Useful suggestions. However, I wasn’t generally fond of them, either. Wardens, Ma’at… none of them had gone out of their way to make sure I was taken care of, in the end.
Everybody had their own agendas. I’d quit because I was sick of being at the mercy of everyone else’s priorities but my own.
Speaking of that, Lewis was right. I should just go my own way. I should toss stuff in a suitcase, leave Sarah the keys to the apartment, and head out of town, David in the passenger seat and the road in front of me. But God, how long had I been doing that? Since the night that Bad Bob and I had fought, and I’d started running, I hadn’t had a home or a place in the world, and I was tired. I wanted… I wanted to rest.
I wanted to belong again, and to be part of the world.
“I’m staying,” I said softly. “I’ll be careful, okay? But I’m staying. I don’t want to live like that for the rest of my life, looking over my shoulder.”
Lewis reached out and took my hand in his. Big hands, scarred and a little rough in places. Strong fingers and a tight grip. “I’m your friend,” he said. “I’ll do what I can for you, you know that. But Jo, if it comes down to it, you have to be prepared to run. I don’t want to see you destroyed, but I don’t want to have to choose which side I’m on.”
I leaned forward and put a kiss on his forehead. “You won’t have to.” He was still holding my hand. His grip tightened, just a bit, and I felt that power humming between us again. We had a kind of complementary vibration to our talents, something that built in waves. Powerful. Dangerous. Kind of sexy, too.
It had always drawn us together, and at the same time, driven us apart. We’d had exactly one truly intimate encounter, and that had been pretty much earth-shattering, in a literal sense.
Lewis wasn’t a safe date, even if my heart didn’t already belong to David.
Sarah knocked on the bedroom door. “Hey! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in there!” she yelled. “And the tomatoes and onions are chopped already. Do you want me to brown the meat?”
“Yes!” I yelled back, and rolled my eyes as I stepped back.
Lewis let go of my hand, stood up, and said, “You know, your sister reminds me a lot of you.”
I gave him a dirty look.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I opened the bedroom door and went out to help make dinner.
It turned out to be okay, really. Lewis was pleasant company, Sarah more or less behaved herself, apart from grilling him mercilessly about the nature of my relationship with him, and going on and on about David, whom she hadn’t actually met, which sort of set my teeth on edge.
Lewis kissed me good night chastely on the cheek and strolled off into the night air, hands in his pockets, looking as if he might be planning on kicking back at the beach and doing nothing much. In reality, he was probably off to save the world. That was Lewis. False advertising in battered hiking boots. I wondered what Rahel and the Ma’at were up to.
Decided firmly that it was none of my business.
Sarah didn’t do dishes. Apparently they didn’t teach that particular skill in snobby culinary classes for bored, rich housewives. I did the dirty work and got to bed at about my normal time, set the alarm, and settled in for a short night’s sleep. I tossed and turned and missed David, missed him a lot. Hugged my pillow. Reached in the drawer, took out his bottle, and ran slow fingers over it.
But I didn’t call him back, and in the end I fell asleep touching the cool glass, imagining he could feel my hands on him.
Which led to a very nice dream. Which was cut short by the ringing of the telephone. I rolled over in bed, flailing, knocking over small, knockable things—luckily not the bottle still lying on the sheets next to me—and squinted at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock after combing the mess of tangled hair out of my eyes.
Three thirty in the morning.
It took six rings to remember where the phone was and fumble it to my ear; when I finally did, I heard a conversation already in progress.
“… a good day, then?” A velvety-smooth British voice, spiced with a lilt. Liquid and fast and a little spiked with adrenaline. “Sorry to be calling so late. I promise not to call you at this ungodly hour again; I was just on the phone with New Zealand and I forgot what time it was here. Will you forgive me?”
It took my sleep-fuzzed brain a minute to figure out why that voice was familiar. Oh, yeah. Eamon. I started to tell him to call back at some hour when people were actually awake, but Sarah’s voice interrupted me in midbreath.
She sounded languid and relaxed and very glad to hear from him. “No, not at all. I wasn’t really asleep.” Liar, liar, panties on fire.
My inner Miss Manners, who was barely awake and bitchy as hell, told me to hang up the phone before I heard something personal. Which I was going to do. Any second.
“Did you enjoy your day out with your sister?”
“Jo? Oh, yeah. She can be sweet, you know?” That was surprising. It threw me off track for a second, until she continued, “Well, when she wants to be. She’s been a total bitch to me most of our lives, though.”
Well, fine. Then I felt no guilt in listening, and besides, who the hell did Mr. Sexy English Guy think he was, calling up my sister at oh-dammit in the morning? I had to get up in an hour! And it was my apartment!
Miss Manners woke up a little more and reminded me that I’d be pretty damn pissed if she’d picked up the phone and listened in on, oh, say, me and David having intimate moments. I debated about it long enough to hear Eamon say, “No more trouble from the ex, though? Not got anyone else looking for you, has he?” He sounded genuinely concerned. “I just worry, you and your sister all alone. It’s a dangerous town, for two beautiful women on their own.”
Trouble? What trouble? There’d been trouble with Chrêtien? From the version Sarah had given me, the trouble had been with the lawyers. Nothing about physical danger.
But then Sarah sometimes omitted facts. Such as the initial significant detail about two-timing Chrêtien with his business partner. That hadn’t exactly been up-front information.
“You’re sweet,” Sarah said, in that half-asleep, breathless tone. I heard sheets rustling. If I could hear them, Eamon was hearing it, too. Sarah always had known how to work the flirt better than anyone I’d ever met. “No, I think he’s given that up. He just calls me, when he can find me. And says… cruel things.”
“I’m sorry.”
“At least he isn’t actually doing the cruel things anymore. Just talking about them.”
Chrêtien? Cruel? New idea to me. I mean, he’d always been shallow and supercilious; I just couldn’t see him as abusive. And she’d have told me, right?
Even if I was a total bitch. My sister would have told me if she’d been married to someone who hurt her.
Right?
“Sarah, he has money and a grudge,” Eamon said. “Bad combination. Does he know where you went?”
“He can guess. I haven’t got a lot of family.”
“Still worried, then?”
She sighed. “A little. About Jo. She’s—she doesn’t know when to quit, sometimes. I’m afraid if he does send someone, she might get hurt.”
“It may sound forward, but… you know that you can call me. Any time. Day or night. I’ll come right over,” Eamon said, and it was delivered in a half whisper, low in his throat. And yeah, I had to admit, my instant answer might have been Oh, yes, please, come on over right now, baby. But that would have been my silent internal answer. Right before I calmly told him no, thank you, right out loud.
Right, I reminded myself from the lofty moral high ground. Because you’ve never done anything like that. Hell, I’d picked up David as a hitchhiker on the side of the road. The lofty moral high ground and I were the proverbial slippery slope.