“You won't have to.” He took the tray, set it aside. “I swear to you, we'll find whatever needs finding.”
She believed him. Maybe she had to, but she believed him.
“In the meantime . . . ” She took his hand. “Can you be with me? I need to be me. I need you to touch me — me — and feel what I do when you're with me. Know that you feel me.”
“There's no one but you.” He slid onto the chair beside her. “Never anyone but you.”
“Don't be gentle.” She dragged his mouth to hers. “Want me.”
She needed those seeking hands, that mouth hungry for hers. Needed to feel and taste and ache, needed to know that it was her mind, her body, her heart meshed with his.
Love, the dark and the light of it, was strength, and she took it from him.
He tugged her jacket down her shoulders, hit the release on her weapon harness as his mouth captured and conquered hers. And those hands, those wonderful hands lit fresh fires, a new fever that raged clean and bright in her blood. Her fingers fumbled for the chair controls so they tumbled back when it slid flat.
It wasn't comfort she wanted, he knew, but lust — the greed and speed. Perhaps he needed the same. So he pinned her arms over her head, used his free one to torment until she bucked beneath him, crying out as she came.
And there was more. Dewy flesh quivering under his hands, frantic pulses jumping at the nip of his teeth. The lust she wanted beat inside him as wildly as her heart.
His woman. Only his. Her flesh, her lips, her body. Strong again.
“Now. Yes. Now!” Her nails dug into his hips as she arched against him, opened to him.
Hot and wet, she closed around him, crying out again as he thrust hard and deep, as she bowed to take him. Holding there, holding for one heady moment as he looked in her eyes. As he saw only Eve.
Then the whirlwind, wicked and wild, spinning them both too high for air, too fast for fear.
And when the world settled back, all the colors and shapes and light, then came the comfort. She lay locked in his arms, breathing him in. Her body — her body — felt used and raw and wonderful.
Eyes closed, she ran a hand through his hair, down his back. “No problem, considering you might have just indirectly banged a ninety-six-year-old woman?”
“If I did, she gave as good as she got.”
She laughed, tangled her legs with his. “We'll still bang when we're ninety, right?”
“Count on it. I'll have developed a taste for old women by then, so this could be considered good practice.”
“It's got to be sick to even be thinking this way, but it's probably like making jokes in the morgue. It's how you get through.” She untangled, sat up. “What I'm going to do is grab a shower, then coffee, then go over your runs. I'm going to work this like it needs to be worked and keep this other thing off to the side. Because if I think about it too hard, I'm just going to wig out.”
He sat up with her, took her shoulders. And what she saw in his eyes blocked the air from her lungs. “What? What?”
“You are who you are. I know you. You believe that?”
“Yeah, but — ”
“You're Eve Dallas. You're the love of my life. My heart and soul. You're a cop, mind and bone. You're a woman of strength and resilience. Stubborn, hardheaded, occasionally mean as a badger, and more generous than you'll admit.”
Fear edged back, an icy blade down the spine. “Why are you saying this?”
“Because I don't think you can put what's happened aside, not altogether. Take a breath.”
“Why — ”
“Take a breath.” he said it sharply, adding a shake so she did so automatically. “Now another.” He kept one hand on her shoulder as he shifted and touched the other to her ankle.
And the tattoo of a peacock feather.
Eight
She got her shower, got her coffee. She told herself she was calm — would be calm. Panic wouldn't help; raging might feel good, but in the end wouldn't help either.
“There are options,” Roarke told her.
“Don't say the E word. No exorcisms. I'm not having some priest or witch doctor or voodoo guy dancing around me, banging on his magic coconuts.”
“Magic . . . Is that a euphemism?”
“Maybe.” It helped to see him smile — to think she might be able to. “But I'm not going there, Roarke.”
“All right then. What about Mira?”
“You think she can shrink Szabo out of me?”
“Hypnosis might find some answers.”
She shook her head. “I'm not being stubborn. Or maybe I am,” she admitted when he cocked his eyebrows. “Right now I'd rather not bring anybody else into this. I just don't want to tell anybody I invited a dead woman to take up residence in my head, or wherever she is. Because that's what I did.”
She shoved up, began to pace. “I said sure, come right in. Maybe if I'd been paying attention to what she was saying, what she meant, I'd have locked the door. Instead I'm all, yeah, yeah, whatever, because I'm trying to keep a woman science says was already dead from bleeding out. It doesn't make any sense, goddamn it. And because it doesn't, I have to set it to one side. I have to,” she insisted. “I have to work the cases — cases — with my head, my gut. Fucking A mine. Which I damn well would've done anyway if she'd left me the hell alone.”
“So you'll fight this with logic and instinct?” He decided they could both use a glass of wine.
“It's what I've got. It's what's mine. And if there's any logic to this other part, the part that makes no sense, when I find the killer, when I find Beata, it — she — goes away. If I don't believe that, I'm going to lock myself in a closet and start sucking my thumb.”
He took her the wine, touched her cheek. “Then we'll find the killer and Beata. And for now, we'll keep the rest of it between you and me. Twenty-four hours. We'll work it your way, and I'll find someone who can undo what was done. If this isn't resolved in twenty-four hours, we'll work it my way.”
“That sounds like an ultimatum.”
“It most certainly is. You can waste time arguing, or you can get to work. I'm not going to share my wife with anyone for more than a day.”
“I'm not your possession either, pal.”
He smiled again. “But you belong to me. We can fight about it.” He shrugged, sipped his wine. “And you'll have wasted part of your twenty-four. Still, it might fire you up, so I'm open to it.”
“Smug bastard.”
“Maybe you'd like to swear at me in Russian or Hungarian.”
“And you said I was mean. Twenty-four.” She took a slug of wine, considered how she's push for more if she needed it. “Let's look at the runs.”
Roarke ordered data on-screen, leaned a hip against the side of her desk. “Your prime suspect,” he began. “You had most of this, but the second-level run added a bit, and I extrapolated from your notes. Allie Madison's apartment, where it's verified Alexi Barin began the day, is an easy ten-minute walk to the alley — considerably less if a healthy, athletic man took it at a jog, even a run. It's about the same from the restaurant where he had brunch. As is his own apartment,” Roarke added, ordering the map he'd generated on-screen. “These locations are clustered, more or less, in the general area.”
“So he could've slipped out, slipped away, put on a mask, sliced Szabo up, and gotten back. Which would involve knowing she'd be in the alley at that convenient moment, and wearing something for the blood spatter. Because you don't hack somebody up the way she was hacked and walk away clean and fresh to take your alibi to brunch.”
She paced in front of the screen. “He could have set a meet with her, pinning the timing. Told her he had some information on Beata. It's a lot of planning for an impulsive guy with a temper.”
“Something set him off at the brunch if we go with your TOD, or prior if we stay with science,” Roarke suggested. “He went to confront her, saw her in the alley — he'd have come from this direction, so he'd have passed the alley. He snaps, pulls the knife, goes in.”