Page 48 of Take Me Tender

“What?”

“Don’t wanna die,” Shanna said. “Was dumb to wanna die.”

Oh, Christ. His gut clenched. “Shanna. Shanna, sweetheart. Where are you?”

“Nex’ door. No. Nex’ door nex’ door.”

Oh, God. “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

“No!” Panic sharpened her voice. “No p’lice. Dad. Public’ty. Gossip.”

“Shanna.” His mind raced, understanding she didn’t want the tabloids in on the story, but Christ! “Where are you?”

“Nex’ door nex’ door. Call…call Smitty.”

Adrenaline focused his mind. “Smitty” was their old pal, Thomas Smith, now Thomas Smith, M.D., who headed one of Malibu’s twenty-six licensed detoxes-by-the sea—nearly one for every mile of coastline. “Nex’ door nex’ door…” He remembered now that her father had bought the place on the other side of Shanna’s marble palace.

“I’m coming, sweetheart,” he said, already thumbing through his cell’s address book for Smitty’s number. “Stay put.”

It took a few minutes, but he got to Smitty. He convinced Shanna to hang up so he could dial her back on his cell phone, and he managed to get dressed while keeping the slurring woman talking. Then he ran out the back door, nearly tripping as he spied that long blue scarf abandoned on the floor.

Like a signpost to lead him to Nikki? Or like a river on which the love of his life had sailed away?

His mouth went dry, so he said the vow inside his head. I’m coming for you, too, cookie. No way am I letting you go.

Twenty-one

You make me want to be a better man.

—JACK NICHOLSON, ACTOR, IN AS GOOD AS IT GETS

Though for the time being, Jay’s silent promise was long on feeling and short on follow-through. In the light of an overhead fixture, he found Shanna in the living room at the old Pearson place, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. Holding his breath, he pushed wide the double doors to rid the place of the acrid stink of new paint mixed with spilled booze.

“Dropp’d it,” she said, her hand making a feeble wave at the shards of a crystal decanter spread across the scarred hardwood near her feet. “Didn’t want more.”

“Good.” Jay checked his watch. How long had Nikki been gone? How long before Smitty arrived to take over as white knight? “You’ve already had too much.”

“Here, take ’em,” Shanna said, fishing under one hip. She held out a plastic bottle. “The oxy. The oxy…whatamacallit.”

As Jay snatched the pills from her hand, a few rattled against the plastic, and his stomach roiled again. He glanced down at the label. Oxycodone, she was right about that. “Jesus, Shanna. What were you thinking?”

“Wasn’t anything—wasn’t anyone—without Jorge.”

He hunkered down beside her. “You don’t need Jorge. You don’t need any man to be someone.”

She nodded. “Know that. Now. Not then. Not next door. But here…” Her hand waved again.

Jay glanced around. He’d peered inside the dirty windows a few times when walking down the beach, and the junk that had been stored inside and out on the deck then was gone. The paint was fresh and the glass of the French doors polished. “You had the place fixed up.”

“Me. I fixed it. Fixed it myself.”

Surprised, he looked over at her. She held out both hands and he could see her fingers were denailed and paint stained her cuticles. “You did the work?”

She nodded. “Almost all me. Paint. Hauled garbage. Left the photos, though.”

“Good.” He had no idea what photos, but that didn’t matter. She was half-lucid and Smitty had said to keep her talking. “They’re nice photos.”

“I’m in ’em. Happy photos. Happy me. Happy here.”

“Great.” He checked his watch again and let his mind leap back to Nikki. Why the hell would she have left after that spectacular bout of sex? How could she have left after that spectacular bout of sex?

Damn, it made him want to tear out his hair. He knew he should have had it out with her before they hit the sheets. So it was his own damn fault that she was gone, but that didn’t stop him from being pissed off at her.

Worry always pissed him off.

As soon as Smitty showed, he was on the hunt. To find answers, to find her.

Except then Smitty showed, and shit, Shanna suddenly showed a resurgence of her previous fixation on him.

“Stay with me, Jay.” Smitty was going to take her to his clinic where he said they’d pump her stomach and then feed her activated charcoal to absorb any leftover toxins. She’d be there at least for the next few days so they could monitor her for liver damage, and assess her emotional needs as well.

Her hand lifted toward him in entreaty. “Don’t leave me, Jay.”

Hesitating, he stared at her thin, outstretched fingers.

Stay with me.

Don’t leave me.

Women had said similar words to him before, and he’d closed his ears to them. Going in, he’d always reasoned, they’d known he wasn’t the staying type. He was a leaving kind of man.

Meaning he’d always opted for the charming smile and the speeding feet when words like that reached his ears.

Stay with me.

Don’t leave me.

But the one saying the words now was Shanna, his childhood friend. Shanna, his careless fling.

What a mess he’d made with that.

A mess he’d love to walk away from now.

And he had himself to consider, didn’t he? Nikki to find.

Damn it, where was she? How could she have done this to him? Instinct he’d never acknowledged or been in touch with before told him he had to find her, and find her fast, before she walled herself off from him.

Shanna’s voice broke through his anxious thoughts. “Jay?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his palm over his face, trying to think clearly. To think of himself and what was best for him. What was best for Hef Junior, the randy adolescent inside himself, Malibu’s selfish bachelor who had never once looked over his shoulder to acknowledge any hurt he’d left behind.

When he opened his eyes, it was to realize that it was time, finally, to grow the hell up. At whatever the cost to himself.

“I’m right here, Shanna,” he said. “I’ll stay with you as long as you’d like.”

Hours later, she was as pale as the clinic’s sheets. He was seated on a chair beside her bed, his hands trying to warm one of her cold ones. Her pale eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks.

“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Tell me again how I don’t need Jorge.”

He squeezed her fingers. It wasn’t the first time he’d repeated the words. “You don’t need Jorge. You don’t need any man to be someone.”

A smile lifted the corners of her chapped lips. “That’s right. When I went back to my house tonight—the little house, did I tell you I’m buying it? I told my father my plan and he sputtered, but I was adamant—I realized that if I could redo that house and if I could stand up to my dad, well, I could be comfortable in my own skin. I could be woman enough to live without a man in my life. Even Jorge.”

On the heels of her words, the man in question ran into the room. His clothes were rumpled, his boots dusty, his face unshaven and bristly. “Madre de Dios!” he exclaimed. “What the hell is going on?”

Smitty showed up next, his ponytail flying behind him. “Shanna, he said Jay left a message on his cell phone about where you were. We couldn’t stop him at the desk.”

Her eyes were wide, darting between their faces until they landed on Jay. He shrugged. “I called him. Told him on the off chance he might want to know.”

“Might! Might want to know!” Jorge followed that up with a string of Spanish that had Jay a little concerned about where his head might end up before the morning was over. “I had to race to Mexicali—”

“Your grandfather?” Shanna lifted onto her elbows. “Was it your grandfather?”

“Sí, sí. Before dawn yesterday morning he goes missing and no one can find him. I think I can get there, get back for your party, okay, maybe a little late…but the pobre cell phone service across the border means I can’t tell you where I am. Even once we find my grandfather and settle him back in the house safe and sound.”

“The landline—”

“I don’t know your landline number, I don’t have any cell reception to call it with anyway, and even if I could have gotten through to U.S. information—which I finally did—your father has it unlisted!”

It was the longest, most impassioned speech Jay had ever heard his friend make.

As if it was all too much, Shanna collapsed back to her pillow.

“Shanna.” Jorge rushed toward the bed and Jay made way for him by ducking out of his chair. The other man dropped into the seat and took Shanna’s now-free hand. “Pobrecita, I’m so sorry. But how could you have done this?”

“It was stupid. I was stupid.”

“How could you imagine I don’t love you? That if something happened to you, it wouldn’t kill me, too?” Jorge’s accent thickened as feeling filled his voice. “How could you not realize I couldn’t go on without you? That I wouldn’t be anyone without you?”

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