Barefoot with a Stranger (Barefoot Bay Undercover #2)(43)

She did that thing with her hair again, but this time it wasn’t so much like Isa, who used to finger her thick brown curls endlessly. She continued toward the water, and he could see now that he was wrong about her walk, too. She had a nearly invisible hitch in her step.

Just as he reached her, she slowed, as if to avoid getting any closer to him. But he smelled it…just the barest, slightest, spiciest hint of Chanel No. 5.

He almost howled. It took everything in him not to scream in her face. Only Isadora can wear that! It was her perfume, her scent, her siren call to Gabe.

He closed his eyes and ran harder, sucking in the salt air to get rid of the scent of a woman he would never, ever forget. This wasn’t f*cking depression. This was grief, and it had him by the balls and the heart and the soul, and it wouldn’t let go.

* * *

Chessie was on the T, desperate to get off at the next stop. She was stuck on the last car on the train as it rolled under Boston, the ancient tracks jostling her and sending her tumbling three steps back for every one she made forward. It felt like she was clawing her way uphill, bumping into people, trying to swim through the crowd and get to the exit. But every few seconds, the train would clatter and bounce to a near stop…except out the window, the Green Line stops were whizzing by like they were going a hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Copley. The Pru. Brigham Circle. Stop! “I have to…get off.”

“I might be able to help.”

“Gabe needs—” Her head slammed against a window. “Owww.”

“Sorry. Potholes. This is why we call it slow and treacherous.”

On the train tracks? Wait. Chessie fought to open her eyes, but nothing in her vision made sense. “I was…” Dreaming. “Why is it so dark?” So, so dark.

“It’s night. Has been for a long time.”

She squinted into the near blackness, able to make out the hood, and the man next to her, lit by the dim, yellow dash lights.

“You talk in your sleep, did you know that? Said you need to get off.”

She frowned at him, a memory pulling. “Did you actually make a sex joke to a person talking in her sleep?”

His grin was sly and slow. “I didn’t really think you heard.”

She tried to look around, but, damn, it was dark. “Where are we?”

“Here.” He held out her glasses. “We’re miles from any civilization that would have working electricity. Just some farms out here and whoa”—he jerked the car to the left into the other lane—“and the occasional discarded oven door. We narrowly missed a refrigerator a few miles back, so someone mustn’t have tied down their traveling kitchen too well.”

She shook her head and squinted again, frustration rising. “Why don’t you have the headlights on?” she demanded. “And do not tell me it’s some spook safety thing and you don’t want to risk getting attention.”

They clunked into a pothole so deep she could hear the road practically crack the axle. Somehow he managed to drive them out of it. The old beast didn’t have too many of those left in her.

“I have nothing against headlights,” he said. “It’s just that…” He clicked a switch on the dash. Twice. And one more time to make his point. “They must be optional on this model.”

“They don’t work.” She dropped her head back, expecting to hit the headrest…but there was no headrest.

“Moon’s strong enough for me.”

She peered up at the half-moon, neatly sliced as if Nino’s chef knife had cut it in two. It shed just enough light to show gathering clouds. And definitely not enough to—

“Hang on,” he said, reaching over to hold her arm with his right hand while he whipped around a turn she had never seen.


As they made it around the corner, the moon cast light over a wide body of water. It was too dark to make out what it was, but they were able to see waves caused by the wind. “I don’t remember seeing a river on the map,” Chessie said.

“I took a little detour because I actually know this road, and, believe me, very few others do.”

“And you’re driving from memory in the dark with no headlights?”

He shot her a smile. “Found that farm stand before you crashed, didn’t I?”

“Reminds me I’m starving.” She twisted to grab the bag they put on the backseat, her empty stomach screaming for attention. She pulled out a peach and dropped it back, hungry for something more substantial. But the bananas were hard and, she guessed, green, and the sweet bell peppers were not the least bit appealing. “Was kind of hoping for a medianoche.”

He gave a dry laugh at the fantasy of a Cuban sandwich. “We’ll find one in Caibarién. Tomorrow. Eat a pepper.”

She made a face at the suggestion, which turned into a big smile when her fingers hit something hard at the bottom of the bag, then closed around a bottle. “Hot damn, Mal Harris. You bought booze from that guy?”

“While you were in the bathroom.”

Bathroom? “And we use that term generously when referring to the horse stall with a hole.”

“Welcome to rural Cuba.”

She pulled the bottle out, immediately recognizing the snap cork that Nino had used for the homemade wine she grew up drinking. “Mama’s milk,” she cooed, holding the bottle up to the dim dash lights, but it was tinted brown, hiding the color of the wine. “I like it dark, thick, sweet, and tasting like the earth and sweet plump grapes.”