“Thank you,” she whispered.
He pulled her back to him, fitting her into the crook of his shoulder. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not for a while. Maybe not at all.”
“So this is a chronic thing.”
His matter-of-fact voice made the whole thing seem less dreadful. He flipped on the bedside lamp and studied her damp face, his eyes somber. “Can I help? Is there anybody whose ass I can kick for you?”
She snuggled deeper into his warmth, kissing the thick bulge of his bicep, and shook her head. “You can't save me from this problem, Seth,” she said quietly. “But I love you for wanting to.”
He stiffened beneath her, and she realized, with a twinge of alarm, that she had used the scary L-word. She'd heard that it made men panic, when used prematurely.
Stop clinging to an illusion of control, she reminded herself wryly. He wasn't running or screaming. That was promising.
“So,” he said, his voice elaborately casual. “What happens now?” She kissed his chest. “Now you sleep, and I stare at the ceiling.”
“No. I mean, with us.”
She propped herself up on her elbow and smiled at him, threading her fingers through the hair on his chest “You can start by promising to never leap out of the dark and scare me, ever again.”
“Give me a key,” he suggested. “When you come in, just say 'Honey, I'm home,' and if I'm there, I'll say 'How was your day, dear?'“
She was taken aback by the bold request. “It seems almost redundant to give you a key, Seth,” she hedged.
“Your neighbors might get nervous if they see me picking your locks all the time. Besides, official boyfriends get issued keys.”
“They do?”
He frowned. “Hell, yeah.” He looked annoyed at her hesitation.
Raine stared down at the pattern of hair on his muscular chest, contemplating the idea. It flew in the face of all the rules, but those rules didn't correspond to the crazy reality she inhabited. She was destined for chaos. She took a deep breath, and followed her heart, not her head. 'Til give you the keys that Victor gave me,” she offered.
He jerked up onto his elbow. “What?”
“He was waiting for me when I came home last night” she said.
He gestured impatiently. “What did he want?”
“He wanted me to spy on you” she said. “He's curious about you.”
“So? What did you tell him?”
“I told him no,” she said simply. “I told him to leave. What else could I do?”
“You could quit,” he said curtly. “You could tell him to fuck off. You could get the hell out of town, that's what you could do!”
She looked down and shook her head.
He cursed, and flopped down onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “You're driving me nuts, Raine. Bad nuts, not good nuts.”
She studied his scowling face, puzzled. “Doesn't it bother you that Victor wants to spy on you?” she inquired.
He slanted her an impatient look. “Not particularly. I'd do the same if I were him. I knew the guy was a sleaze. It comes as no shock to me. Want me to dream up some stuff for you to tell him, just to keep him off your case?”
“No, thank you. I don't want to play his game at all.”
His face hardened. “Then what are you doing here?”
She shook her head again. “Seth—”
“I have to know. You don't want to play Lazar's dirty little games, and yet, you can't leave. You say you have your reasons. So what are they?”
His voice slashed across her nerves, already jagged from the nightmare, and her fragile calm began to crumble. She thought of her father’s sad, hollow eyes as he drifted away. Tears came, in a hot, uncontrollable rush, and she covered her face with her hands.
Seth made an impatient sound. “I'm not going to be put off by sniveling, Raine. What the hell is it with you and Lazar? Out with it.”
The words came out of their own volition. “He killed my father.”
He didn't react, or exclaim, or look shocked. He just studied her, his eyes thoughtful, for a long moment He reached out and brushed the tears off her cheeks with his knuckle. “You want to run that by me one more time, babe?” he asked gently.
She pressed her hand against her mouth as she tried to sort out what she dared to tell him. One wrong word and the whole thing would burst out of her, uncensored. “It was years ago,” she whispered “I was eleven. My father... worked for him. I don't know the details. I was too small. It was passed off as a boating accident. We ran away, never came back. My mother refuses to talk about it.” “So what makes you think that Victor—”
“This damned nightmare!” Her hands fell, and she let him see her tear-blotched face, her humiliating desperation. “I've been having it ever since my father died. He shows me his gravestone and the letters start to gush blood I look up, and there's Victor, laughing at me.”
“No proof? Nobody else accused him at the time?”
“No,” she whispered. “We just ran. My mother and I.”
He gently smoothed away her tears with his knuckles. “Sweetheart,” he said carefully. “Could this just be about grief?”
She flinched away from him. “Do you think I haven't asked myself that question for seventeen years? At this point, I no longer care. I have to do this, or I'll end up in a mental ward. It's that simple.”
He scowled. “Do what? What exactly do you have to do?”
She threw up her hands. “Find out what my father knew that got him killed. Look for clues, motives. I never said I was Wonder Woman.”
“I thought your parents lived in London.”
She shot him a startled glance, and he shrugged impatiently. “I hacked into your personnel file,” he explained.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Hugh Cameron is my stepfather. After my father was killed, we wandered all over Europe for five years. Then my mother finally calmed down enough to settle in London with Hugh.”
“What's your father's name?”
This was the one detail she wasn't ready to tell him, or anyone. Some instinct blocked the words at their source. She tried to hide the tremor that went through her. “His name was ... Peter Marat.”
It was true, as far as it went. Peter Marat Lazar.
“You studied literature and psych at Cornell, right?” he asked.
“You really studied that file, huh?”
“Of course I studied it. My point is, what does a secretary who studied lit in college think she's doing investigating a seventeen-year-old murder? Do you have the slightest idea how to go about it?”
She looked away from him. “I've done some reading,” she said.
“Reading. Huh.”
Exhaustion rolled over her, in a crushing wave. “I'm not doing this for fun, Seth,” she said. “I'm compelled. Maybe I'm mentally unsound after all those traumatic nightmares. I wouldn't be surprised, but it wouldn't change a thing. I've still got to do what I've got to do.”
“What have you got to do?” he demanded. “What's the plan?”
She hesitated. “I'm sort of making it up as I go,” she admitted “It's a good thing that Victor has taken an interest in me—”
“Like hell it is,” he snarled.
“For my purposes, it's excellent,” she corrected. “I was lucky to get called to go to Stone Island yesterday. I'm looking for memories, for clues and signs. I'm present, I'm paying attention. I'm doing my best. The dream won't let me do anything else.”
“So what you're saying is that you've got no plan at all”
She let out a doleful sigh. “That's about the size of it”
His hand slammed onto the pillow, hard enough to send feathers wafting into the air. “That is the craziest, stupidest, most totally fucked thing that I've ever heard in my life.”