Dirty Games (Tropical Temptation)

“I’ll change. I swear. I’ll win your trust back.”

“You…” Luke’s voice replayed in her head, and shaped her reply. “You have to earn it. You have to go back to Foundations, and you have to finish this time. That’s step one.”

“I know,” he repeated, sounding miserable but strangely resigned. “I can’t do this anymore, either. I can’t stand myself, Quinnie. I can’t stand that I hurt you. Again.”

Hurt her? Hurt seemed like an insufficient description of the state she was in. Emotions churned to the surface. “I blamed someone else. Someone important to me.” Tears scalded her cheeks. “I called him a bastard to his face and pushed him away.”

“I’ll talk to him—”

“No!” She took a deep breath, and tried to clear an image of that disaster from her mind. She really would be picking her brother up at the morgue if she let Luke get within striking distance of Callum. “No. This isn’t something you can fix.”

“This is the guy you were cozy with on Paradise Bay?”

Exhaling helped her release her death grip on the steering wheel. “It wasn’t like that. He came as a favor to Eddie—to help me salvage my shot at Dirty Games. But for Eddie cashing in a chip, he would have chosen to have nothing to do with me.”

“Then he’s an asshole, Quinnie. I’m not saying that to justify my fucking things up for you, but any guy who doesn’t thank his lucky stars to be near you doesn’t deserve your time. You’re smart, fun, and you’re determined. People like Eddie call in favors for you for a reason. You’re the real deal, Quinn. I mean it. You have your shit together. Even when we were small, and I was the star and you were Callum Sheridan’s sister, I knew there was something inside you—some core of strength. Hell, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s something I didn’t have.”

“My shit is together?” She almost laughed at how off the mark her brother was, but, then again, he spoke from the perspective of a guy who’d just walked out of a jail cell. “Not really. Luke knows better. He saw the absolute worst of me—an ungrateful, argumentative woman with a self-defeating streak a mile wide, hiding her insecurity behind pride and a fuck-you smile. For some reason he stuck by me anyway. He pushed past all my defenses, and actually gave a damn about me. And I paid him back by calling him a lying bastard and accusing him of betraying me. No explanation I offer can undo that.” She swallowed the truth like a bitter pill. “There is no fixing this.”

The weight of that was too much to bear. She rested her aching head against the seatback and let the stinging tears flow from beneath her closed eyes.

Something soft touched her face, disappeared, and then returned with more insistence. Belatedly, she realized Callum was wiping tears from her cheek with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

The little-boy sweetness of the gesture threatened to shatter what was left of the heart she’d broken to pieces all on her own. She ducked away. “Jesus, don’t even. Where has that thing been?”

The snide comment earned her a sheepish laugh. “I’m pretty sure it’s yours,” he confessed, and continued drying her tears. “I borrowed it when I was living with you. Sorry. I’ll get you a new one.”

It was just pathetic enough to wring a laugh out of her. A tired one, but still. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m not too concerned about replacing a sweatshirt.”

He gave her a patient, almost wise smile. “It’s not really about replacing the sweatshirt, it’s about making amends—acknowledging the harm and restoring justice as much as possible.”

She sniffed, and then gave up and wiped her face with her own sleeve. “Making amends, huh?”

“Yep. We learn about it in recovery. Some mistakes can’t be undone, but you can always make amends in some way. It’s how you fix things.”

“You think?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he replied in his version of Yoda’s simultaneously guttural and sing-song-y voice, and poked her in the shoulder. “Fix things, you must.”

Chapter Eighteen

Luke approached a treadmill where a bearded, tattooed lumberjack of a guy sweated through a warm-up. Six months ago, the warehouse manager and one-time high school wrestling champ wouldn’t have survived the first mile. At intake, he’d been sixty pounds overweight, recovering from a heart attack, and afraid of leaving his wife a widow before he’d seen any of their four kids graduate from kindergarten. Today, thirty-five pounds lighter and far more active, Luke noted with satisfaction Dale Metcalf jogged comfortably at a ten-minute-mile pace.

Apparently sensing an audience, the man’s attention wandered from the news program playing on the flat screen mounted in front of the line of treadmills to the mirrored wall where both their forms were reflected. Teeth flashed beneath the Grizzly Adams beard. “Ah, Christ, McLean, you’ve gotten even uglier since I last saw you.”

“I missed you, too, Dale.” He did his best to muster up a kiss-my-ass sneer, but it felt flat. Flying back from Paradise Bay alone with a hole in his chest where his heart should have been had effectively sucked whatever was left of his sense of humor away. Three days back in his normal routine had done little to restore it. He missed her, dammit. Worse, he was about one more miserable, lonesome night away from doing something pathetic like calling Eddie and asking him if Quinn had mentioned him.

Dark eyes assessed him in the mirror and the grin disappeared. “You know, you look kind of bleak for a guy who just got back from a long vacation at a swanky resort.”

“Wasn’t a vacation. I went there for work.”

“Poor you. My work never takes me to an island in the Carib-fucking-bean.” The eyes narrowed. “And yet, you’re wound tighter than my mother-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner. Is it possible you went to a tropical paradise and somehow managed to not get laid? That’s gotta suck. No wonder you’re all tense and shit.”

“I’m not tense. If you want to worry about something”—out of habit, he checked the heart rate monitor readout and noted it was in a good range—“worry about your own sex life.”

Dale laughed. “Are you kidding? The wife can’t keep her hands off me, and since I’ve dropped some weight, we can get up into some damn interesting…ah…positions. She likes this one—I call it the naked skiing accident—where she goes low”—he dropped his hand to demonstrate— “and I go high, and she does this thing with her leg—”

“Consult your doctor to confirm you’re healthy enough for sex.”