On the one hand it felt deceitful.Josh had no way of knowing that Liam felt connected to his family after years of association with Danny.
But on the other hand… if all Liam ever had was that moment, that one moment, of Josh Salinger in his arms, scowling with embarrassment, still trying to run the op as his entire family lost their mind over his health, then he still would have known that the boy was extraordinary.
He still would have wanted to know the man whom Lightfingers had helped to raise.
And Josh seemed to realize there was something… a connection, a plucked and vibrant string, binding them together.
His emails to Liam were oddly formal when the language of his crew was almost free-flowing performance art.
The times Liam sat for dinner with the crew were the only times Liam ever saw him discomfited.
And now…?Now they would be stuck together on a yacht for three weeks of vacation and mystery solving, investigating the deaths of Stirling and Molly’s parents.Stirling and Molly were two of Josh’s oldest friends, foster siblings who’d been adopted by a couple of sweet middle-aged zillionaires, a breed Liam could have sworn was born in myth.
But leave it to Felix and Julia to know two unicorns, and leave it to Josh and his friends to want to avenge their untimely demise.
Liam wanted in.He’d benefited from some of their capers, had gotten some promotions from the leads they’d let him in on.
He wanted in on this one.
But mostly he wanted the in to Josh.He wanted the right to sit at the boy’s table.To hear him talk, to learn the language of the crew so he spoke it like his own.
That string that had plucked in his heart when he’d first seen the boy smile—that sound, that chord—had grown cacophonously louder in his ears since that close day in July.It only stilled when Josh glanced at him or, hell, texted him a detail or wrote an email.
He felt ridiculous on the one hand.He was past thirty; Josh had turned twenty-one in January.What sort of addled, daft, lecherous… oh dear God!
As Liam approached the yacht again—he’d made friends with the captain the day before while waiting for the others to arrive—one of the younger crew came dashing down the dock.
Liam knew them by now.Stirling, of course, was the crew’s computer specialist—their hacker—and Liam had seen firsthand that the boy was sort of a prodigy.Compact, midsize, Black, with hair kept precision short, Stirling wasn’t always great with people, but hewaspractical to the bone, and he seemed a bit rattled now.
“Heya, Stirling,” Liam said, concerned.“Did you get lost?”
“I was looking for Julia or Danny or Felix,” he said unhappily, peering back to where Grace, Josh, Hunter, and Tienne were grouped.“I know this is supposed to be Leon’s yacht, but Josh can’t really wait—”
At the mention of Josh’s name, Liam’s head came up like a prized pointer’s—he couldn’t seem to help himself.“Is he not feeling well?”
“Recovery lasts a long time,” Stirling said, which was something Liam had been trying to drill down into his own head for the past six months.
“I know it,” Liam muttered.“Here, I introduced myself to the captain while I was waiting and—oop!Shit!”
While they’d been talking, the object of their concern turned cloud white and fell immediately into Hunter’s arms.
The one thing Liam could think as he and Stirling hustled down the dock was that the only person who got to carry Josh Salinger was him.
Hunter gave over, though, and in no time at all, Josh was in his arms, cranky and exasperated and tired enough to actuallymentiontheir polite dance around each other on group email and texts.
“You’ve got to let me in, boy-o,” Liam murmured into his hair.“I don’t go where I’m not wanted.”
“Dick,” Josh muttered, and Liam was grateful.The boy with his blood up was so much less worrisome than “Recovery Boy,” as Josh’s friend Grace called him.
But Recovery Boywasworrisome—enough so that Liam stashed him in his own air-conditioned cabin, watched over first by Stirling and then by Julia while he went to find a shipboard doctor.
After Josh had been checked out (showing great patience, Liam thought, for all the family’s fussing), the boy was asleep on Liam’s bed, covered in a cotton throw, and his mother—stunningly elegant woman, barely forty, with the grace and poise of a young Grace Kelly—turned to him and said, “If you like, you can use his room in the upper deck until he awakes—”
Liam shrugged.“I’ve got my book,” he said, indicating his phone and meaning his audiobook, since his dyslexia made reading onerous but helovedadventure stories.“I can keep him company while the rest of you get situated.”
Julia nodded gratefully, her gaze resting on her sleeping son with a mother’s trouble.“He’s so over this cancer thing,” she said with a short laugh.“Which is unfair, I know.He’s got a good six months before he’s even close to where he was before he got sick, and at least three years before we can truly breathe a sigh of relief.But he’s always been precocious.Since the cradle, really.Has wanted to be out in the world, doing, planning,beinga part of it.And he knows—he knows how lucky he is.I don’t think….”Her voice caught.“I don’t think he knows how luckyweare—”
He saw her swallow and take a deep breath.And then, showing the strength she’d exhibited all those years ago when told she’d be taking in a stranger for the sake of a man she loved like a brother, she cleaned up her mascara with the tip of her third finger and smiled again.
