut, her lips still parted—as if she were trying to preserve the moment, to mold her memory into perfect form the way she would a lump of clay.
He also remembered when they’d made love for the first time, Erin nervous and awkward but so trusting, so deeply in love with him that he felt as if he could carry the whole world on his back. She’d been all arms and legs back then, it had seemed, her energy scattered and unfocused, half-girl, half-woman, half-lightning bolt…but now everything felt more…right. Like her bones were finally finding their place inside her skin, her brain inside her skull.
But the one thing that didn’t fit was her not painting. Really painting the way she was meant to paint, the way he’d seen her do it those days back in her gran’s studio, with her eyes wild and her heart on the canvas, her face flushed with emotion. That’s the Erin he remembered, and he could tell from her expression that she could see that memory in his eyes, too.
“You went off to conquer the world,” she said quietly. “And I…didn’t. I had my degree to consider, requirements to fulfill. I knew that my most technically proficient work was my most controlled stuff, so that’s what I focused on, driving for my degree as quickly as possible, especially after Gran died.” She shrugged. “I guess I got a little lost along the way.”
Her voice was so sad that he reached out and grazed his fingers across her chin. “Getting lost’ll happen,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean you have to stay lost.”
Erin smiled, shaking her head. “And that sounds like the Zander I remember,” she said, her words little more than a sigh. “You really aren’t afraid of anything, are you?”
“Other than questions like that?”
She gave that short, heartbreaking laugh again. “I’m serious. It seems like I spent most of my childhood afraid of screwing up—and then I screwed up big time, with you. Maybe that’s part of why I shifted focus with my painting, too. I couldn’t afford to screw that up. Only maybe in the process of not screwing it up, I controlled it to death.”
“I have noticed control is kind of a big thing with you,” Zander said dryly, and Erin snorted.
“Yeah, well. I never had a say in anything when I was growing up, never had control. I always seemed forced into doing something crazy I didn’t want to do. But how much has really changed?” She waved her hand around the room. “I’m out here in the middle of nowhere, still about to do something crazy I don’t want to do.”
“Well, hell, sweetheart,” Zander said, the words coming out of him before he really understood what he was saying. “Maybe you should start doing the crazy kind of things you do want to do.”
That caught her. Her gaze swung around to meet his again. “What are you talking about?”
And then he did understand what he was saying. Understood it and welcomed every inch of it. “I mean, sometimes, in the face of no control, you have to take control back. To do something—anything—that’s just on your terms. Something you do for the hell of it, just to remind yourself that you’ve got more power than you think you do, even when it seems like you don’t have any power at all.” He leaned forward, pinning her eyes with his gaze. “So, you tell me, Erin,” he murmured. “What do you really want to do, right this second?”