Grave Phantoms (Roaring Twenties #3)(5)

Gawking reporters and nosy crowds were the last thing an illegal enterprise needed, so the less the public could see of the yacht, the better—at least until the police could track down the owner and get the damn thing off Magnusson property. They didn’t need the cops poking around out here, either. Sure, Winter paid them off. But it was one thing for them to look the other way, and another to operate right in front of their faces. Tomorrow night’s distribution runs would need to go through their secondary Marin County docks across the Bay, which would mean more time spent in the cold rain.

Bo had little faith he’d ever feel dry or warm again. All of this weirdness with the blue-faced survivors was a bad ending to a bad day, and he was impatient for it to be over.

A lie.

He was just impatient to see Astrid again. After she’d left for college at the end of the summer, he’d hoped time apart would tame his feelings. Instead, the yearning turned him into a deranged man, one match short of combusting with obsession. Absurd, really, that one tiny girl had that effect on him. So he told himself it was merely a case of mind over matter, and prayed when he saw her again she’d appear less dazzling. He would merely look upon her fondly. Platonically. Like the old friend she was, nothing more.

But now that he had seen her, he knew all of that had been a pipe dream. It was so much worse now. Because the truth was, college had changed her. He didn’t know how or why, only that if it had anything to do with that Luke fellow she wrote about, it would take every man in the warehouse holding Bo back to stop him from driving down to Los Angeles to bloody the professor’s face against the classroom chalkboard.

No, time apart hadn’t helped one bit. His blood still heated at the sight of her. His heart still ached, wanting what it couldn’t have. And no matter how he tried to pretend she was still the same fourteen-year-old, gum-smacking, know-it-all live wire he’d first met years ago, she hadn’t been a little girl for a long time. Seeing her tonight did strange, bewildering things to him. The sound of her voice alone sketched a secret road map from his heart to his brain, with a looping detour down to his cock.

Aiya, she made him miserable. Weak. Crazy. Stupid.

He absently glanced toward the light of the office window and spotted her silhouette.

“She’s angry with you,” Winter said, startling Bo out of his thoughts.

Not half as angry as he was with her. But he didn’t say that, because then he’d have to explain why. And as much as he confided in Winter, he wasn’t dumb enough to admit that Astrid had yanked out his heart and stomped on it with a few careless words in a weeks-old letter. Some lines you just didn’t cross, and pining over the Viking Bootlegger’s fox-eyed baby sister was one of them.

He tore his eyes away from the girl and stared straight ahead at the yacht. “She’ll get over it when she goes back to Los Angeles after the holidays.”

Three weeks. He might survive three more weeks of Astrid (devious smile, stubborn chin, blond curls, scent of roses, soft skin) if he stayed busy, out of sight. Found excuses to sleep at his old apartment in Chinatown instead of in his room at the Magnussons’. Kept his cock and balls locked up in some kind of medieval chastity cage . . .

“I’m going home,” Winter said in a weary voice. “I haven’t had more than an hour of sleep since yesterday, and Aida will divorce me if I stay out another night. She hasn’t been sleeping, either. She’s had a few unsettling séances lately. Heard strange messages . . .”

“About what?” Winter’s wife, Aida, was a trance medium who conducted séances for a living, temporarily able to summon back the dead to talk with their loved ones. Plenty of frauds out there, but Aida was the real thing. “Not about all this, I hope,” Bo said, motioning toward the yacht.

Winter shook his head. “No, something else is coming. It’s probably . . . well, hopefully she’s wrong about it, but it’s making her worry.”

“Go home, then,” Bo encouraged.

“Suppose I should take Astrid back with m—”

“I won’t be much longer,” Bo said a little too quickly and tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “The sandbagging’s finished, and squaring away the yacht shouldn’t take long. I’ll drive her back.”

“She’s not your responsibility anymore,” Winter said softly. “You’re my captain now, not a driver, and not her guardian. She can take care of herself while she’s home for the holidays. She’s a grown woman.”

Oh, he’d noticed, all right. But that didn’t stop him from worrying over her safety. Hell, it made him more anxious. The Magnussons might be wealthy, and Bo might be better paid than ninety-nine percent of the other Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, but that money was hard-earned and came with a list of threats so long, he couldn’t keep them all in his head at once: rival bootleggers, cheap club owners, crooked cops and politicians. Mobsters from out East. Smugglers hunting new cargo. Disgruntled customers looking to save a buck . . . and hungry, delinquent kids looking to steal one.

He should know.

To someone slinking down dark alleys, trying to stay alive, Astrid Magnusson’s blue eyes looked like easy money. A kidnapping waiting to happen. And that’s why Bo had been both relived she’d chosen to attend college in Southern California, so far away from all this—yet at the same, time terrified that it was too far. That he couldn’t watch out for her anymore. That he couldn’t protect her.