by Linda Howard
Her eyes were sultry, her lips swollen and pouty from his kisses, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. He watched her expression tighten with desire as she moved slowly up and down on him, her eyes closing even more. “Just for that,” she murmured, “I get to be on top.”
He reached overhead and caught the headboard, his powerful biceps flexing as his fists locked around the brass bars. “No matter how I beg and plead?”
“No matter what you say,” she assured him, and gasped herself as her movements wrenched another spasm of pleasure from her nerve endings.
“Good.” Quinlan arched, almost lifting her off the bed. “Then I won’t accidentally say something that will make you quit.”
He didn’t. When she collapsed, exhausted, on his chest, they were both numb with pleasure. He thrust his hand into her tangled hair and held her almost desperately close. She inhaled the hot, musky scent of his skin, and with the slightest of motions rubbed her cheek against the curly hair on his chest. She could feel his heart thudding under her ear, and the strong rhythm was reassuring. They slept again, and woke in the afternoon with the sun going down in a blaze of red and gold, to drowsily make love again.
He got up to turn on the television sitting on her dresser, then returned to bed to hold her while they watched the news, which was, predictably, all about the blackout. Elizabeth felt a little bemused, as if a national crisis had passed without her knowing about it, even though she had been intimately embroiled in this one. Intimately, she thought, in more ways than one. Perhaps that was why she felt so out of touch with reality. She hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours concentrating on the lack of electricity, she had been concentrating on Quinlan.
The Great Blackout, as the Dallas newscasters were calling it, had disrupted electrical services all over the Sun Belt. The heat wave, peak usage and solar flares had all combined to overload and blow circuits, wiping out entire power grids. Elizabeth felt as if her own circuits had been seriously damaged by Quinlan’s high-voltage lovemaking.
He spent the night with her. He didn’t ask if he could, and she didn’t tell him that he couldn’t. She knew that she was only postponing the inevitable, but she wanted this time with him. Telling him about Eric hadn’t changed her mind, any more than knowing about Eric had changed Quinlan’s basic character.
When morning came, they both knew that the time-out had ended. Reality couldn’t be held at bay any longer.
“So what happens now?” he asked quietly.
She looked out the window as she sipped her coffee. It was Saturday; neither of them had to work, though Quinlan had already talked to a couple of his staffers, placing the calls almost as soon as he’d gotten out of bed. She knew that all she had to say was one word, “Stay,” and they would spend the weekend in bed, too. It would be wonderful, but come Monday, it would make it just that much more difficult to handle.
“I don’t see that the situation has changed,” she finally said.
“Damn it, Elizabeth!” He got up, his big body coiled with tension. “Can you honestly say that I’m anything like Landers?”
“You’re very dominating,” she pointed out.
“You love me.”
“At the time, I thought I loved him, too. What if I’m wrong again?” Her eyes were huge and stark as she stared at him. “There’s no way you can know how bad it was without having lived through it yourself. I would rather die than go through anything like that again. I don’t know how I can afford to take the chance on you. I still don’t know you, not the way you know me. You’re so secretive that I can’t tell who you really are. How can I trust you when I don’t know you?”
“And if you did?” he asked in a harsh tone. “If you knew all there is to know about me?”
“I don’t know,” she said; then they looked at each other and broke into snickering laughter. “There’s a lot of knowing and not knowing in a few short sentences.”
“At least we know what we mean,” he said, and she groaned; then they started laughing again. When he sobered, he reached out and slid his hand underneath her heavy curtain of hair, clasping the back of her neck. “Let me give something a try,” he urged. “Let me have another shot at changing your mind.”
“Does this mean that if it doesn’t work, you’ll stop trying?” she asked wryly, and had to laugh at the expression on his face. “Oh, Tom, you don’t even have a clue about how to give up, do you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you,” he said, smiling back just as wryly. “But at least I’ve made some progress.
You’ve started calling me Tom again.”He dressed and roughly kissed her as he started out the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. It may not be today. But there’s something I want to show you before you make a final decision.”
Elizabeth leaned against the door after she had closed it behind him. Final decision? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. To her, the decision had been final for the past six months. So why did she feel that, unless she gave him the answer he wanted, she would still be explaining her reasons to him five years from now?
CHAPTER NINE
The doorbell rang just before five on Sunday morning. Elizabeth stumbled groggily out of bed, staring at the clock in bewilderment. She had finally set the thing, but surely she had gotten it wrong. Who would be leaning on her doorbell at 4:54 in the morning?
“Quinlan,” she muttered, moving unsteadily down the hall.
She looked through the peephole to make certain, though she really hadn’t doubted it. Yawning, she released the chain and locks and opened the door. “Couldn’t it have waited another few hours?” she asked grouchily, heading toward the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. If she had to deal with him at this hour, she needed to be more alert than she was right now.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t slept, and I want to get this over with.”
She hadn’t slept all that much herself; after he’d left the morning before, she had wandered around the apartment, feeling restless and unable to settle on anything to do. It had taken her a while to identify it, but at last she had realized that she was lonely. He had been with her for thirty-six hours straight, holding her while they slept, making love, talking, arguing, laughing. The blackout had forced them into a hothouse intimacy, leading her to explore old nightmares and maybe even come to terms with them.
The bed had seemed too big, too cold, too empty. For the first time she began to question whether or not she had been right in breaking off with him. Quinlan definitely was not Eric Landers. Physically, she felt infinitely safe and cherished with him; on that level, at least, she didn’t think he would ever hurt her.
It was the other facet of his personality that worried her the most, his secrecy and insistence on being in control. She had some sympathy with the control thing; after all, she was a bit fanatic on the subject herself. The problem was that she had had to fight so hard to get herself back, how could she risk her identity again? Quinlan was as relentless as the tides; lesser personalities crumbled before him. She didn’t know anything about huge chunks of his life, what had made him the man he was. What if he were hiding something from her that she absolutely couldn’t live with? What if there was a darkness to his soul that he could keep under control until it was too late for her to protect herself?
She was under no illusions about marriage. Even in this day and age, it gave a man a certain autonomy over his wife. People weren’t inclined to get involved in domestic “disputes,” even when the dispute involved a man beating the hell out of his smaller, weaker wife. Some police departments were starting to view it more seriously, but they were so inundated with street crime, drug and highway carnage that, objectively, she could see how a woman’s swollen face or broken arm didn’t seem as critical when weighed in that balance.
And marriage was what Quinlan wanted. If she resumed a relationship with him, he might not mention it for a while—she gave him a week, at the outside—but he would be as relen
tless in his pursuit of that goal as he was in everything else. She loved him so much that she knew he would eventually wear her down, which was why she had to make a final decision now. And she could do it now—if the answer was no. She still had enough strength to walk away from him, in her own best interests. If she waited, every day would weaken that resolve a little more.
He had been silent while she moved around the kitchen, preparing the coffeemaker and turning it on. Hisses and gurgles filled the air as the water heated; then came the soft tinkle of water into the pot and the delicious aroma of fresh coffee filled the room.
“Let’s sit down,” he said, and placed his briefcase on the table. It was the first time she had noticed it.
She shook her head. “If this requires thinking, at least wait until I’ve had a cup of coffee.”
His mouth quirked. “I don’t know. Somehow I think I’d stand a better chance if your brain stayed in neutral and you just went with your instincts.”
“Hormones, you mean.”
“I have nothing against those, either.” He rubbed his beard and sighed wearily. “But I guess I could use a cup of coffee, too.”
He had taken the time to change clothes, she saw; he was wearing jeans that looked to be at least ten years old, and a soft, white, cotton shirt. But his eyes were circled with dark rings and were bloodshot from lack of sleep, and he obviously hadn’t shaved since the morning before the blackout. The blackness of his heavy beard made him look like a ruffian; actually, he looked exactly like the type of people he hired.
When the coffee stopped dripping, she filled two mugs and slid one in front of him as she took a seat at the table. Cautiously sipping the hot brew, she wondered how long it would take to hit the bloodstream.
He opened the briefcase and took out two files, one very thin and the other over an inch thick. He slid the thin one toward her. “Okay, read this one first.”
She opened it and lifted her eyebrows when she saw that it was basically the same type of file that he’d had on her, though this one was on himself. Only it seemed to be rather sketchy. Bare bones was more like it, and even then, part of the skeleton was missing. It gave his name, birthdate, birthplace, social security number, physical description, education and present employment, as well as the sketchy facts of his brief marriage, so many years ago. Other than that, he seemed not to have existed between the years of his divorce and when he had started his security business.
“Were you in cold storage for about fifteen years?” she finally asked, shoving the file back toward him. “I appreciate the gesture, but if this was supposed to tell me about you, it lacks a little something.”
He eyed her warily, then grinned. “Not many people can manage to be sarcastic at five o’clock in the morning.”
“At five o’clock, that’s about all I can manage.”
“I’ll remember that,” he murmured, and slid the second file, the thick one, toward her. “This is the information you wouldn’t have gotten if you investigated me.”
Her interest level immediately soared, and she flipped the manila folder open. The documents before her weren’t originals, but were a mixture of photostats and faxes. She looked at the top of one and then gave him a startled look. “Government, huh?”
“I had to get a buddy to pull up my file and send it to me. Nothing in there is going to reveal state secrets, but the information is protected, for my sake. I could have hacked into the computer, but I’d just as soon not face a jail term, so it took some time to get it all put together.”
“Just exactly what did you do?” she asked, not at all certain that she wanted to know. After being so frustrated by his lack of openness, now that his life lay open before her, she wasn’t all that eager to know the details. If he had been shot at, if he had been in danger in any way…that could give her a different set of nightmares.
“No Hollywood stuff,” he assured her, grinning.
“I’m disappointed. You mean you weren’t a secret agent?” Relieved was more like it.
“That’s a Hollywood term. In the business, it’s called a field operative. And no, that isn’t what I did. I gathered information, set up surveillance and security systems, worked with antiterrorist squads. It wasn’t the kind of job that you talk over with your buddies in the bar after work.”
“I can understand that. You got in the habit of not talking about yourself or what you did.”
“It was more than just a habit, it could have meant people’s lives. I still don’t talk about it, because I still know people in the business. Information is the greatest asset a government can have, and the most dangerous.”
She tapped the file. “So why are you showing me this?”
“Because I trust you,” he said simply; then another grin spread across his face. “And because I didn’t think you’d believe me if I just said, ‘I can’t talk about myself, government stuff, very hush-hush.’ You would have laughed in my face. It’s the kind of crap you hear in singles bars, hot-shot studs trying to impress the airheads. You aren’t an airhead.”
After flipping a few pages and scanning them, she said, “You’re right. I wouldn’t have believed this. Most people don’t do this type of work.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I went to Cal Tech, and I was very good at what I did.”
“Did?” she asked incredulously. “It’s what you still do. It’s just that now you do it for yourself instead of the government.” An idea struck her. “The people you hire. Are they—?”
“Some of them,” he admitted.
“Like the biker?”
He laughed. “Like the biker. Hell, do you think I’d hire anyone who looked like that if I didn’t personally know him? He really was an operative, one mean son of a bitch.”
“They come to you for jobs when they retire?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m not a halfway house for burned-out government employees. I keep track of people, contact them to see if they’re interested in working for me. Most of them are very normal, and it’s just a matter of moving from one computer job to another.”
She closed the file and pushed it away from her. Quinlan eyed her with alarm. “Aren’t you going to read it?”
“No. I don’t need to know every detail of everything you’ve done. A brief overview is enough.”
He drew a deep breath and sat back. “Okay. That’s it, then. I’ve done all I can. I can’t convince you, prove it to you in any way, that I’ll never treat you the way Landers did. I know I won’t, but you’re the one who has to believe it. Elizabeth, sweetheart, will you marry me?”
She couldn’t help it. She knew it wasn’t the way a woman was supposed to respond to a marriage proposal, but the relentlessness of it was so typical of Tom Quinlan that she couldn’t stop the sharp crack of laughter from exploding into sound. She would probably hear that question every day until she either gave him the answer he wanted or went mad under the pressure. Instead of making her feel pressured, as it would have before, there was a certain amount of comfort in knowing she could depend on him to that extent. Seeing that file had meant more to her than he could know. It wasn’t just that it filled in the gaps of his life, but that he trusted her to know about him.
She managed to regain her composure and stared seriously at him. Somehow, what had happened during the blackout had lessened the grip that Eric Landers had still had on her, even after so many years. During the long hours of that hot night she had been forced to truly look at what had happened, to deal with it, and for the first time she’d realized that Eric had still held her captive. Because of him, she had been afraid to truly let herself live. She was still afraid, but all of a sudden she was more afraid of losing what she had. If it were possible to lose Quinlan, she thought, looking at him with wry fondness. But, yes, she could lose him, if she didn’t start appreciating the value of what he was offering her. It was sink or swim time.
He had begun to fidget under her silent regard. She inhaled deeply. “Marriage, huh? No l
iving together, seeing how it works?”
“Nope. Marriage. The love and honor vows. Until death.”
She scowled a little at him. He was as yielding as rock when he made up his mind about something. “Yours could come sooner than you think,” she muttered.
“That’s okay, if you’re the one who does me in. I have an idea of the method you’d use,” he replied, and a look of startlingly intense carnal hunger crossed his face. He shivered a little, then gathered himself and raised his right hand. “I swear I’ll be an absolute pussycat of a husband. A woman like you needs room.”
She had taken a sip of coffee, and at his words she swallowed wrong, choking on the liquid. She coughed and wheezed, then stared at him incredulously. “Then why haven’t you been giving me any?” she yelled.
“Because I was afraid to give you enough room to push me away,” he said. He gave her a little half smile that acknowledged his own vulnerability and held out his hand to her. “You scare me, too, babe. I’m scared to death you’ll decide you can get along without me.”
She crossed her arms and glared at him, refusing to take his outstretched hand. “If you think you’ll get a little slave, you’ll be disappointed. I won’t pick up after you, I don’t like cooking and I won’t tolerate dirty clothes strewn all over the place.”
A grin began to spread across his face as she talked, a look of almost blinding elation, but he only said mildly, “I’m fairly neat, for a man.”
“Not good enough. I heard that qualification.”
He sighed. “All right. We’ll write it into our wedding vows. I’ll keep my clothes picked up, wash the whiskers out of the sink and put the lid back down on the toilet. I’ll get up with the kids—”
“Kids?” she asked delicately.
He lifted his brows at her. She stifled a smile. God, dealing with him was exhilarating! “Okay,” she said, relenting. “Kids. But not more than two.”
“Two sounds about right. Deal?”
She pretended to consider, then said, “Deal,” and they solemnly shook hands.
