The Thrill of It All (7 page)

He smiled back. “You look like you’re having fun.”

“Oh, I am.” She slid onto a stool and rested her elbows on the bar. “Leaving Half Palm puts me in a happy mood.”

He slid a napkin and a glass of wine in front of her. “Your family will be sorry to see you go.”

Her smile faded. “I’ve done what Aunt Vi asked!” She’d asked people about Ben. Not one had seen him recently, but no one seemed concerned about him, either.

Meaning they knew the Charms as well as she did.

“I’m off the hook,” she told Peter, lifting her wine glass. And almost free of them for good, she thought, smiling at her reflection in the mirror over the bar.

Hmm. Her lipstick looked a bit smudged. She started to reach into her purse, then stopped.

Tonight she didn’t have to be perfect. Her mood bubbled again.

“Hey, there.” A handsome twenty-something stepped up to lean against the bar beside her. “I haven’t seen you around here before. I’m Duke.”

Felicity took a big swallow of wine and gave him an even bigger smile. “Of course you are. And I’m…” She hesitated, glancing over at her smudged-lipsticked, knotted-shirt, and too-tight jeans reflection. “I’m Lissie.”

That’s exactly who she was tonight. Fun-loving,
wild-living Lissie. Well, not too wild, just wild enough to let darling Duke buy her a drink. And fun-loving enough to let him regale her with boastful accounts of his climbing adventures.

She propped her chin on her fist, devoting her attention to the young man. “Fascinating, just fascinating,” she said, her voice booming into a sudden quiet. Looking around, she realized the music had been turned off and that the room’s attention was riveted on the TV screen mounted overhead.

Felicity glanced up at it, just as Magee’s face appeared there, leaner, stubbled, and sunburned. Then she saw a close-up of Simon, followed by more close-ups, strangers to Felicity, but obviously other members of their climbing team.

The sound of a door banging open jerked everyone’s gaze from the TV to the other side of the room. A man stood there, backlit by the overhead lights in what appeared to be a small office. “Turn the goddamn music back on,” a hoarse voice—Magee’s voice—barked out. Then the door slammed shut.

Bob Marley started up a Jamaican rhythm. Felicity looked back to the TV screen just as the program’s title rolled across:
From Daring to Disaster
.

“That’s him,” Duke said. “The Lucky Bastard.”

She flicked a glance back at the slammed door. “Exactly how did he come by that nickname?”

Duke pulled his stool closer to her, as the pounding music drowned out the sound coming from the television. “The way I hear it, if you climbed with the Bastard, you came back alive.”

Felicity grimaced as her stomach dipped. “And exactly how dangerous is this sport you people like so much?”

Duke shrugged. “Define danger. We’re a wuss culture. There’s helmet laws and seat belt laws and laws about how hot to cook hamburgers. Regular soap isn’t good enough, now it has to be antibacterial.”

Felicity struggled to find something inherently wrong with disease prevention. She was still speechless when Peter rolled up and paused.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

No. She wanted to recapture her earlier mood. She wanted to think of herself shaking the sand of Half Palm off her feet as she sped away from it instead of thinking of that hoarse bark in Magee’s voice.

“Just trying to understand this climbing thing,” she said. Her gaze drifted up to the television screen, where a line of brightly bundled figures struggled through thick snow. “I don’t think I get the appeal.”

“It’s different for different people,” Peter said. “Getting close to nature. The physical challenge.”

A head popped around from the other side of Duke. It was the dread-locked guy she’d run into the night before. “And don’t forget the chicks, man. The chicks love guys who can kick danger’s ass.”

Peter grinned. “And then there’s the chicks. The chicks love guys who can kick danger’s ass.”

“Magee said something about the angles and the independence,” Felicity remembered.

“He would.” Peter nodded. “That’s a lot of what it is for him, I suppose.”

“How so?” Not that she cared or anything.

“In many ways climbing is a game you play all alone inside your head. As for the angles—that’s what Magee is brilliant at. He has a master’s in applied mathematics and he looks at the rock like a problem he has to solve.”

“Oh.” The guy to whom she’d explained chicanery and George Bernard Shaw had an advanced degree in math. Then her mind skittered back to him emerging from that back office. “And, uh, he’s not the busboy here, is he?”

Peter’s brows rose. “No. We’re co-owners of the Bivy. Magee’s also a partner in a climbing store—”

“The Wild Side?”

He nodded. “And he has another partnership in a rock gym in Palm Springs.”

“Oh.” Oh, terrific. She slid off her stool, trying to think how often and how else she might have insulted Mr. Masters-in-Applied-Mathematics. “I think I’ll just pop into his office and tell him goodbye.”

After she extended a gracious apology. It was the least she could do, right? Then she could leave town in the morning, all loose ends neatly tied up and tied off forever.

The “Come in” he rasped out after she knocked on the door wasn’t welcoming. Felicity entered anyway.

At a long wooden desk, he sat with his back to her, his lean body slumped in a black leather chair, his elbows resting on its arms, his chin resting on his fisted hands. His gaze was trained on a small television set
sitting on one corner of the desk. The current program:
From Daring to Disaster.

Somehow she wasn’t surprised.

Shutting the door behind her muffled the heavy beat of Shaggy’s rap remake of “Angel” and highlighted the thick quiet in the small office. “You’re watching with the sound off,” she said, because she had to say something. It wasn’t clear he was aware she was in the room.

He didn’t look around. “I know what happens.”

“I don’t.” She didn’t know what made her say that.

But it got his attention. He flicked a glance at her over his shoulder, then went back to staring at the TV screen. “Short version: Eight went up Alaska’s Denali—aka Mt. McKinley. Seven made it down.”

Not knowing how to respond, she kept her gaze on him and off the television. He watched the program in silence for another moment, then lifted his hands to rub his face. “God, I hate the fucking snow.”

Her heart squeezed, and she rushed toward the television. “Then let’s turn it off.”

He barred her way by simply straightening his leg and resting the heel of one beat-up boot on the desk. “Let’s not.”

“You said you know what happens.” She leaned over his outstretched knee toward the TV’s off button.

Twisting the chair toward her, he snagged her around the ribs. When she struggled, he put his foot back on the floor, then pulled her onto his lap, keeping her there with his forearm around her waist.

“But you said
you
didn’t know.” His breath was hot against her ear as he turned the chair to once more face the TV. “And here’s the perfect opportunity to get the whole story, up close and very personal.”

“I don’t—”

“I watched you on television this morning, didn’t I? Turnabout’s fair play.”

His arm was immovable and his mood angry, but it was clear he couldn’t bear to turn the program off. And she wondered if he also couldn’t bear watching it alone, and that was why he was holding her against him.

“Here’s Simon and I off on our summit bid. Look at those faces. Grins literally frozen on. Simon’s blowing kisses to Anna P. and Ashley, in case you can’t read lips.”

Felicity squirmed, but he just tightened his arm. “Now it’s several hours later and here’s the team, trying to raise us on our radio phones. The weather’s deteriorating and they want to warn us, but we don’t respond. It’s because I dropped mine and Simon can’t reach his—not when he’s carrying me because my ankles are broken.”

She stilled. “You broke your ankles?”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “But Simon makes it back to camp the next morning, see? He’ll gather a team to go up and bring me down from the bivy where he left me. There—there I am, about twelve hours later.”

He looked like his own corpse, his complexion
gray beneath the sunburn. His lips—his wonderful, thrilling lips—cracked and swollen. Her heart slammed inside her chest and she put both hands over the arm he had around her because she needed to feel that he was warm. Alive. “Magee,” she whispered, turning her head toward his.

He tried directing her face forward again. “Look, look. You don’t want to miss this, dollface. It’s Simon heading down the mountain, while I stay back because I’m barely conscious. See him? He’s waving again. That damn Aussie, always trying to hog the limelight.”

“Magee.” Though his arm had loosened on her waist, she didn’t move and she didn’t look away from his face. The bad-boy’s voice was hoarse and his dark, dangerous eyes were bleak. His gaze never wavered from the television screen.

“Watch, Lissie, because that’s the last anyone will ever see of him alive,” he said, his voice getting raspier by the second. “Damn Aussie. Goddamn Aussie who shouldn’t have saved me. Goddamn fucking Aussie who shouldn’t have died.”

“Michael…” she whispered.

He put his free hand up to his eye.

Right then, someone knocked at the door. As it opened, Felicity moved by instinct. Twisting on Magee’s lap to clamber over the chair arm, her knee—intentionally—clipped his groin.

He grunted, bending over.

She made it to her feet, then whirled to face the
newcomers moving into the room. Peter and the Wild Side’s Gwen. “He, uh, has something in his eye,” she said, motioning toward Magee.

“Like hell,” he wheezed out. “She just kneed me in nuts.”

Peter winced.

Felicity shrugged, trying to appear apologetic. But he’d been so desperate a moment ago, and though she kept trying to forget about it, she’d seen him desperate before. She knew what happened next, she’d seen that before, too. And knowing him, he wouldn’t want to be caught with tears in his eyes.

Now he had an acceptable, macho-guy reason.

He looked up, and his eyes were glittering, all right, but they were glittering with annoyance. At her. “What do you need, Peter?”

It was Gwen who spoke up. “As I was closing up at the Wild Side tonight, a group of three strangers came in. Wearing business suits—ties and everything. They were very polite, and they said they were looking for Ben.”

“Did they say why?” Felicity asked.

“They said he owes them money.”

S
itting at his kitchen table, Magee stared at the dregs of his coffee. After three nights of little sleep, his eyes felt as heavy and gritty as the sludge at the bottom of the mug. Last night he’d dreamed again, of climbing.

And it had been a dream of a climb at first, everything coming together as it did on the very best days. Under a perfect sky, his body moved smoothly, a kinesthetic proof of mathematical theorems. Then he was resting on a belay ledge, and someone yelled up to him, “Catch!” A book appeared in his line of vision and he lunged for it, only to fall, a heinous fall, with the book in his hands.

He had plenty of time to page through it as he plunged toward hell. It was the only climbing journal that his tribe was desperate to keep their names out of—the annual publication of
Accidents in North American Mountaineering
.

“Magee!” The little-girl voice and the pitter-patter of Anna P.’s feet on the kitchen floor jerked him back to the present. He had a second to brace before she
leaped into his lap and he instinctively grimaced, Felicity’s knee jab of the night before just an ache away.

“Morning,” Anna P. sang out, and bussed him on the cheek.

He inhaled the scent of baby shampoo as he kissed her in return. Ashley entered the kitchen, and the little girl wiggled away, already demanding Cheerios and toast and orange juice and pancakes and waffles.

Ashley caught Magee’s eye and they smiled at each other. “She has her father’s appetite,” Ashley murmured.

But with her father gone, it was up to Magee to feed her, clothe her, to give her the life, to live the life, that Simon had been planning. He knew that. Watching daughter and mother move about the kitchen, Magee imagined it. Ashley, his wife. Anna P., his, too.

He loved them.

He did.

The time was right to present his plan. He’d meant to a few days before, but then he’d collided with Felicity. There was nothing to stop him now, though, only more pushing him forward, including whatever trouble Ashley’s brother Ben had gotten into.

He abruptly stood, the loud scrape of his chair against the floor catching both Ashley’s and Anna P.’s attention. Clearing his throat, he wondered how much, exactly, to say.

“I didn’t tell you why I went to L.A. a few days ago,” he started.

Ashley ducked her head, studying the cereal box in her hand. “No.”

“I took Simon’s job.”

She froze, then looked up. “At Forrester Engineering? That desk job?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t they offer you a position a few years ago?”

“Yeah.” The Forresters were wealthy climbing aficionados, and Simon had guided the two men up a few of North America’s higher peaks. Magee had been along once as well, and the brothers had used their persuasive powers on him as well as Simon, once they found out they both came out of the same master’s program at Cal Berkeley.

“But when they asked you before,” Ashley pointed out, “you said no.”

Magee shrugged. “Simon said no the first time they asked him, too. But then things were different—after you and after Anna P.—and he changed his mind. Things are different for me now.”

Ashley slid her finger under the sealed flap of the cereal box and moved it slowly across without speaking.

Maybe she didn’t understand what he was getting at, Magee thought. “I want you to…” He cleared his throat again. “I want you and Anna P. to move with me to L.A. We’ll find a nice neighborhood with good schools, get a house.”

“Mommy?” Anna P. was looking from her mom to him and back again. “Mommy, I like this house.”

Ashley looked down at her daughter. “This is Magee’s house. If he moves—”

“You go with me,” he said.

Anna P. looked up at her mother again. “But—”

“Before every climb I promised I’d take care of you,” Magee said, drowning out her protests. “I promised I’d take care of you both if something happened.”

Each time he’d made the vow without thinking about it, because he’d been so sure nothing
would
happen. He chose his expeditions and his teams carefully, after all. And maybe he’d begun to believe his own press, too. He was the Lucky Bastard, wasn’t he? He could face down anything, and win.

Until that last time.

“It’s the right thing, Ash.” The only thing that made sense of what had happened. “Simon wanted this, wanted someone for you to lean on.”

She looked up then, and in her gentle eyes he saw she understood. Holding her gaze, he walked over to her and tipped up her chin with one finger. Her lashes floated down and he pressed his mouth to hers.

The kiss was as soft and gentle as Ash herself. It might not be a carnal kiss, the Felicity kind that put his soldier at stiff salute, but it tasted of virtue and reparation. It fulfilled the purpose that he’d figured out.

When he lifted his head, he exchanged another long look with Ashley, but he didn’t mention marriage.

He didn’t have to.

Felicity paced Aunt Vi’s living room, stepping over cats and cousins, but never slowing her pace. She’d demanded a family meeting first thing this morning. The calls had been made by her personally, to every family member—with the exception of Ashley, whom Felicity had left off the list for various reasons—but
in typical Charm style it was closing on noon and only half a dozen of them had bothered to show up.

Even those who had stirred themselves to get to the house were now draped about the furniture in various states of repose. They petted cats, sipped coffee; one turned the pages of an outdated
People
, while another idly flipped through the TV channels.

Well, she didn’t have time to wait for any more of them, not if she was going to make it back to L.A. today as she’d promised herself. This time she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from getting out of Half Palm and from getting away from the Charms.

She stomped to the front of the room and spoke over their lazy chatter. “Okay, everyone, here’s the deal. We need to call the sheriff’s department and ask them to look into Ben’s disappearance.”

Every Charm head jerked up. A cat yowled, as if a stroking hand had tightened on soft fur. A coffee cup thudded against the old carpet. No one bothered moving to clean up the mess. Instead, they all stared at her as if she’d gone mad.

Felicity held on to her temper and turned to her aunt. “Aunt Vi, you’ve been worried about Ben from the first. I admit, I didn’t think it was anything serious before, but now with these men looking for him…”

Felicity still didn’t think it was serious. Ben had bugged out of town until he could scrounge up the money he owed some friends. But it gave her a good excuse to pass the problem of her missing cousin on to someone else.

Her aunt responded with the patented Charm helpless-female flutter. “But the
sheriff,
Felicity!”

“Charms don’t call the sheriff,” her second cousin, Harry declared.

He was in his late teens now, tall and lanky in a pair of expensive slacks, collared knit shirt, and natty white golfing shoes. Aunt Vi had told her the clean-cut-looking kid was “working” around the local courses, Charmspeak for hustling.

“No,” Felicity corrected him, “it’s that Charms hope someone doesn’t call the sheriff on
them
.”

Shrugging, he sent her a guileless, engaging grin, probably the very same one he used as he walked away with some CEO’s pocketful of petty cash. What would it be? she wondered. Twenty bucks a hole?

“Well, I consulted the Tarot…” her cousin Rainbow, aka Roberta, began.

The whole room groaned.

“What? What?” Rainbow/Roberta flung up her many-ringed hands. “Do you want my expert opinion or not? People pay a lot for a consultation with me, I’ll have you all know.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Uncle Vin, Aunt Vi’s and Uncle Billy’s brother, spoke up. “And the rest of us are tired of hearing just how much that is. You have a good racket going, I’ll give you that, Roberta, but the worst thing you can do is start believing your own baloney.”

Rainbow/Roberta objected to that remark, hands and scarves waving in the air to make her point. Then Uncle Vin objected back, and Harry returned to playing with the television controls, while the two oldest
relatives launched into a nostalgic reminiscence of previous Charm scams.

Sighing, Felicity picked up one of the cats, holding it against her cheek as it purred, but even the animal’s motorboat rumble couldn’t drown out that last conversation.

She’d heard it all a million times, because the scams were the stuff of family legend, and each had a colorful moniker. There was “Fruit Loop”—when they’d opened a fruit stand selling the produce they’d stolen from someone else’s orchards. That skulduggery had been short-lived, however, since it had entailed doing the actual work of picking the produce.

“Big Chief” was another, when an entire offshoot of the Charm family tree built a teepee in their yard to convince the Bureau of Indian Affairs they were owed a stipend because they were one-quarter Native American instead of one hundred percent lazy. The chain letter from the “Chain Gang” scam had netted next to nothing as well, as far as she knew, but the oldsters still talked about it.

With the argument between Uncle Vin and Rainbow/Roberta showing no signs of ending, Felicity set down the cat and clapped her hands together. She
had
to get the family to agree. “Come on, come on, everybody. We need to wrap this up. Is there a reason, a
real
reason, that I shouldn’t call the sheriff?”

The group quieted. They knew what she was asking. Were any of them currently involved in some sort of larceny that would mean real trouble if the sheriff
started sniffing around. Heads moved as gazes traveled about the room. No one spoke up.

Scenting freedom, Felicity’s heart beat faster. “Okay, then—”

“Wait!” Harry raised the hand holding the TV remote. “We don’t know what Ben was up to.”

Uncle Vin nodded slowly. “The boy’s right. We don’t know why these men think Ben owes them money.”

Aunt Vi fluttered. “Maybe it’s a misunderstanding.”

Uncle Vin appeared to consider. “Or maybe it’s a misdemeanor.”

“Or maybe it’s a felony,” Rainbow said in ominous tones. “I—”

“Hey, it’s Felicity!”

Felicity’s shoulders slumped as the last remark distracted the group once again from the point in question. Misunderstandings, misdemeanors, even felonies were forgotten as they all focused on the television. Harry’s toying with the remote control had managed to start the VCR playing the GetTV videotape that Anna P. had left inside the day before.

Felicity groaned, but that didn’t stop the Charms’ fascination with the show. Though she tried to regain their attention a few times, they shushed her as they sat through the cell phone jewelry, the lighted ice cubes, the glamorized rubber gloves, even George Bernard Shaw and the wine cellar.

“You’re good,” Harry finally said, when the show ended. “Really good.”

“Really good,” Rainbow echoed. “Looks like a
cushy deal, too, though I bet I still make more money and work less hours than you do.”

“Remarkable,” someone else added.

Around the room heads nodded, and Felicity now found herself grateful for the latest interruption.
Hah
. The tape was perfect! It was the way to show the family how far she’d come, how far apart she was from them.

She warmed under the murmurs of praise and didn’t try redirecting the discussion, even as she sensed someone else come in the room. She wanted every single Charm to see, to know, to realize she’d remade herself into something separate from them.

Then she could walk away from them forever, without a backward glance.

“Excellent,” Uncle Vin pronounced, nodding in agreement. He slapped his hands on his thighs and almost cackled. “More than excellent. Eliot? Glenn?”

The two old men looked at each other, then looked at her, their wrinkled faces breaking into proud smiles.

Felicity smiled back at the old darlings.

“A credit to the family,” one said.

The first credit, Felicity thought, the first one to break the shameful tradition of petty lying, cheating, and stealing. The newcomer in the room moved, and from the corner of her eye she saw it was Magee.

Fine. She’d not called Ashley about the meeting because her cousin, bless her helpless heart, was part of the dithering half of the Charm family. But she didn’t mind Magee hearing this, not at all.

“Yes, yes,” the oldest family member repeated. “Felicity, you’re a real credit to us.”

That’s right. A real credit that they’d listen to now about calling in the sheriff.

The co-oldster gave her a thumbs-up. “Undeniable. She’s a true Charm through and through.”

A true Charm through and through
.

Her jaw dropped, the words rendering her speechless. Leaving her nothing to convince them with, which left no point in standing around. Without a backward glance, she escaped.

In his car, Magee followed Felicity as she stomped on foot down the street. After a couple of blocks, when she didn’t turn back toward Vi’s, he pressed on the gas to catch up with her.

Continuing to walk, she looked over at him. “What do you want?”

He leaned toward the open passenger window. “Whatever it takes.” After his breakfast conversation with Ashley, he’d stopped by Vi’s to see what he could do to hurry Felicity on her way out of his life. “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

She kept walking. “If you wanted to offer a ride, why were you following me instead?”

“I was keeping a safe distance.”

“What? Why?”

“Considering what you did to me the last time we were together…”

“Oh. Well. That.” She darted him a glance. “That was, you know, a favor.”

“Favor, my ass.”

“It was!” She glanced over again. “I didn’t think you would want anyone to see you with te—”

“I had something in my eye!”

She held up her hands. “And didn’t I say that?”

“
After
you gave me a good one to the gonads, dollface.”

She smiled, all sweetness. “Shall I kiss it and make it better?”