Chapter Seventeen

COOPER NEARLY SLAMS  into the back of us, but Blake doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Damn it, Sam!” he says, pounding his palm into the steering wheel. “It wasn’t an act!” His voice comes out a growl, and just as he opens his mouth to say something else, the electronic ring of his phone comes through the speakers again.

“Everything okay up there?” Cooper asks.

When I look behind us, he’s out of his car, one hand holding the phone to his ear and the other on the butt of the gun in his holster.

“We’re good,” Blake answers pulling back onto the road and hitting the disconnect button on the steering wheel. “Look, Sam,” he says after a long, strained silence. “You know I find you attractive. I haven’t made any secret of that. But as far as what happened in that room, I was just—”

“Doing your job. I know.” I turn to face the window. “Was anything you said true?”

He blows out a sigh. “I’m obviously not a movie guy . . . and, as you already know, my name’s not Harrison Yates, but most everything else . . . yeah.”

I tip my forehead into the window and watch UC Berkeley pass by.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he says.

“Hmm . . . thanks. That really makes up for ruining my life.”

Neither of us says anything else as we wind into the Berkeley Hills—somewhere my family never could have even dreamed of living. I watch the multi-million-dollar homes flit past my window for a while, then close my eyes.

“Home sweet home,” Blake says a few minutes later.

I open my eyes and see we’re slowing near a brown, shingled garage. From the road the front of the garage is the only thing I can see. The land drops off sharply down the hill in front of us, so any house that might be associated with this garage would be well below where we are in the street. Still, I might be able to see it if it weren’t for the dense, twelve-foot hedge to the right of the garage that extends all the way to the corner of the road, obscuring the view of anything beyond it, including the house and San Francisco Bay, forever below us.

Jenkins is already parked at the curb and Cooper pulls up next to us. Blake rolls down his window. “Take a sweep of the perimeter.”

“Got it,” Cooper says.

Blake clicks a button on the console of the Escalade and the garage door goes up. He eases the Escalade into one of the garage bays.

“Wait,” he says when I reach for the door handle. He clicks the button again and waits for the garage door to close. “Okay.”

We spill out of the car and he directs me to an elevator door at the side of the garage. He slips a key from his pocket into a lock, then presses in a code on the panel. The door slides open as soon as he finishes.

We step in, and, when the door on the opposite side of the elevator slides back, it’s into a foyer, which opens on a huge great room, bright and sparsely decorated. What catches my attention immediately is the view out the wall of windows across the room. A mile below us San Francisco Bay and the city beyond is spread out as if it’s on display just for me. The fog has burned off and the water sparkles under a sapphire blue sky. It’s stunningly beautiful.

I glance at Blake, then wander to the window. My eyes follow the lines of the Bay Bridge to the city, where sunlight flashes off the windows of the skyscrapers. To the right, behind the city, the Golden Gate Bridge stretches to the north, and in the foreground, just at the tip of San Francisco, I can make out Alcatraz.

There’s a French door leading to a balcony on this level, and below is an expansive redwood deck. A stone path winds down the hill from the deck to a pool with a bathhouse, at least forty feet below me. The same tall shrubs I saw at the road next to the garage surround the entire place, and even though I know there are neighbors to the left and across the street past the pool below, it’s completely private. A sanctuary.

“Whose house is this?” I ask without turning.

“It’s a government seizure. The owner is a second-string drug runner from Miami. He was just convicted last month and all his U.S. property seized.”

I turn and see Blake is standing near the sofa, watching me. I step away from the window. “Why me?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you came into Benny’s, you came right to my stage. Why?”

His eyes flick wider for just a second before his lips press into a tight line. He opens his mouth to answer but then closes it again and moves to the kitchen, at the right side of the great room. He steps around the black granite breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the living room and pulls down a tumbler from the glass-front mahogany cupboards, filling it at the tap. “Would you like some?” he asks, lifting his glass.

“No. Thanks.” I turn back to the window and gaze out over the city, and a minute later Blake steps up to my side.

“I made a mistake,” he says, his voice low.

I turn to him.

He sips his water, staring out over the spectacle below as the sun starts to dip over the water, and I feel my insides tighten at the bob of his Adam’s apple when he swallows. He is so incredibly masculine—so unbelievably gorgeous. As he answers, my eyes follow the contours of his face: the strong angle of his jaw, his high cheekbones, the straight line of his nose. “The way you moved . . . the way you looked up there on the stage . . . it just drew me to you. But I was stupid to target the girl I was attracted to. This would be so much less . . .” He rubs a hand down that amazing face. “. . . complicated if I’d gone in another direction.”

His admission stirs something deep in my belly. “I’m complicated?”

He finally turns to look at me. “This is complicated,” he says, gesturing between us with a wave of his hand.

The desire pulsing through me flows into waves of frustration and anger, and they’re all so intense, it’s impossible to decipher one from another. I spin from the window. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t set me up, and put me in so much danger that you had to kidnap me and drag me off to . . .” I throw my good hand at the window, but then my gaze follows. This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

I was eleven when Mom married Greg—old enough to remember the cockroaches and bedbugs in our tiny one bedroom apartment. It was the best Mom could do on what they paid her at Food for Less, but I know she wanted something better for us. I’m not really sure if she loved Greg or not when they got married three months after they met, but he was stable, with a decent paying job and small house in Fremont that we moved into. We had the things we needed and not much more. These were the houses that we drove by when family came to visit. The Berkeley Hills were a tourist attraction, not someplace any of us ever imagined living.

But here I am.

My eyes flick to Blake and there’s a subtle twist to his face that could be chagrin.

“I’m sorry, Sam. I never expected things would go this way.”

At the anguish in his eyes when they find mine, I feel myself softening. But then I remember where I am. I’m trapped here, with no ability to contact the outside world for months, maybe. “Mom didn’t answer when I called. Can I try her again?”

He looks at me for several long heartbeats. “I’ll see what I can do.” He backs away from the window and starts across the great room. “Your room is over here.”

I follow him past the elevator and a wide staircase with a wrought-iron rail behind it, through a door into a palatial master suite. Just like in the living room, the western wall is solid glass, with an unobstructed view of the bay and San Francisco. Through French doors there’s a private balcony with a lounge chair and a small table. At the foot of an immense king-sized bed with gold linens, a fireplace opens over a whirlpool tub in the bathroom on the other side, and above the fireplace there’s a huge flat-screen TV. I step through the door next to the fireplace into a bathroom bigger than my bedroom at home. Next to the tub that I saw through the fireplace is a stall shower I could throw a small party in—if anyone was allowed to know where I was. Everything is black granite and brass fixtures. “Wow.”

“I trust you’ll be comfortable here?”

I glance at Blake, who’s leaning against the door frame, and I want to say no. I want to rail against him and tell him that I’ll be miserable here. But I can’t force the lie from my mouth. Instead, I pluck at my top—the same one Jonathan brought me before our fateful trip home. “Despite the posh shower, I’m going to get pretty unbearable to live with if I don’t get a change of clothes.”

He tips his head, indicating that I should follow, and shrugs off the door frame. He moves through the bedroom and opens a set of double doors on the opposite wall from the windows, then steps back to let me pass. Inside, I find a closet as big as the bathroom. There are drawers stacked down the middle of hanging rods on each wall. It’s mostly empty, but on the hangers I see a few blouses, sundresses, a cotton granny nightgown, and a bathrobe. “Check the drawers,” he says with a nod at them.

I pull open the middle drawer. Inside are a four pairs of faded Levi’s, almost identical to the ones I’m wearing. I open the drawer above it and find several T-shirts and cotton tops. And in the one above those there are bras and underwear. I pick up a pair of panties. They’re white cotton Fruit of the Loom bikinis, and though they’d probably fit, I can’t imagine anyone younger than my mother actually wearing them.

I hold them up. “Who bought this stuff?”

“Nichols and me.”