Chapter 2 #5
And Liam had stayed in touch, calling Danny, calling Felix, being included in the crew’s adventures and almost coyly insinuating himself into Josh Salinger’s life.
On the one hand it felt deceitful. Josh had no way of knowing that Liam felt connected to his family after years of association with Danny.
But on the other hand… if all Liam ever had was that moment, that one moment, of Josh Salinger in his arms, scowling with embarrassment, still trying to run the op as his entire family lost their mind over his health, then he still would have known that the boy was extraordinary.
He still would have wanted to know the man whom Lightfingers had helped to raise.
And Josh seemed to realize there was something… a connection, a plucked and vibrant string, binding them together.
His emails to Liam were oddly formal when the language of his crew was almost free-flowing performance art.
The times Liam sat for dinner with the crew were the only times Liam ever saw him discomfited.
And now…? Now they would be stuck together on a yacht for three weeks of vacation and mystery solving, investigating the deaths of Stirling and Molly’s parents.
Stirling and Molly were two of Josh’s oldest friends, foster siblings who’d been adopted by a couple of sweet middle-aged zillionaires, a breed Liam could have sworn was born in myth.
But leave it to Felix and Julia to know two unicorns, and leave it to Josh and his friends to want to avenge their untimely demise.
Liam wanted in. He’d benefited from some of their capers, had gotten some promotions from the leads they’d let him in on.
He wanted in on this one.
But mostly he wanted the in to Josh. He wanted the right to sit at the boy’s table. To hear him talk, to learn the language of the crew so he spoke it like his own.
That string that had plucked in his heart when he’d first seen the boy smile—that sound, that chord—had grown cacophonously louder in his ears since that close day in July. It only stilled when Josh glanced at him or, hell, texted him a detail or wrote an email.
He felt ridiculous on the one hand. He was past thirty; Josh had turned twenty-one in January. What sort of addled, daft, lecherous… oh dear God!
As Liam approached the yacht again—he’d made friends with the captain the day before while waiting for the others to arrive—one of the younger crew came dashing down the dock.
Liam knew them by now. Stirling, of course, was the crew’s computer specialist—their hacker—and Liam had seen firsthand that the boy was sort of a prodigy.
Compact, midsize, Black, with hair kept precision short, Stirling wasn’t always great with people, but he was practical to the bone, and he seemed a bit rattled now.
“Heya, Stirling,” Liam said, concerned. “Did you get lost?”
“I was looking for Julia or Danny or Felix,” he said unhappily, peering back to where Grace, Josh, Hunter, and Tienne were grouped. “I know this is supposed to be Leon’s yacht, but Josh can’t really wait—”
At the mention of Josh’s name, Liam’s head came up like a prized pointer’s—he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Is he not feeling well?”
“Recovery lasts a long time,” Stirling said, which was something Liam had been trying to drill down into his own head for the past six months.
“I know it,” Liam muttered. “Here, I introduced myself to the captain while I was waiting and—oop! Shit!”
While they’d been talking, the object of their concern turned cloud white and fell immediately into Hunter’s arms.
The one thing Liam could think as he and Stirling hustled down the dock was that the only person who got to carry Josh Salinger was him.
Hunter gave over, though, and in no time at all, Josh was in his arms, cranky and exasperated and tired enough to actually mention their polite dance around each other on group email and texts.
“You’ve got to let me in, boy-o,” Liam murmured into his hair. “I don’t go where I’m not wanted.”
“Dick,” Josh muttered, and Liam was grateful. The boy with his blood up was so much less worrisome than “Recovery Boy,” as Josh’s friend Grace called him.
But Recovery Boy was worrisome—enough so that Liam stashed him in his own air-conditioned cabin, watched over first by Stirling and then by Julia while he went to find a shipboard doctor.
After Josh had been checked out (showing great patience, Liam thought, for all the family’s fussing), the boy was asleep on Liam’s bed, covered in a cotton throw, and his mother—stunningly elegant woman, barely forty, with the grace and poise of a young Grace Kelly—turned to him and said, “If you like, you can use his room in the upper deck until he awakes—”
Liam shrugged. “I’ve got my book,” he said, indicating his phone and meaning his audiobook, since his dyslexia made reading onerous but he loved adventure stories. “I can keep him company while the rest of you get situated.”
Julia nodded gratefully, her gaze resting on her sleeping son with a mother’s trouble.
“He’s so over this cancer thing,” she said with a short laugh.
“Which is unfair, I know. He’s got a good six months before he’s even close to where he was before he got sick, and at least three years before we can truly breathe a sigh of relief.
But he’s always been precocious. Since the cradle, really.
Has wanted to be out in the world, doing, planning, being a part of it.
And he knows—he knows how lucky he is. I don’t think…
.” Her voice caught. “I don’t think he knows how lucky we are—”
He saw her swallow and take a deep breath. And then, showing the strength she’d exhibited all those years ago when told she’d be taking in a stranger for the sake of a man she loved like a brother, she cleaned up her mascara with the tip of her third finger and smiled again.
“Let us know if you need anything. I’ll have somebody run you both a tray for dinner if he’s not ready to join us by then. I’ll tell the staff that you’re welcome to sleep in Josh’s cabin if he doesn’t feel like moving. You’ve been so much help, Liam. I cannot thank you enough.”
And with that she left, and Liam was free to kick off his shoes and move to the window side of the bed, where he could gaze out at the lovely city above San Juan harbor and enjoy the sudden quiet.
He’d just placed his earbuds in and was settling back on the pillow when Josh murmured, “What did you mean by that?”
“By what, my boy?”
“Stop,” Josh muttered, “with the boy-o, the my boy, the lad. Call me by my name and tell me what you meant when you were carrying me in.”
Liam swallowed. Oh, this was embarrassing.
“You… you were upset, because I was keeping my distance,” he said softly.
“This fall. Bo—Josh, you’ve got to understand.
I’m a friend of your father’s, and you are ten years younger than me and were very, very sick.
Of course I felt it last summer. You fell into my arms—that doesn’t happen every day.
” He gave a slight smile that Josh couldn’t see.
He’d been curled on his side facing the door since Liam had laid him on the bed.
“Certainly not as much as you complain about it.”
Josh grunted. “I had the biggest… thing for this other policeman,” he murmured. “So bad. Hurt my chest. He was married with a baby—like I was going to come between that, you know?”
Liam did know, mostly because Danny told him, keeping him ever so subtly apprised of Josh’s life, of his activities, while Liam ever so subtly asked. Both of them knew the tenor of those exchanges had changed the moment Liam had felt that slight weight, tempered by steel, in his arms.
“So your Uncle Danny tells me,” he confessed, and Josh let out a humorless laugh.
“Nick Denning… he wanted me,” Josh confessed quietly. “But I’d already fallen into your arms, smelled you. Did you know you smell good?”
Liam had to smile at that one. “I had no idea,” he said, pleased.
Then he sobered. “Funny, you know. How some moments… some moments take over your life.” He was thinking about that moment Danny had spoken to him in the museum.
Or the moment he’d found Tienne, covered in his father’s blood and crouched in an alleyway.
Or the moment Josh had stumbled coming out of the electronics van, and Liam had caught him, thinking he was being a Good Samaritan.
He hadn’t realized he was catching his own destiny in a resentful bundle, but here in this quiet cabin, listening to the sounds of the sea—and the voices echoing up and down the corridor—he could think of nothing but the man beside him, talking as though he knew exactly what had been in Liam’s heart since that one moment.
Funny, that. Until this heartbeat, right here, it hadn’t occurred to Liam that it had taken over both their lives, together, and that they’d been bound the entire time, no matter how hard they thought they’d fought it.
Quietly, without fuss, Liam reached out and put his hand on Josh’s shoulder.
Josh reached across his body and laced their fingers together. In a few heartbeats, Liam heard his breath even out in sleep, and he turned his audiobook back on.
Clive Cussler, one of his favorite authors. For an hour he sat there, the book running, and didn’t hear a word.
All he could hear was the regular in-and-out sound of Josh Salinger’s life force, growing a little bit stronger with every beat of his heart.