On top of him . . .
I guess we’ll see. Maybe I should actually let him sleep.
He sighs, but he’s smiling. “I was trained to stay awake for a lot longer than twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, yeah?” I wander over to help him lift his T-shirt off his body. It’s covered in drywall dust and dirt from hours of cleaning up. He could probably use a shower. Something else I’d like to try out with him, but maybe later. “What else were you trained to do?”
He eases back onto the bed, the springs creaking under his weight, to give me a good look at my work. It’s healing nicely. “All kinds of things,” he murmurs through a giant yawn.
I duck back into the bathroom to clean the smeared makeup off my face and brush my teeth, then decide that I really do need to hop into the shower to wash the day’s grime from my skin, with or without him. Ideally, with him.
“Hey, did you want to . . .” My voice drifts off. Sebastian is stretched out on his back, his arm beneath his head, snoring softly.
After my shower, I tiptoe to the other side and ease onto the bed in my towel, expecting him to wake up with the dip of the mattress. I mean, he was a Navy SEAL. Don’t they sleep light?
He doesn’t so much as twitch; he’s out cold, his normally taut jaw relaxed, his features almost boyish. So I simply lie there and watch him sleep for more than an hour as I fail at drifting off myself, until I hear the front door creak open and Dakota’s welcoming hum.
I duck out to the living room and let Sebastian rest.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SEBASTIAN
I wake with a start, my body jerking enough to shake the bed.
A soft moan beside me instantly brings me back to reality. I laid down in Ivy’s bed. It was close to four in the afternoon. I was going to just grab an hour, at most.
I glance at the window. It’s dark out now, the streetlight casting a dim light into the bedroom.
It’s . . . Holy shit. I’ve been asleep for almost eleven hours? I can’t remember the last time I slept this long without drugging myself with Ambien. And to not even stir when Ivy came around . . . No one’s ever been able to step into a room without my waking up before.
“You’re alive,” Ivy mumbles, tucked under the covers, her eyes still closed, her jet-black hair fanning across the pillow. “You missed dinner. I thought you might have died in your sleep.”
I can’t help but smile. “And you willingly crawled into bed with a corpse?”
“Corpses are quiet, and I was tired.”
“Did you even try to wake me?”
“Of course I did . . .” The words drag out in that tired, half-asleep way. “Then I stripped you down and took nude pictures of you with me, then with Dakota and with the bearded lady. Going to ask Fez to post them all over the Internet in the morning. You and Gerti are going to be famous.”
I frown. She seems coherent but she’s not making any sense. “Gerti?”
“The bearded lady from the circus. Dakota’s dinner guest tonight.”
“You’re kidding, right?” She says it all so deadpan, I’m beginning to wonder.
She sighs. “Not about the beard.”
I smile. But check my belt buckle all the same. “You’re cute when you’re half-asleep.”
“Half-asleep and naked,” she points out.
Just the thought of Ivy naked stirs my blood. Yesterday at the house, having to stop partway through was torture for me. By the looks she cast my way all afternoon, I left her just as frustrated. And then I fell asleep the moment we got here.
I reach under the bedsheet to find nothing but her warm flesh beneath. She rolls onto her back, letting the sheet fall away.
To entice me, I’m sure.
It works.
Ivy peers up at me through hazy, satisfied eyes. “I still can’t believe you slept that long. You must have been a shitty SEAL.”
“The worst.” I place a kiss on her forehead, and another one on the tip of her nose. “I’m going to duck out now.”
“Now? It’s five in the morning.”
“Do me a favor and stay put. I’ll call you.” When she doesn’t agree, I press. “I mean it, Ivy.”
“Fine,” she grumbles, rolling away from me, curling into her sheet.
The doorbell makes a low buzzing sound when I press the button. I wait, and a few minutes later I hear the footfalls coming from the other side. Whoever it is, they walk on their heels.
The door to the small pink house flies open and a disheveled woman appears, midway through pulling a short pink silk robe over her rumpled boxers and a white tank top—no bra, her small tits sagging in different directions. A waft of incense floats out the door with her movements.
I guess eight-thirty in the morning is a little early to be paying house calls. “Hi, is Dylan around?” I ask.
She looks me up and down, tucking her yellow-blond hair behind an ear and then folding her arms self-consciously over her chest. “Who are you?”
“My name’s John. I was in Afghanistan with him.” I know enough about the Marine Corps to get by. I just hope she doesn’t know enough to ask too many questions.
“How’d you get this address?” she asks, her eyes pinched with suspicion.
This must be the cheating girlfriend that Dylan was talking about in the video. She’s not particularly friendly, but that could just be the situation. Either way, she may have useful information about her ex. “Dylan gave it to me awhile back. Told me to stop by when I was in town again. I tried emailing him but never got an answer, so I figured I’d just surprise him.” I have no idea how long Royce was living here, but thanks to Bentley’s recon, I do know that he wasn’t living here when he died.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Dylan was shot and killed a couple weeks ago.” Her voice wobbles. Bad breakup or not, she’s obviously upset by it.
I slide my glasses off because that’s the appropriate thing to do, though I’d rather keep my eyes hidden. “Seriously?” Luckily I can pull off a compelling cool, shocked reaction very easily. “What happened?”
She gives me the basic rundown—nothing that anyone who read the newspaper article wouldn’t know about.
“Man, I’m just so . . . this is crazy.”
“I know, right?” She swallows, blinks back the glossiness in her eyes. “I mean . . . we actually broke up a few weeks before that and then this happens. Shocking, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I hadn’t talked to him in at least five months. Maybe longer. He was still over in Kabul with Alliance.”
“Oh.” She sneers. “Those assholes. They didn’t even send flowers to his funeral. I know he wasn’t working for them anymore, but—”
“He wasn’t?”
She shakes her head. “They fired him.”
“They fired him? He’s earned a damn Medal of Honor! Why the hell would they do that?”
She shrugs. “Dylan changed a lot after he started working for those guys. You know how he was.” She waves a hand my way. “He used to laugh and clown around. He was so happy and helpful. Just a genuinely good guy. But after he went back with them . . . he wasn’t the same guy anymore. He was angry. He started doing drugs. Something there changed him.”
I wish she had told me something different. That he was an abusive drunk, that he had always been a dick. Something that might suggest he was no better than Mario when it came to those poor girls, that he deserved the bullet.
“This is awful news.”
“I know. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.”
I pause. “I’d love to go see his mother and offer her my condolences. Would you happen to have her address?”
She studies my face—I twitch against the urge to reach up and touch my jaw; I shaved the beard off this morning, and it feels strange to be clean shaven after so many years under shadow. But if I’m going to be showing my face around San Francisco, digging for information, I need to make a small effort to camouflage my usual self.