Tempting Fate by Carla Neggers Page A

walking right over the scattered books and papers in his bare feet, and dug in his small refrigerator for a bottle of Pembroke Springs Natural Orange Soda. Dani had sent him a case—and the bill. His daughter was a barracuda. He handed the soda to the kid, who looked relieved. John heard the fizz of the bottle opening as he shut his door. His good deed for the day. Didn’t want the kid croaking on his drive back to the two-bit office-supply store where he worked.
    The fax had been sent from Beverly Hills:
    Dear John,
    What kind of damn fool would live in the desert with no phone? Dani’s been robbed. She’s okay, but I’m not. Call me: I have a phone.
    Nick
    Not, John observed dispassionately, “Love, Dad,” or even the conventional “Your father.” Just Nick. Like they were old pals, which they weren’t. Of course, they weren’t much as father and son, either.
    John laid the slippery fax on the counter and got out a Dos Equis, then heated up a leftover quesadilla and lit a cigarette. He’d learned to smoke the night he’d lost his first thousand in a poker game. He hadn’t had a thousand to lose, and gambling had seemed a hell of a way to get rid of his money. Smoking hadn’t helped. He’d known it wouldn’t, but he’d needed something to try to assuage his guilt and self-hate, although why he’d thought a cigarette would do the trick he still couldn’t figure out. Now he smoked whenever he felt particularly guilty or rotten. Usually all someone had to do was mention his daughter.
    He sat on the tattered couch he’d picked up from the Salvation Army fifteen years ago. He’d always thought he’d have it recovered but never had. He reread his father’s fax. A fax machine wouldn’t intimidate that old geezer. Nicholas Pembroke was the most selfish and egotistical and totally unreliable man John had ever known, but endearingly honest about his failings, and direct, and unafraid—to a fault—of taking risks. John, on the other hand, seldom told anyone what was on his mind and had learned to avoid risk. To him his gambling wasn’t taking risks. It was avoiding them. Popular media opinion declared that his Pembroke genes—a penchant for gambling and adventure and self-destruction—had led to his downfall. He disagreed. He’d been all over the world, gambling, writing the odd travel article, doing as he damn well pleased. But it was a life he’d chosen not for its risk but for its safety. Staying on at Chandler Hotels and being the only parent to his only child would have required greater courage. Staring in the mirror every morning and wondering if he’d driven Lilli off all those years ago. Wondering if he’d helped make her feel trapped and unhappy. If he’d pushed her into making her deal with his father to act in Casino on the sly.
    Give him a hot poker game any day.
    He stubbed out his cigarette. He hadn’t seen Nick in months. Despite their many differences, the one thing he and Nick did share—this mismatched father and son—was a deep affection for Dani. Daughter and granddaughter, she was the one person they both loved without condition.
    And whom both had failed without reason.
    John smoked another cigarette and drank another beer. In his gut he knew what Nick was going to ask him to do.
    Twenty-five years ago tonight Lilli had disappeared.
    How could Nick ask?
    â€œDamn,” John whispered, smashing his cigarette into an ashtray. He’d only smoked half of it. The other half he’d save for another day.
    The minute he’d finished reading his father’s fax, he’d known what he would do.
    He dressed in khaki pants and a white cotton shirt he didn’t bother tucking in and his ratty, once-white tennis shoes. All in all, he still looked like a desert rat, brown and wizened, squinty-eyed, a pathetic shadow of the proud, determined man he’d once