Forsaken

CHAPTER ONE

"Did you just say you were going to add shit to my menu?"

Jason Sullivan couldn't resist, even though the smart-ass comment earned him a kick in the shin, one he rightly deserved. Samantha had been chattering, happy and excited as she unzipped a leather portfolio, pulling out three-by-five recipe cards and rattling off the names and contents of each to him. She was in culinary school and he'd agreed to let her cut her teeth on the menu at Sully's, his pub.

He sat across from Sam in one of the bar's back corner booths after hours while around them, waitresses wiped down tables, stacked chairs and collected ashtrays. As he spoke, her mouth spread in a broad and beautiful grin as she punted him playfully beneath the table. "Pupus," she said. "It's Hawaiian. I said maybe we could add some tropical flare with some Kamaboko dip or another pupus recipe."

Sam looked toward the bar, where a solitary customer remained, perched comfortably on one of the bar stools, nursing the last of a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. "What do you think, Bear?" she asked. "Polenta bites with marinated mushrooms, steamed clams with chorizo or the Kamaboko dip?"

Theodore "Bear" Phelps, her uncle, was a narcotics detective on the police force, a big, burly man with an appropriate nickname. He pivoted enough in his seat to glance between Jason and his niece and drop a wink. "I'm not going to eat shit either, Sammi."

Jason laughed and now Sam booted him hard beneath the table, pretending to scowl. "Oh, hilarious," she muttered, shaking her head, stuffing her recipes back into her portfolio. "You two should give up your day jobs, try some stand-up comedy."

"Which reminds me..." With a laugh, Bear slid from the stool. "Some of us actually have to work for a living come tomorrow morning." He hooked his jacket off the back of the stool, shrugging it across his broad shoulders as he approached the table. "Thanks for the beer, kid."

As Jason accepted Bear's handshake, he could see the curious and pointed look in the older man's eyes: So, are you going to do it tonight or what?

Sam's parents had died in a horrible car accident. She'd only been a little girl, just seven years old. Though she'd been in the car, seriously injured when the ambulance had sped through a cross-street red light and slammed into the side of her father's station wagon, she'd told him she'd never been able to remember much about it. "And what I do..." she'd always said with a shaky, sorrowful laugh. "Well, it isn't pretty."

Jason had asked Bear, who'd practically raised her, for permission to propose to Sam weeks earlier. But ever since gaining this blessing, Jason had fumbled, floundered, foiled or otherwise fucked up any and every opportunity he might have had to actually pop the question.

The previous weekend would have been perfect. Jason had taken Sam to Holiday Island, a crappy little fleabag amusement park out on the wharf, and at the end of the day, they'd ridden the Waterfront Eye, a towering Ferris wheel that offered a nearly unobstructed panoramic view of the city and seascape below. They'd stopped at the very top to load some of the cars below, and Samantha had leaned out, giddy as a child, her mouth spread in a delighted grin.

"Look," she had exclaimed, pointing out toward where the horizon and ocean came together in a barely discernible seam. Here, they could see beyond the expansive mouth of the bay, out into the Pacific Ocean, where major international shipping lanes converged. "Isn't it beautiful?"

He should have asked her then. The moment had been perfect. He'd had the ring with him, a simple gold band offset with a small square-cut diamond that he'd scrimped and saved for months to buy, in case just such an opportunity had presented itself. He should have asked, but in the end, he'd chickened out. The Eye had started turning again, delivering them to the ground once more, and the moment had been irrevocably lost.