Restless Hearts Sleep Alone
“BAILEY, SON,” his father said in a pained voice. “Do you really think you want to spend your time helping?”
To his credit, Connor Dodge didn’t put any emphasis on helping , although yesterday’s repeated accidents in the mother-in-law cottage had proved that Bailey was anything but help.
“Fine,” Bailey muttered, gazing at the two spilled buckets of nails and screws in dismay. He could swear he was a competent adult when he was in the hospital, but something about working side by side with his own father….
“Son,” Connor said, his voice set on extra kind, “why don’t you go relax? Spend some time reading by the pool? I know you don’t get a lot of chances for vacation, but why not make this one?”
Bailey stared at his father like he’d sprouted another head. A burst of sheer frustration drove him to his feet, and he stalked out of the mother-in-law cottage snarling, “Fine! I’ll sit and be useless, and you can go ahead and rebuild the Taj Mahal!”
Behind him he heard his father sounding dismayed and Dean’s father soothing him. Yeah, well, Bailey got the feeling Ed Royal was used to calming volatile tempers.
With a harumph, Bailey strode directly to the pool, let himself in through the chain link gate, stripped to his cargo shorts, kicked off his boots, and dove in.
The water was surprisingly cool, and he surfaced, trying not to sputter, before setting off on a blistering freestyle, hampered by the baggy shorts and soggy underwear.
He ignored that and continued for a good five laps, until the bright sunshine, the coolness of the water, the thrill of physical activity—all of it—settled into his muscles and he relaxed enough to start having fun.
When he finally pulled to a halt, out of breath but a little less pissed off, he found Reg squatting at the end of the pool, waiting patiently for him to be done.
“Hello,” he said brightly. He liked the quietest Royal.
In the past three days he’d met them all but Sal, who lived several hours away.
Prock and his wife and children had been a delight, and Laure and her two teenaged boys had been a wisecracking family in the best of ways.
Reg had, in his understated way, floated among them all, holding the baby for Prock, lending a phone charger to Russell, Laure’s oldest, fixing Prock’s wife’s phone in a matter of moments.
Whereas Chance was bright and shining, distracting everybody’s attention with a smile or a joke—or often a very na?ve statement that seemed like it was too innocent to be true but that Bailey was starting to suspect Chance really was—Reg was the family angel, quietly helpful in all ways, embarrassed by any notice whatsoever.
“Hi,” Reg said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I, uh, are you done with your laps?”
Bailey thought uncomfortably of his sodden cargo shorts. “Yeah. I should get out and start to drip dry, at least, before it gets so hot my skin starts to peel off my shoulders.”
Reg nodded. “Come on, let’s sit under the umbrella. I got lemonade and big plastic cups with ice .”
Bailey grinned at him. “Your mom sure does know how to do summer right.”
The Royal family wasn’t fancy. The soda was bargain brand, and the lemonade was the kind from frozen concentrate.
There were no fluted glasses or expensive tumblers—Julie had alluded to their “fine gas-station china” on the first day, but a giant plastic cup full of ice was still pretty blissful in the middle of Bakersfield in July.
“There’s also curried chicken salad,” Reg said, looking quite pleased. “It’s my favorite.”
Bailey had an idea that Julie had done that on purpose.
Anthony had gone back home the day before—apparently he lived about forty-five minutes away, and he and his father owned and operated a shooting range, both of them giving lessons along with a recently hired manager.
Reg and Anthony weren’t an item— yet— but Bailey could see by the way Reg’s shoulders drooped that he missed Anthony, even for the work week when he went to keep up his livelihood.
“Why don’t you go with Anthony and work from his house?” Bailey asked, sitting on the patio chair in a plop of clammy cloth.
Reg scowled at him. “That’s forty-five minutes away,” he said. “Most of my siblings are here.”
Bailey raised his eyebrows. “You’d still see them,” he said tentatively.
Reg shrugged. “Anthony’s busy. He doesn’t need me hanging on his coattails.”
Privately Bailey thought Anthony would love to come home and have Reg in his house, finishing up the IT work he did through telecommuting. But Anthony had pretty much told Bailey he was biding his time until Reg felt like he was important enough to be somebody’s number one priority.
Bailey wished them both luck.
“So what’s doing today?” Bailey asked, picking one of the curried-chicken-on-wheat sandwiches and taking a happy bite. Simple, yes, but still superlative.
“Well, I finished my commission this morning,” Reg said, matter-of-factly. “And I thought we could address what’s making you so edgy.”
Bailey almost choked on his sandwich. “I beg your pardon?”
Reg took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumbs.
“Was it a secret?” he asked. “I mean, you’ve been super polite to Mom and Dad, but so’s everybody.
But you spent two hours last night pacing around the property.
I know what a walk looks like, and I know when somebody’s stress walking, and that was definitely pacing.
And you just managed to piss off your dad, and he’s got ‘laconic cowboy’ in his DNA. ”
Bailey grunted. “I was just trying to help,” he muttered.
“You were just trying to get out of your own way and into somebody else’s,” Reg said dryly, and Bailey wondered if the rest of the family had caught on to that dry sense of humor.
“Well, that too,” Bailey admitted.
“You’re worried,” Reg said bluntly, and hearing the words from someone in Dean’s family—when he’d been trying so hard not to be worried in front of them—was enough to make Bailey’s shoulders sag in relief.
“Oh my God, am I,” he admitted, feeling pitiful.
“I am so worried. It’s dumb—I know it’s dumb—because Dean has left me a dozen times since we got together, and I never knew what he was doing or how dangerous it was, but this time…
.” He rubbed his stomach, and Reg made a mirror gesture with an expression that was pure sympathy.
“Me too,” he said softly. “Want to do something about it?”
Bailey cocked his head, surprised. “Like what?”
“Well, for starters we could figure out what he’s doing. And, well, for finishers, I might be able to track his location.”
Bailey gaped at him. “You can what ?”
“Shh!” Reg flailed and glanced around. “Do not let this get out, okay? I just… well, I worry. I mean, I worry about everybody , so I’ve pretty much done this for everybody , but I worry most for Dean because he’s… he’s not really conscious of risk to himself, you know what I mean?”
Bailey frowned a little, thinking of the intense amounts of micromanaging that had gone into his jump from the airplane. “No,” he said bluntly. “He… he seemed to plan for every contingency when he was getting ready to drop me, uhm, off in the desert.”
Reg nodded as though this information didn’t contradict what he’d said at all.
“Yes. He’d planned for you , but I’m betting that his plan with Marcus consisted of…
.” He trailed off, and the next few moments consisted of him mimicking a conversation between Dean and Marcus—and boy, was he spot on.
Mannerisms, gestures, even Dean’s trademark scowl.
Bailey had no doubts as to who was who in this scenario and how scarily accurate Reg’s rendition was.
“So, we fly somewhere dangerous.” This was definitely Dean.
“Yeah, yeah.” And right there he’d nailed Marcus.
“And then we get out of the plane somehow.”
“Sure, sure.”
“And then we disable the bad guys.”
“Oh, of course.”
“And then we obtain our objectives.”
“I’m with you, bro.”
“And then we exfil to safety.”
“Brilliant! It’s a plan!”
Bailey stared at him, torn between laughter and panic.
Reg had done the conversation pitch perfectly , mimicking Dean’s flat, no-nonsense tones and Marcus’s more eager, excited chorus, and changing his body posture to echo each person he mimicked.
And when he hit, “Brilliant! It’s a plan!
” Bailey realized that it was all true , and that Dean and Marcus’s plan was to have no plan .
“That’s terrifying,” he said, as the reality sank in. “It’s like you were there in the plane with them.”
“Oh, I’ve heard them talk,” Reg said grimly.
“Which was why I snuck into Dean’s room three Christmases ago and stole his SIM card, planted a bug in it, and replaced it.
Someday, Dean’s going to find out, and either he’ll be super pissed and never speak to me again, or I’ll be bailing him out of the shit and he’ll be fine with it.
Either way, let’s see where he is, figure out what he and Marcus are doing there, and maybe plan to go get them in case they need us. ”
“Wow,” Bailey said, feeling a little like he did in Dean’s presence, but even more so because gentle, quiet Reg seemed like the last place he’d find that much potential for evil. “You’re as scary as he is.”
Reg shrugged. “We’re sort of tightly knit. Even Sal, who likes to pretend he’s above us all. I’m pretty sure he and Laure have weekly conferences where they map out our love lives to see if we need any help.”
Bailey thought about Dean’s only sister, outstanding cook, mother of two teenagers, CEO of her own home-office based headhunting business.
“If I knew your sister was planning my love life, I’d be very afraid,” he said bluntly, and Reg shrugged.
“I think Sal introduced her to her husband, and yeah, I know he died young, but it was true love. It’s like he wants to give her that moment back, and she wants him not to mourn his friend, and they’ve been doing that for a good fifteen years.”