Page 93 of Hopeless Romantic
“Tommy? Dad, are you outside? It’s forty degrees out.” She closed her eyes and rubbed at the fatigue.
“I told him to go back to bed, but he only wanted you. And you know I have to work on my presentation.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” The sound of crunching glass coincided with her dad’s voice becoming ragged—more frantic.
“Okay, take a deep breath, we got this,” she said, taking a deep breath herself. “Did you check the basement? You know how he likes to hide in the Batcave.”
“He was in his room,” he said, his words nearly drowned out by the crunching.
“Is that glass?”
Her question was met with an eerie stillness that slid down her spine and prickled her skin.
“Dad?” she asked. Silence. “What are you doing?”
His breathing was heavy and distraught. Then the sound of metal on metal knocked in Beckett’s ear.
“Dad?Dad.”
“I told him to stay put, but he just ran from me,” he whispered.
Realization spread over Beckett like an icy blanket. “Dad, are you back in your studio?”
“He won’t come to me.”
The line went dead, and the eerie iciness leeched deeper, into muscle, into bone. Beckett called her father back, but got no answer. Trying her damnedest to keep her shit together, she dialed Annie, relieved when she finally got a sensible adult on the other end of the line.
“Hey,” Annie said, her voice thick with sleep.
“I know you pulled a double, and you must be exhausted. I’m so sorry to ask, but can you swing by my house and check on my brother?” she said, then offered the short version of the story.
“Absolutely. I’ll call you as soon as I get there.”
Beckett knew that Annie could handle whatever she found, but the wait to hear back from her felt interminable. Where time had flown by earlier in the evening, now it crawled. Where the business of the bar had initially kept her mind busy, now nothing distracted her from a sick feeling in her gut.
Something was wrong. Really wrong.
When Annie finally called back, twenty minutes later, her first words were, “You need to come home.”
* * *
Levi had to hand it to Gray—sailing to Nantucket for beer tasting and whale watching made for a damn fine bachelor party. There was no Vanna White or need for dollar bills, but then again, they were no longer those guys.
One by one, each of them had started a new chapter, and damn, if Levi wasn’t excited about where this new one was headed. And it had everything to do with a certain sexy little complicated and compassionate concierge, who, in a month’s time, had Levi seriously reconsidering postponing his summer sailing trip to embark on a more personal one.
Which was the only thing that could explain why, instead of taking advantage of some bro-time belowdecks with friends, he was pacing from the bow to the stern and back again, in nothing but sweats and a sweatshirt, freezing his nuts with a beer in one hand, his phone in the other aimed toward the sky as if that would help him catch a signal.
Instead, he was the one caught. At first, he thought it was Emmitt’s dad stretching his legs, but before he could lower his phone, he realized it was the groom-to-be. Who took one look at Levi, perched off the bow like Rose fromTitanic, and grinned. “Whatcha doing?”
“Just wanted to check in at the restaurant,” he lied. Between his time with Beckett and these last couple of days with the guys, the last thing on his mind was business. He felt rejuvenated, and his brain had actually slowed down enough for him to think clearly.
Only the more he thought, the clearer it became just how screwed he was. The clock in his bar was steadily ticking down the days until he left, and the clock in his chest was collecting all the things he wanted to experience with Beckett before time ran out.
This was a discrepancy that couldn’t be rectified.
“Sure was a big smile for work.”
