Chapter 9 – CARTER
9
CARTER
I pressed the balls of my hands into my tired eyes. The pressure felt good. I leaned back in my seat, stretching my back out. A glance at the corner of my computer screen told me the time.
It was eight. What remained of daylight slanted through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I had about two more good hours in me.
That was how it was in the past; nose to the fucking grindstone day after day, but I wasn’t fighting anyone anymore. I had more money than I knew how to spend. I didn’t have to work like somebody was chasing me anymore, but the old work ethic had stuck. That was the thing about money though. I had had nothing, so I knew that it wasn’t permanent. If I could make it, I could lose it too.
I looked over at the photograph on the wall directly across from my desk. Of the beach at night. Grayish white clouds crouched in the navy stillness, but the moon shone brightly through them, illuminating them from within. The silvery light reflected off the water.
The image was captured at exactly the right moment to catch both the waves washing up on the shore and rolling down. Every other wall was bare, no paintings, art, nothing. I wasn’t a sentimental guy, but that was just because I never had anything worth keeping until Anna gave me the negative of that photograph. It was a miracle that by the time I had the money to have it properly developed and framed, it wasn’t worn off from my constant need to pull it out and stare at it through lamplight.
Why don’t you just use a digital camera like a normal person , I had asked her once. The reason was that some people with the most cutting-edge digital cameras couldn’t take pictures as good as she took with 20th-century technology. I wondered if she still felt the same way. She was talented.
I was biased, but I was also right.
That picture was the first thing I saw whenever I looked up from my computer. It was impossible to look at it without thinking of her.
A punishment, but also a snapshot of some of the most peaceful nights of my life.
Seeing it day in and day out motivated me like nothing else could.
God, I needed to see the beach tonight. Not just the photo on my wall, or in my mind. I needed to feel the sand. Smell the sea. Anything to bring me the calm I would need to stop myself from getting on the highway, driving to St. Louis and killing this Josh asshole without even a lick of real evidence that he was the one who hurt her or put that bulletin out on the dark web.
The massive villa was an investment property but it was also a 3.9 million dollar fuck you to everyone who lived on this end of the beach.
When I was younger, guys like me would get the cops called on them if we hung out within five miles of here. Now, I could take a shit out there if I wanted and nobody could say a word. I just wanted to be near the water. And this was the perfect spot.
Just a little ways past the halfway point, tipping toward the wealthy end. This was where I met her so many times I lost count.
I parked the Ducati and entered the villa, discarding my jacket on the stool in the kitchen knowing it would be hung on a mahogany hanger in the closet before I woke up tomorrow morning. The staff here came and went like ghosts.
That was our beach out there; me and Anna. The best nights of my life were spent twenty yards from the back door. And now a piece of that was mine forever.
The place was way too big for me. I could easily fit a family of seven or eight in the house if I wanted to. Kids had never crossed my mind because typically, they came with a wife, something I’d resigned myself to never having. There was no woman I wanted enough to share my last name with.
To raise children with.
There was one once, but I’d gone and ruined that, just like I’d ruined so many things before it.
I wasn’t cut out to be a husband. Not anymore. Not after everything I’d done. What I’d become in her absence.
My footsteps echoed through the empty entrance hall as I made my way to the living room. I kicked off my boots and peeled off my socks, opening the door to the verandah that wrapped around the entire back of the house. The smell of diffused sandalwood giving way to ocean brine and cold sand.
Enough of the homes in the neighborhood, mine included, were second or third homes, so the beach was never crowded, even during the day. Not like the northside beaches. With syringes and trash poking out of the sand.
I walked out onto the beach, the sea air refreshing me from the inside out. I stopped just outside my property line, stuck still by the silhouette of a woman interrupting the view.
The immediate association I had made me shake my head. I didn’t bother fighting the feeling clawing its way through me as memory after memory assaulted me.
I almost forgot what it was like, feeling something other than numbness and rage.
I remembered lying on the sand with her, walking out on the pier and dangling our legs over the side. The sound of her laugh. The feel of her. I wouldn’t trade that summer for all the money in the world.
Except you did exactly that, you ruinous bastard.
Squinting through the darkness, I moved closer, ready to give a gruff nod to whoever it was as I passed them for my usual walk down the shoreline.
My jaw went slack. Even in the dark, even this far away, I knew the way she moved.
Anna shifted her weight onto one foot, pulling her arms tighter around herself with a shiver as a cool wind swept up the shore.
Her skirt billowed. She had to hold her hand to her face against the breeze to stop her hair battering it. It wasn’t all that dark, but she hadn’t noticed me yet. Her head tilted down to the sand as she turned away from the wind with a scowl on her face. Tension across her shoulders.
It reminded me…
It reminded me of so many other nights where she’d walk down this beach looking exactly like she did now, only younger. With less curves to her body. With shadows carved not quite so deeply beneath her eyes.
The sound of crashing waves disguised the sounds of my approach. I was close enough to kiss her neck before I finally spoke.
“Do you know how many times I came out here hoping I’d see you?”
Anna shrieked, jumping back at least a foot, shoving at my reaching hands as she struggled to regain her footing with a glare.
She wore a conservative blue silk dress, perfectly tailored to her shape but revealing little of her skin. The neckline wasn’t even low enough to show her collarbone, while the skirt hung just below her knees. She’d swept her hair up into an elegant updo, looking every inch the perfect governor’s daughter.
I wanted to rip that fucking dress in half.
Anna collected herself, straightening her shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. It sounded more like an accusation than a question.
I peered down the beach, the way she would’ve had to come and frowned when I didn’t see any trace of life. Where were my men?
She shouldn’t have been out here alone, and by her lack of pockets or purse, she’d taken off without even her phone to call for help.
Anna, Anna, Anna.
What was I going to do with her?
I made a mental note to call Paulson and remind him his neck only stayed unbroken because he was good at his job. Any more slips like this one and I’d assume his skull didn’t need to be connected to his spine anymore.
“I live here,” I told her.
I gestured to the villa behind me and her lips formed a perfect O of surprise.
“That’s yours,” she repeated, then shook her head with a scoff. “Of course it is. Look, Carter, I just came here to think. Whatever you want from me, I’m not in the mood.”
“Too bad,” I said, my voice dropping an octave all on its own. “You owe me answers, Anna.”
“I told you where I went,” she said immediately. “Malawi. I would have called, except you made it pretty clear that you didn’t want to speak to me again.”
I cringed inwardly. If I could wipe away everything I said when we broke up, I would do it. I would have given up my whole fortune, my home, every goddamn thing I owned to erase that day.
But I had bigger concerns. I wanted to confirm, once and for all, that it was Josh who left those bruises on her.
“I’m more interested in learning who hurt you.”
She scoffed again, folding her arms across her chest. “Why do you care?”
My eyes narrowed. Things between us ended badly, but how could she pretend like what we shared would ever be really gone? I was never going to stop wanting her. Never.
“You know why,” I said in a low voice.
She looked at me skeptically, her perfect pink lips pursed, brow raised.
I let her see it.
See me.
The truth.
She did know why. She just needed reminding.
The tension in her forehead went slack as she read something in my quiet stare, her lips parting in a way that made my cock thicken in my slacks.
“Carter, I?—”
I curled my hand around the back of her neck, pulling her to me roughly to crush my mouth against hers.