He pocketed the card. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
Mickey dropped his voice, as though his aunt wouldn’t hear him. “Hey, is she really your partner?” he asked, with a nod toward the room where Shane still sat with Denise.
“She is,” I said simply.
“I’d be tapping that if I were you,” he smirked.
I didn’t punch him, because as misguided as he was, I knew that Mickey thought he was complimenting Shane, and perhaps me, with his comment. I caught a glimpse of the set of Shelley’s mouth and knew she had overheard him.
Shelley reminded me of my own mother, with some of my sister and grandmother thrown in. Women who had taught me to value women. The time I’d spent with the Peacekeepers had shredded my faith in men, and I realized that was what I’d been rebuilding in myself since I returned from Africa.
I gave the boxer a last, lingering look. He held his head in his hands and was so tired I could almost feel it in my bones. But he wasn’t beaten, and the proud strength of his shoulders spoke of resilience and determination. He’d fight again, just as soon as he decided he was ready. It was a powerful image of a powerful man, undaunted by momentary weakness.
I directed my comment to Shelley. “If it’s for sale, I’d like to give the boxer a home.”
35
Shane
“Instinct is the equivalent of a Morse code message from our ancestors about how to survive.” – Kendra Eze
When I got back to the cottage after the long interview with Denise, Gabriel was already asleep on the twin bed with a quilt pulled carelessly over him as he lay on his stomach, one arm hanging off the side. He was too big for a twin, and the view of his shoulders was far too distracting for the work I still had to do. I briefly considered waking him up to move him to the bigger bed, but that would have opened the door to the conversation we weren’t having about the trajectory of our relationship.
And I was nothing if not an avoider of such conversations.
I considered this as I changed into a big, soft t-shirt and wrapped a throw from the chair around my shoulders. I believed people should trust their feelings, and I told that to my clients all the time. “If you believe he’s cheating, he probably is” was my simple statement that almost always turned out to be true. But by definition, the inverse must be true too – if you believe you can trust him, you can. That simple statement was going to require some deeper probing than I had the inclination for though, so I let Gabriel continue to sleep in the tiny bed, and I sat in the bigger bed making notes on my computer and deliberately avoiding the view of the sleeping man.
I finally closed the lid of my laptop an hour later. Gabriel had turned over and tugged the quilt up to cover his shoulders, but that left his feet bare. The cottage had gotten colder, and even under the big duvet, the only warm spot was exactly where my legs were. No matter how twisty my brain was about Gabriel, he was also my friend. My conscience was not going to rest while my friend slept on a too-small bed under a too-small quilt in a too-cold room.
So I got up. If I whispered his name and he didn’t wake up, I would cover his feet and go back to bed. If he did, well …
“Gabriel.” My voice was barely audible to my own ears, but I stood close enough to him that I could see the pulse beat in his throat. His eyes snapped open so fast that I jumped back.
“Oh!” I gasped. “You scared me.” I took a step back and retreated even as I spoke. “If you’re cold, you can sleep in the big bed under the duvet with me.”
I didn’t wait to see what effect my invitation had, or even if he was awake enough to register my words. In my own ears, my heartbeat sounded like a basketball being dribbled down the court in an empty gym, and I was humiliatingly certain he could hear the echo. I got back into the queen-sized bed and almost knocked over the bedside lamp in my hurry to turn it off.
The room was dark, and I dove down under the covers, deliberately closing my eyes like a kid playing if I can’t see him, he can’t see me hide-and-seek. Gradually, my heartbeat slowed to something less turbulent, and I was able to convince myself he hadn’t really been awake enough to hear my invitation and therefore it would be cruel to try to wake him up properly.
And then I heard him move, maybe sit up, maybe stand. Then the definite sound of bare feet on cold floorboards was followed by an unmistakable dip in the mattress next to me.
I was curled up on my side facing the nightstand with my back to the side of the bed that was about to be filled by a very large, shirtless and sockless and who knew what else-less man. Cold air followed him under the covers, and I shivered without thinking that it would give away the fact that I was only pretending to be asleep.
Either he didn’t notice, which I thought was unlikely, or he was going to let me keep pretending, because he didn’t speak and didn’t try to get my attention. He just curled his body up against my back and legs, wrapped his arm around my waist, and exhaled quietly into my hair. I didn’t move, he didn’t move; my heart was back to slamming, and so was his.
I didn’t hold my breath, because that would have been too obvious, and gradually I became aware of more than just … him. He was shirtless, which I already knew, but he wore some kind of soft flannel pajama pants, so between my t-shirt and his PJs, there was fabric covering every inch of where our bodies touched. I was aware of how warm he was, like he was fueled by a radioactive core, and the clothes we slept in were all that stood between me and a third-degree burn. Okay, not really, but that’s what I was distracting my brain with so I didn’t feel the hard length of him pressed against my backside. It was unmistakable evidence of his attraction to me – as if the flying kisses, and the lingering looks, and the hand at my back, and holding me steady in the shower so I could wash my hair weren’t evidence enough.
The shower. Without a doubt the most intimate experience I’d had in years.
I hadn’t even looked down to realize he was still dressed. My eyes had been locked to his until I closed them to wash my hair, and then all I could feel were his hands at my waist, keeping me upright.
I felt small in those hands – delicate, but not fragile. He supported me on my foot as though I weighed nothing and wasn’t nearly as tall as he was. Delicate was not a word or a feeling I’d ever associated with myself, and it made me feel more feminine than I’d felt since I’d grown taller than the tallest boy in my third grade class.
I didn’t think about what he saw at the bottom of my leg, or what he thought about my wide swimmer’s shoulders, or my wide woman’s hips, or my barely palm-sized breasts. I concentrated on the width of his hands spanning my ribs and the gentle strength in them as they held me.
Because if I had let myself think, I would have wondered why he didn’t kiss me. Why his mouth hadn’t trailed down my skin like the water running off my nipples and down between my legs. I would have thought he couldn’t possibly be attracted to me if he had me naked in the shower and did nothing, because it was so easy to believe there was something wrong with me. It was so simple to look at the stump of my leg and believe the disgust on someone’s face when he tells you you’re crazy to think anyone would ever want to fuck you with that visible – when he says it’s not cheating if he actually wants to be with her and only stayed with you out of pity.
I screwed my eyes shut and swallowed a sob against the memories of my ex-fiancé, Mitch. But then Gabriel’s arm tightened around my waist, and I let myself relax into his hold until the pain of my thoughts receded.
His breath deepened and slowed, and when I finally fell asleep, it was long after the ache had dimmed and the cold had been banished by the heat of him around me like an electric blanket.
36
Shane
“Sometimes the loudest things in the room are the words we don’t say.” – Gabriel Eze
Because I was a giant chicken, I ninja’d out of the room and went for coffee before Gabriel woke up. He was already dressed when I got back, and he sighed when I handed him his cup.
<
br /> “A woman who understands,” he said with a smile as he took a sip.
“You keep me so well-supplied with good coffee at the office, it would be hard not to,” I said, trying not to notice how well he fit the dark gray denim shirt he wore, and quelling the irrational disappointment that he wore anything at all.
“Do you mind if we get on the road?” I asked. “I can run down everything Denise told me while we drive. The internet here isn’t strong enough for me to do the searches I need to do.”
If he was disappointed I didn’t want to stay longer, he didn’t show it, just like I didn’t let him see that I was sorry he was dressed. “Sure. I’ll drive and you can talk.” He grabbed both our bags and slung them over one shoulder to load into the car. We left the cottage key under the mat as we’d been instructed to and were soon back on the highway headed south, talking about safe work topics as our coffees cooled.
Denise had told me that Quimby’s big client had hired ADDATA for contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. The client had only put down ten percent though, which wasn’t enough to build up the ADDATA infrastructure to handle the workload. Quimby had put up their own personal assets and mortgaged them to the hilt in order to float the bills until the client paid.
All of that we knew, or had guessed. The part that Mickey had hinted at to Gabriel, and that Denise had confirmed outright, was that in order to grant ADDATA the contract, the political action firm had required background security checks on Quimby.
I’d been a P.I. far too long to ever trust someone else with the kind of information a person needs to pass a security check. I didn’t even like answering census questions because it was just too much information to put out in the universe.
“So Karpov had enough information to get dirt on Quimby,” Gabriel said, with a snort of something that sounded like disgust.
“And when Quimby made noise about getting paid for the work they’d already done, Karpov threatened to reveal whatever he had. According to Denise, Karpov has something big on her husband, but she doesn’t know what.”
Gabriel exhaled. “We could use that to get him to back off of you. Whatever Karpov has on Quimby was enough to inspire him to get a gun license.” He let that delightful thought hang in the air for a long minute, then shot me a quick glance. “By the way, did you sort out your fee with Denise?”
“Yeah. She gave me cash.”
His eyebrows rose. “She gave you cash?”
I smirked at him. “She said she doesn’t trust banks.”
“So where should we go?” he asked. “New York? San Francisco? Mexico? How do we spend your newfound wealth?” He had an infectious grin, and I let myself wish, for just a moment, that it could ever be that easy.
“Well, this part of we is going to pay my prosthetist for some of the legs he’s designed for me on credit.”
That statement sparked a whole conversation about the various MacGyver legs Sparky had successfully created, and some of his more spectacular failures, with me as his crash test dummy. Gabriel asked very technical questions about leg construction, from the first leg I ever wore, to the innovations Sparky brought to the devices.
“One of the guys in my unit in Ethiopia had his leg shattered in a fall, but he caught dengue fever while he was in the hospital, and it was three months before he could even sit up after the leg was amputated. By the time he was well enough to walk and try a prosthetic, his muscles had atrophied too much. He was never able to walk properly. Last I heard, he’d given up completely,” Gabriel said. “Can something be designed to help him walk now?”
“Anything is possible, but it’s so much harder the longer you wait. I’m sorry for your friend.” I sat in silence for a long moment gathering my thoughts, or maybe my courage. It had been so long since I’d had a conversation like this – not even Sparky knew more than the basics. Gabriel left me to my silence, which is probably why I took a deep breath and broke it.
“There was a doctor doing a special series on amputations at the UC Davis Medical School who happened to be working with a group of students the night they brought me into the ER. He had just come back from Cambodia where he’d worked with landmine victims. He took one look at my leg and said ‘cut it off.’ He told me later that he probably could have saved the leg and the other ER doc had argued for keeping it. But, he said, it would never have been strong or pain-free, and would probably have needed five or six surgeries to repair to the point of usefulness. Better to get me up doing PT as soon as possible so I could use existing muscle tone to relearn how to walk with a prosthetic.”
The words were so simple, and yet they weighed a thousand pounds, and I felt myself on the verge of gasping with the effort of them. But then Gabriel spoke, and the constriction in my chest loosened at the sound of his voice, as if the strings on a too-tight corset had just been cut.
“I was a fit, twenty-six-year-old RMP when I was shot,” he said, and I whipped my head around to stare at him as he continued. “The bullet went in under my arm and punctured a lung. It was a fairly simple surgery, they said – out with the bullet, in with the chest tube – but it was two months before I was up and moving around again properly, and I’ve never felt so weak as I did then.”
“Who shot you?” I asked before I could censor myself.
Gabriel hesitated only a fraction of a second, and to my ears it was as though he cracked open his chest and showed me his heart. “My best friend, Jackson. He shot me, right before he killed himself.”
37
Gabriel
“Feeling empty just means you’re ready for filling.” – Miri Eze
My chest hurt with phantom pain, but the memory of the physical wound from that day was the merest twinge in comparison to the empty hole Jackson’s death had left in my life – in all our lives. It was an emptiness I’d run from as soon as I was strong enough, but nothing had ever filled it – not work with the Peacekeepers, not the Nigerian girls I’d been able to save, not even Mika, the little boy Jackson had left behind who filled my heart with such joy.
And yet this woman who sat beside me, who had so many twists and turns and hidden places of her own, somehow she’d crawled inside me and taken up residence in a corner of the cavern Jackson had left behind.
I could feel her eyes on my face, and although she didn’t touch me, her warmth reached across the space between us. It took more effort than it should have to inhale the breath with which to speak, but I forced myself to say the words.
“I know he didn’t mean to shoot me, and I’m not sure he really meant to shoot himself, but the gun was in his hand while he thought about it, and I made the mistake of trying to wrestle it from him.” I took another ragged breath and shaped the memory into words. “If I had just talked to him instead, he might have put the gun down. But when I rushed him, he reacted in self-defense, and I got a bullet for my trouble.”
I wiped my eye with the heel of my hand. “I’m fairly sure he thought he killed me, and it was too much responsibility to add to whatever it was that put the gun in his hand in the first place.” Something like laughter that sounded more like a sob tore from my chest. “He preferred to die rather than tell my sister he’d killed her twin. So instead, he left the job to me.”
I focused on the sound of the road beneath the tires, the drone of the engine, and the noise the trucks made as we passed them – anything to erase the crack of the gunshots in my memory.
“Oh God, Gabriel. He was Kendra’s Jackson? Mika’s dad?” Shane’s gasp was the air my own lungs needed, and I finally inhaled deeply, drawing strength from her presence.
“He’d loved her since we were kids, but she never gave him the time of day until Jackson and I came home on leave. They got married when she discovered she was pregnant, but I think he was terrified of the responsibilities of being a husband and father. I don’t actually know all the reasons Jackson had for putting a gun to his temple that night …” I left the sentence unfinished, and Shane allowed the words to fade
away.
The miles passed in silence, and the turbulence in me began to calm. Jackson had been my best friend, no matter how much I’d hated him afterwards.
“I’m not sure when I finally let go of the anger,” I said, as though Shane had been privy to the conversation in my head. “After Nigeria, I suspect, when I’d thoroughly beaten myself up over my prodigious failures as a savior.”
“I’m still angry,” she said quietly.
I glanced at her quickly, but her eyes were trained out the window, staring at nothing in particular, possibly not even seeing the view in front of her. I’d learned not to prompt Shane. She would speak if she wanted to. But with those three words, the door closed on my own pain, and somewhere inside the cavern Jackson’s death had left behind, Shane took up a little more space.
She inhaled deeply and let the words escape one by one. “My dad and my little brother were killed by a drunk driver when I was sixteen. They were heading up to the mountains to go backpacking. I didn’t go with them because I had a date with Mitch.” The hitch in her breath sounded like swallowed tears, but I didn’t turn to see. I would feel her eyes on me if she needed me to look at her.
Another mile passed in silence. “I stayed out after my curfew that night because my dad was the enforcer and my mom always went to sleep early, so I was still up when the police came to the door.”
I reached for her hand and held it gently. She let me keep it for a time while she spoke. “The minute they left for the mountains, I felt guilty. I should have gone with them instead of going on a stupid date. And then when I found out they were dead, I got so mad. How dare they leave me with guilt as the last thing I remember feeling about them?”
Code of Conduct (Cipher Security Book 1) Page 22
