“Kat, if Sean is in trouble, I don’t need to be hired. I would do anything for him. But you’ve got to calm down. And Bridey is right, you can’t start wildly accusing Amanda.”
“But I’m right!”
“Then you need proof.”
“My father won’t believe me.”
Zach understood Kat’s feelings about her stepmother. Amanda wasn’t much older than Kat herself was. But he hadn’t seen anything himself to suggest that Amanda meant to do away with Sean. Sure, she enjoyed the fact that he was well off and probably wouldn’t have given him a second look otherwise, but that was a far cry from murder.
Frankly, he just didn’t think the woman had the brains to be capable of planning a murder.
By the time Kat finished talking, he knew she was right about one thing. She should not go to Ireland—she might well wind up in jail—and he should. Actually, he thought, he should be heading straight to Rhode Island, where Eddie Ray and his boat had gone missing. But Sean was alive in a hospital in Dublin, and he needed to come home. Kat was too emotionally involved, too convinced that her stepmother was evil, to see to that. Sean, for whatever reason, loved his new wife. He also loved his daughter. And a blowup between the two women could be dangerous to his health.
Zach picked up his watch from the bedside table. He could be in Dublin by morning. How soon he could head back, though, would depend on how well—or poorly—Sean was doing.
“What about your father? Is he well enough to travel?”
“Yes, with a nurse or something. I didn’t understand it all, just that, yes, he could come home. Please, Sean, bring him home. And when he’s safe—or at least at home, where I can keep an eye on that woman—you can find Eddie. I’ve talked to Dad, and he thinks he just ate something bad, but he’s worried sick about Eddie. Just book a flight to Dublin, then call me back and I’ll handle the rest of the details. You’re free right now, right?”
There was a movement on the other side of the bed, and he winced. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the woman’s name. He did. But there was nothing between them other than the fact that she liked a dimly lit bar and some good music after a long day at corporate headquarters, and so did he, so he’d ended up here at her apartment. Truthfully, he was beginning to think he was meant to wander aimlessly and restlessly through life—focusing on work, but never finding what it was that he really wanted to come home to.
He wished right now that he had woken up alone.
“Yeah, I can leave today, and I will. I’ll get a flight,” he said to Kat, going over what she had told him and wondering if something dangerous really was going on, or if he was letting Kat’s suspicions get to him.
He reminded himself of just how much hostility she bore Amanda, even though, for her father’s sake, she kept it hidden most of the time.
It was perfectly possible that Sean had simply fallen ill or, as he’d said himself, gotten a nasty case of food poisoning. As for Eddie, well, that was worrying, but maybe he was just playing a prank.
No. Eddie would never play that kind of a practical joke. Something else had to be happening, and once he got back, he would have to find out what.
He started to tell Kat a quick goodbye, but she stopped him.
“Wait, Zach.”
“What?”
“Please, I know I must sound crazy, but…God, I feel it. Like a chill in my bones. It’s like…like something evil is out there. An evil shadow. I’m worried sick about Eddie, and…I can’t let anything happen to my dad. I can’t.”
“Kat, I’ll get to him as quickly as possible and I’ll get him home.”
“Something really bad is happening, Zach. I don’t understand it, but I’m really afraid. And I’m not a coward, you know that.”
“I know that, Kat. Just stay calm. I’ll get Sean home.”
“And you’ll stay with us until you get this figured out?”
“I’ll stay until it’s all figured out,” he promised, then said goodbye at last and hung up.
He slipped from the bed, showered, then dressed in the bathroom. When he went back into the room, his bed partner was still stretched out on the mattress, a lithe and well-manicured thirty-something blonde.
“Call me when you’re back in my neck of the woods,” she said huskily.
He ought to tell her he would. That would be the polite thing to do.
But he didn’t want to lie, so he didn’t say anything.
“You’re not going to call, are you?”
“No,” he said softly.
For a moment she stared back at him with tawny brown eyes that registered what was at least an honesty between them. Then she smiled, something dry in her gaze. “Nice night, thanks. Have a good life.”
“You too,” he told her. It was the truth. It had been a nice night, and he wished her well, but their lives weren’t meant to intertwine.
He dialed the airport as he left, and headed back to his hotel to pack up as quickly as he could.