He let out a half laugh. “I never know what odd path that mind of yours might take. But it never disappoints.”
It wasn’t about the ridiculous desk, he thought—though knowing her, that could be part of it. But it was to show both of them she could take whatever ugliness would come her way. She’d face the nightmares, the fears, the brutal memories to do the job she’d sworn to do.
So he went to her. Though the glint in her eyes dared and demanded, he cupped her face again. And thinking of the nightmares, the fears, the memories, laid his lips gently on hers.
To cherish.
In response she took two fistfuls of his hair, yanked him to her, hard. “Uh-uh. This is desk sex. That means it might hurt a little.” So saying, she bit him.
Then she shoved him back, deliberately rough, so she could pull off her sweatshirt. “Give me what you have.”
“What I have?”
“Yeah. And more.”
“And when you say you can’t take it, remember what you asked for.”
“Oh, I can take it. Let’s see if you can when—”
He slid a hand between her legs, pressed, and the rest of the words died in a gasp. Before she could draw the next breath, his free hand clamped on the back of her neck, holding her in place while his mouth ravaged hers.
Now he used his teeth, left her breathless and churning on that erotic edge just this side of pain. She wrapped her legs around him, holding him hard and tight against her, rocking, rocking against the hand driving her mad.
“Inside me. You should be inside me.”
“Not yet, no. I’ve more than that,” he reminded her and caught her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Light pinches, relentless friction drove her straight over the edge.
Her legs tightened around him like a vise as she came, but he didn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.
Even as she moaned out her release, he shot her up again.
Her own breath burned her lungs as she stumbled along that edgy, dangerous line of pleasure. She dragged at his suit jacket with hands that trembled with outrageous needs.
“Take it off, take it off.”
Desperate, she tore at his shirt, sent buttons flying. Then at last her hands found skin. Hot, firm, hers. Now her arms wrapped around him, her fingers digging into flesh, her nails scraping, biting.
“Now. God. Now.”
But he said, “More,” and sent her flying.
Something thudded to the floor when he pushed her back on the desk. Her flailing hands sent disc files tumbling.
Then he was feasting on her breasts even as his hands drew the cotton pants over her hips. She struggled to reach his belt, to unhook it, to find him. To take him.
He left her quivering to glide his tongue down her body, to take it over her, into her.
The world was heat and glory, and needs newly incited the moment they were met, hungers keenly sharpened the instant they were sated.
She gripped his hips, said his name, only his name, saw his eyes, a wild and wicked blue with what they made each other.
And at last, at last, he plunged into her. Hard and fast, whipping them both past all borders of control. She met him madness for madness, greed for greed until the world dropped away.
She wondered her heart didn’t break through her ribs. Its crazed beat rang in her ears as aftershocks—for that had been an earthquake of sex—shook her body.
They sprawled over the desk like barely conscious survivors of a cataclysm, and she gave a passing thought to the desk.
How bad could it be if it could support all that weight?
“I might be lying on murder files. That’s just not right. It’s so disrespectful.”
“You’re not.” His face was buried between her breasts. “They fell over. Maybe off. We’ll sort it out. Christ Jesus, I can’t find my breath.”
“If you do, see if mine’s with it.”
He lifted his head, looked at her with eyes that managed to be wild and wicked, and a bit sleepy all at once. And she managed to lift her hand and brush the hair back from his face.
“So . . . was that all you’ve got?”
How, given their position and current state, he got his hand under her to pinch her ass—hard enough to make her yelp—was a wonder.
“Just asking. I may have seen God. She may have been smiling.”
“Well, she made us to fit together, didn’t she?”
“We do.”
“So we do.” He laid a kiss between her breasts, winced a little as he eased back to stand. “I believe it did hurt a little.”
She laughed, then hissed as she sat up. “Yeah, maybe. We did knock over murder files,” she noted. “And the coffeepot—but that was empty. Mostly. Can’t you wear less clothes? I ripped the shirt—the buttons off anyway. It probably cost more than the damn desk.”
“If I’d known desk sex was on tonight’s agenda, I’d have worn less.”
“If I go with the command center, there could be regular command center sex. Dress appropriately.”
Laughing, he picked up his shirt—a soft slate gray with just a hint of blue—examined it. “Well now, it’s done for, I suppose, and a small price to pay.”
She took it, put it on. Subtly breathed him in. “We have to pick this stuff up. I can’t pick up murder files naked.”
“Apparently I can,” he said, and helped her pick them up, gather up the clothes they’d discarded. “You can organize it all in the morning.”
“I guess. Maybe we should put that desk in some sort of display. With a plaque.”
“‘Dallas and Roarke Banged Here’?”
“No—though we could make a secret plaque for that. Just something like: ‘It Served Us Well.’”
“You’re oddly sentimental over a desk.”
“I am now. I need my pants.”
“Why? We’re going straight to the bedroom.”
“And Summerset could be lurking somewhere between here and there.”
“I can promise you he’s tucked into his own quarters by now.”
“Maybe he’s in his coffin, maybe he’s not, but I’m not walking to the bedroom in nothing but your torn shirt.”
“We’ll take the elevator,” Roarke said, solving the problem by calling for it. “So, what was it you asked for? All I had. And more?”
“You pulled it off.”
“Not yet. That was all I had.” He pulled the bundle of clothes out of her hand, dropped them. “This is more.”
“You couldn’t possibly—”
He just pushed her back against the elevator wall, and took her there. Fast and fierce.
When he was done, and very satisfied with himself, she started to slide bonelessly down the wall.
He plucked her up, restarted the elevator. Then carried her to the bed when the doors opened.
“You know what they say.” He wrapped an arm around her. “Mind what you wish for.”
“I didn’t mind.” But her voice was blurry as she slid toward blissful, exhausted, thoroughly used-up sleep.
Then she popped right up again. “Jesus cross-eyed Christ, the clothes! They’re still in the elevator.”
“They can be sorted out in the morning.”
“He’ll see! All those sex-tangled clothes. Get them back!”
“The elevator’s still there if it worries you.”
She leaped up, all but dived in to grab the clothes when the doors opened. Near to shuddering with relief, she dropped them in a heap on a chair.
She crawled back into bed, sighed, and slept in seconds.
Apparently, Roarke thought, sex-tangled clothes were acceptable when sorted out from a bedroom chair.
What a marvel her mind was, he decided, and slipped into sleep after her.
—
The dream grippe
d her with sharp, digging claws. Even knowing it for what it was, she couldn’t break free of it. It held fast, dragged her down.
Into the study in the Spring Street brownstone.
Edward Mira sat in the desk chair dressed in one of his senatorial suits, his glossy black hair swept back from his stony face.
“I’m dead.”
“I’m aware.”
“Yet you make my murderers my victims.”
“The way I see it, you did that. Did you rape them, Senator Mira?”
Leaning forward, he banged his fist on the desk. “I’m dead. Your responsibility is to me. But you’d smear my reputation, destroy my legacy? This is how you stand for the dead?”
“I’ll do my job. I’ll do my best to identify and apprehend the person or persons who killed you, even if doing that smears your rep.”
“Your best?” He sneered at her. “Your best to paint me as a monster so those who took my life are coddled and stroked.”
“My best to uncover the truth, whatever that means.”
“The truth?” He banged the desk again, but this time with the gavel he held. “I know the truth. I know what you are, what you did. You’re just like them.”
He struck the desk again, and on the explosion of sound they stood in the room in Dallas with the ugly red light flashing.
“No. No.” She backed away as panic coiled up, struck like a snake. “I’m done with this. I don’t come here anymore. It’s finished for me.”
“It’s never finished.” The senator sat, wearing his black robes, at his raised judge’s platform. “Murderer!”
At the next bang of his gavel she saw herself, the terrified girl she’d been, struggling with, pleading with Richard Troy. With her father as he raped her.
She heard her own high-pitched scream, felt the pain in her own arm as the bone snapped when he broke her arm.
Felt the horror and the hope when those small fingers closed around the little knife.
“Guilty!” the senator shouted when the desperate girl plunged the knife into flesh. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.”
Stabbing, over and over and over. The inhuman sounds growling in her throat, and the blood, all the blood washing warm over her hands.
“Blood on your hands. Guilty. Murderer. Just like them.”
“Kill the bitch.” Richard Troy stared at her with glassy eyes as blood bubbled from his lips. “Give her what she deserves.”
With the next strike of the gavel she was back at the crime scene, the noose around her neck. She dragged at the rope with her blood-smeared hands, but it only tightened, tightened as the mechanism hummed the chandelier higher.
“Now,” the senator said, “justice is served.”
“Wake up! Eve, you bloody well wake up and fucking breathe.”
Roarke’s words, his rough shakes finally got through. She sucked in air, still dragging at the dream noose around her throat.
“It’s a dream. A dream. Do you hear me? Come back now.”
“I’m all right. I’m all right.”
“You’re not, but you will be. Look at me.”
She couldn’t stop the shaking, but made herself look into his eyes. Anger, yes, some anger in there, and the kind of desperation she understood too well.
“I’m okay. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’ll piss me off.” He grabbed the throw from the foot of the bed, wrapped it around her, rubbed her back, her arms while the cat bumped his head against her hip. “You’re cold.”
Then he wrapped his arms around her and rocked. “I swear, you stopped breathing for a moment. Just stopped. You’ll have a soother.”
“I—”
“Don’t argue about it, you’re having one. I’m having a bloody soother myself.”
She said nothing when he got out of bed, but sat, shivering under the cashmere throw, stroking the cat. They’d have tried to wake her, she thought, her husband and her cat, but she’d been in too deep.
Roarke lit the fire first to add more light and warmth to the room, then moved to the AutoChef.
“You need the soother,” he said more calmly. “You haven’t had a nightmare that . . . intense in some time.”
“Soothers all around.” She fought to make her voice sound normal. “Maybe the cat needs one.”
“He’s his own soother.” Roarke brought two glasses back to the bed, handed her one, gave the loyal Galahad a rub. “He’s fine now, though I’ll say he was nearly as shaken as I. Drink that now.”
She gulped some down, sighed. “It’s chocolate.”
“I know my cop.”
That brought the tears up, had her pressing her face to his shoulder. “I couldn’t get out of it. I knew what it was, but I couldn’t get out.”
“You’re safe now.” He kissed the top of her head, dug in for tenderness. “Drink the rest, darling. Drink it up, and tell me.”
She did what he asked, and when she was finished, when he’d set the empty glasses aside, he gathered her close.
“I know it’s not true, what he said—what my subconscious went into. But—”
“There’s no but in this. You were an innocent child defending her life against a monster. These are grown women who killed with calculation.”
Yes, yes, that was the logic. That was reason. But . . . “The motives align. If I’m right, I will smear his reputation.”
“If you’re right, his reputation is a lie. It’s truth you’re after, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. If I’m right . . . you’d come down on their side of it.”
He kissed her cheek, then the other before drawing her down so she could curl into him, find the warmth.
“We have different views on some matters, but as you’re fond of telling me, you’re the one with the badge. You’ll do your job, Lieutenant, as you must. And I’ll help you as I can to find the truth. After that, it’s not in my hands or yours, is it?”
“No.”
The cat curled against the small of her back, sandwiching her in the safe. Tears stung her eyes again, so she closed them. And as the soother did its work, she drifted back to sleep.
Holding her close, Roarke lay awake, listening to her breathe.
11
Eve’s communicator buzzed, a rude, insistent sound that woke her in the dark.
Roarke said, “Bloody, buggering hell,” and called for lights on at ten percent as she crawled out of bed.
“Baxter.” She hissed it as she scanned the readout. “Block video,” she ordered. “Dallas, and this better be damned good.”
“Sorry, LT. Trueheart and I were on deck, and we caught one.”
“I didn’t figure you were tagging me at four-fricking-thirty in the damn morning to chat about Arena Ball.”
“Nope, but how about those Metros?”
“Baxter, want to do everybody’s fives for the next six months?”
“Can’t say I do. We caught one,” he repeated, “but I’m pretty damn sure he’s yours.”
“Why? Who’s the DB?”
“Jonas Bartell Wymann.”
“And what makes him mine when I don’t know who that is?”
“DB’s sixty-eight, and was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers about a decade ago, also was once chief economist of the Department of Labor. Big money guy with his own big money. He went to Yale, LT. Same class as Senator Mira.”
“Fuck. Do you have COD?”
“Flagging him for Morris, but he’s been beaten—face and genitals. Sodomized. Hanged—naked—same as the first DB. And there’s a comp-generated message around his neck.”
“‘Justice is served’?”
“Yeah.”
“Give me the address.”
“He was practically your neighbor,” Baxter told her, and gave an address only two blocks
from her house.
“I’m on the way. Save me time, tag Peabody. Scene secured?”
“You bet. We’ll hold here for you.”
She clicked off, and Roarke—already up—handed her coffee. “Thanks. Shit. I’m going to grab a shower and get there.”
“We’ll grab one. I’m going with you. I’m hardly going back to bed,” he said before she could argue. “And I knew him.”
She gulped down coffee as she headed for the shower. “How?”
“Slightly. We weren’t friendly, but I can say he was brilliant—when it came to economy issues.” Roarke didn’t bother to sigh and barely winced when she ordered jets on full at 102 degrees.
He’d asked for it, after all.
“He sure as hell knew Senator Mira. Now we have two. And if my angle is right, that’s two BFDs from Yale, probable rapists. But—” She shoved her wet hair out of her eyes. “That angle may be a dead end now, and we might just have a couple of psychopaths torturing and murdering BFDs.”
She jumped out of the shower, let her thoughts swirl as hot and fast as the air in the drying tube.
Then she put them aside. Better to go in cold, stop trying to bend new angles. See, observe, gather data and evidence.
They dressed, and as she sat to put on her boots, Roarke handed her an egg pocket on a small plate. “Eat. He isn’t going anywhere, and we’ll be there in minutes.”
To save time, she bit in, then scowled at him. “There’s more than eggs in here.”
“Is there?” With an innocent smile, Roarke sampled his own. “I believe you’re right.”
She ate it anyway, gulped more coffee. “I need things from my office.”
To save time, they took the elevator, then the steps from there. He’d already ordered her car remotely, so it sat out in the cold, dark night, heat already running.
She let him drive and did a quick run on the newest victim.
“Two marriages, two divorces, currently single. Three offspring, and five offspring from them. Lots of letters after his name. Graduated magna cum laude from Yale, did some postgrad work there, some at Columbia, did some more at Oxford. Guest lecturer at Yale, at Columbia. Wrote a couple of books on economics, lots of papers. Served as adviser for two administrations—and did that while Senator Mira was in Congress. They damn well knew each other.”