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always.” Hebert mopped a handkerchief over the sweat beading along his bald head. Spidery veins and bluster stained his smiling face.
    “What’s he thinking, recovering on a ship, away from a fully outfitted hospital?”
    Hebert brushed back a lock of her hair with a beefy hand. “He’s old, just like me, and when you’re running out of time, you just aren’t willing to waste any of it being somewhere you don’t wanna be.”
    So where did that leave her now with the decision to come to Genoa?
    Hebert gestured to Charles. “What’s he doin’ here?”
    The blackjack dealer lounged against the door frame with his backpack dangling from one hand. “Good evening, Mr. Benoit.”
    The older man grunted.
    Jolynn placed a hand on Hebert’s arm andsqueezed. “Charles helped get my car started. He rode along in case it gave me trouble again.”
    “Thanks, Tomas.” Hebert’s brows lowered in a deep scowl. Bushy spikes of hair touted defiance to the bare scalp. “I appreciate your watchin’ over our little girl.”
    “Bear, nobody’s called me
little
since my tenth birthday.” Sighing, she realized she’d exhausted her stall tactics. “Charles, I really could use that coffee. Extra milk, two packets of Splenda.”
    “It’ll be waiting.” The brief flash of Charles’s dimples bolstered her for the ordeal ahead.
    By the time she’d reached the end of the hall, her feet seemed to drag her body into her father’s private suite, which had to be costing a mint. Nothing simple for Josiah Taylor. The pricier, the better to prove to everyone how far he’d come from his poor roots.
    He’d started his operation with a simple sawdust joint— a nonluxury gambling club on the Texas-Louisiana border. As legal constraints on gambling put a choke hold on expansion, he’d redirected his business into a riverboat casino with seed money from a less-than-reputable source and his business expanded overseas.
    Or so the story went. Not that anyone had ever been able to prove anything. And not that her whispered childhood confession of what she’d seen was ever believed. Her nanny had gone to her father…
    He’d told her she was mistaken. It hadn’t been one of his employees who’d shot Uncle Simon, but one of their enemies and he would pay. She must have been traumatized by what she’d really seen.
    Her father’s face then merged with now as he lay in a hospital bed surrounded by antiques that still didn’t re-createany sense of home. Whatever medicines they’d put him on left his features bloated, his complexion pasty. Time had dulled his full head of red hair to a rusty copper with glints of silver.
    “Daddy,” she whispered with all the feeling of a child waking from a nightmare in search of comfort.
    God, how she wanted to keep driving with Charles, far away from Genoa. To London maybe… which made her think about the guy with the fakey Brit accent back on the ship.
    No escaping.
    Her father’s eyes moved beneath his lids. Jolynn backed away. His lids fluttered open, and he scanned the room for a moment in a vague, unfocused manner before halting on her. Father and daughter looked at each other for the first time since she’d graduated from college.
    Jolynn plastered what she hoped was a hundred-watt smile on her face. “Hey there, old man.”
    “Hello, Punkin’.”
    The childhood endearment stung. Eyeing the doorway, she wondered what Charles would think if she burst back into the waiting room and begged him to run away with her to a London garret on the Thames. He could study quadratic equations while she admired him in nothing but a pair of jeans.
    “You…” Her father cleared his throat with a grimace. “You all settled in on the ship?”
    “There’s not much to unpack. I’ll be leaving in the morning before the ship pulls out.” Before she could stop herself, she said, “I could stay for an extra day or two if you need me.”
    He shook his head gruffly. “No need. I’ve got plenty of suck-ups