by Terese Ramin
"No?" Cameron turned, throwing back his head to stare at her. "You did. Doesn’t it occur to you that I’m about to fall apart and that I don’t want to do it in front of someone else, especially not you? Or that I may not know how to?"
"I fell apart in front of people," Acasia said quietly. "It was just that they were people who didn’t matter to me the way you did, who didn’t see me the way you saw me, who didn’t expect anything from me the way you did. Expectation’s a heavy burden. I mean, this is me, Acasia Jones, tough enough to take care of myself, strong enough to handle anything, right? Well, I wasn’t. I wasn’t strong enough to face myself with my… crimes. And facing you would have taken more courage than I had. So I didn’t. It was easy. I just never looked forward."
She paused, and Cameron waved the liquor bottle in the air and intoned savagely, "Little Mary Martyr, doing what she oughter, going like a lamb, down to bloody slaughter."
The rhyme was old, composed to jolt one or the other of them out of a bout of self–pity. The game had two rules: the first line remained constant, and the others had to rhyme with it. But that had been when they were younger, when anger had been quick to flare and quicker to dissipate. Now anger flared with more deliberation, and took longer to die. Cameron took a swig from his bottle and began again.
"Little Mary Martyr—"
"Stop it." Acasia crossed the grass, grabbed the bottle and flung it away. It landed with a dull thud in the soft earth of a flower bed. "Just stop it. I chose to come here, but you asked me to stay. What did you need, a spare punching bag in case beating yourself up turned out not to be enough fun?"
"If all I’d wanted was a spare bag to punch, I would have chosen one with less tendency to hit back," Cameron snapped. He was weaving a bit on his feet, but his language was clear, if liquor–soaked. "Everything isn’t always about you, Casie. This time it’s about me and what I’ve done, nothing else."
"Fine," Acasia said. "It’s about you. So what are you gonna do about you?"
By way of an answer, he blinked.
"That’s what I thought," she said, and turned her back on him.
Over the top of the uneven line of trees edging the mountain, light gathered rapidly. Nearby, mourning doves welcomed the day with their triple–toned coos. In the complex of buildings that made up the on–site staff’s living quarters, occasional lights flicked on, burning yellow into the morning.
Between Cameron and Acasia the silence took on weight, grew heavy. The three bodyguards who’d managed to stay discreetly with them just out of hearing, stretched and changed positions. Sun nudged the mountaintops. Acasia moved.
"Well, this has certainly accomplished a lot," she said, sarcasm mixing with self–disgust at her failure to fix things again. It didn’t help that she wasn’t sure what there was to fix anymore, she only knew that she’d responded badly to the situation. Cameron had needed an empathetic ear, not a knock–down drag–out fight. She glanced at him, half waiting for him to say something, because this kind of silence wasn’t like him.
"Don’t shut me out," she said softly. "Don’t run away from me the way I did from you. Don’t act like me. Please."
When Cameron continued to stare fixedly into the distance, she suddenly found the need to get away from him as urgent as the need to follow him had been in the first place. She turned on her heel and left the garden.
Cameron watched her leave, willing himself to stop her, to call out, but nothing came. He understood Acasia better now than ever, it was himself he couldn’t fathom. He wanted Acasia with him, but he couldn’t let himself get near her. She threatened the bargain he’d made with himself to wallow in guilt until he felt sure he’d achieved some measure of balance between his continued life and Byrd’s death. Unfortunately, nowhere was he promised there would ever be a balance.
His eyes burned. He blinked, but no tears formed to soothe them. His head hurt from too much liquor and too little sleep, and he realized suddenly that he couldn’t remember why he was standing here. He needed…
He needed to pull up his socks and get on with life.
He went in through the library and headed for Rhiannon’s great front hall, following his nose down the corridor that smelled of fresh coffee and led to the kitchen. Acasia was standing in front of the toaster, either truly unaware of him or deliberately waiting for him to set the pace and make the first move. Cameron didn’t blame her. He wasn’t entirely sure how to approach this one himself. With a deep breath, he stepped over to the counter and proceeded with caution.
"Casie?"
"Hmm?"
"I’m sorry."
"For what?" she asked, and handed him a plate of bagels and cream cheese.
He took the plate and set it on the kitchen table. "For behaving like—"
"A human being who’s been hit by a blizzard of emotional excess? Trust me, for that you don’t need to apologize. For the way I preached and pushed and poked and assumed—well, uh…" She grimaced. "For that it’s you who deserves an apology."
"Is that what this is?" Cameron watched the muscle in Acasia’s jaw twitch and nodded to himself. "Yeah, from you it would be." His palms itched again. He looked down at them and rubbed the tips of his thumbs over the ends of his fingers, willing the sensation to go away.
Into the silence Acasia tossed a trivet on the table and plunked the coffeepot on top of it. She had to reach past him for the mugs, and he felt how careful she was not to touch him, not to aggravate whichever wound pained him most this morning.
For the first time it didn’t occur to him that it was probably her own wounds she didn’t want touched.
She set the mugs on the table and filled them with coffee, then returned the pot to its trivet and stood, momentarily helpless. "The last time I knew you, you didn’t drink coffee yet. I don’t even know if you take it with sugar or milk or black. God, that seems like a stupid thing not to know."
"I’m a buckaroo, just like you," Cameron said, and Acasia looked at him. He grinned faintly. "You used to sit in the school cafeteria in the morning and look at these Styrofoam cups full of mud. Then you’d take a sip, cringe, grab for the sugar, push it away and say, ‘Aw, hell, if I’m gonna drink this stuff, I might as well be a buckaroo.’ I never could figure out why, if it was so bad, you wanted to drink it in the first place." He slid one of the mugs across the table and sat down with a laugh. "I had my first cup the morning you left. Making love with you… I felt different, so I figured I should be different… a man… something. And men drank coffee. And apparently liked it. It tasted like liquid cigarette ashes, but it brought me closer to you, so I learned."
"That was dumb," Acasia said softly.
Cameron nodded. "I was in love. God forbid I should do what was smart." He looked at Acasia. "Like forget you."
She swallowed. "I never meant to hurt you, Cam." Then or now, she added silently.
He laughed shortly. "I know. That’s the hell of it." He selected a bagel, inspected it, put it back. "You know, I’ve never been in the wrong place at the wrong time before—not even in the navy. I wanted something overseas, but my father pulled strings behind my back and I ended up doing most of my two years in D.C. College was a snap. I had my doctorate from M.I.T. before I was twenty–three—hell, it was almost easier for me than high school. By the time everyone else was getting getting their caps and gowns, I had my own design lab and had made my first twenty million. All I’ve ever had to do to get what I want is define my goals, collect my data and go. The only time there’s ever been a question mark in my life is when you’ve been there."
"What do you want from me, Cam? I tried to tell you—to show you—what I am, but you wouldn’t stop coming after me. You made me believe in something I didn’t know existed, made me think that tomorrow was a possibility. Now…"
Cameron picked up the sentence where Acasia had left off. "Now I don’t think I can find tomorrow without a road map."
They stared at one another like strangers across a bargaining table, or friends who�
��d come to understand too much about one another in too short a time.
"So where do you want to go from here?" she asked.
"Into hibernation for about a year," he said.
"Would that help?"
"Look, Casie, I’m only human. I can take only so much chaos in my life. And like the old man said—it couldn’t hurt."
"Right," Acasia agreed sarcastically, and got up to rinse her dishes in the sink.
Cameron looked at the wall, avoiding the sight of her stiffened back. He knew what he had to do: he had to adjust to Byrd’s death. Not accept, not forget, not withdraw, just adjust. Very simple. He was not invincible; he was not immune. And reality had a bad habit of sinking in when you least expected—and could least afford—it. Acasia knew that; Acasia had always known.
He got up and carried his plate to the counter. "Tell me again how you handle it—besides not too well."
She shrugged. "I lie to myself a lot. Or I tell myself it was a long time ago, that it wasn’t my fault, that one brief incident out of your life shouldn’t decide how you spend forever."
"How often do you believe yourself?"
"Only when I have to. Although, actually—" she eyed him with a drop of calculation "—I was doing quite well the last few years until your name came up around the office. There are a lot of little holes in our relationship. Had you noticed?"
"Mmm. And we seem to keep adding new ones rather than patching up the old."
They regarded one another over the running water. There were no more dishes to rinse. Acasia turned the water off and leaned against the counter. "About six years ago I was asked to deliver some papers to a man in El Salvador," she said suddenly, plunging into a hole without preamble. "It was a blind faith drop—no questions. I didn’t know what I was carrying—or why—and, at that time, I didn’t much care. I met Dom after I turned over the papers. He was freelancing for French Intelligence, dogging the same guy I’d made the delivery to. Turned out the guy was an arms and information conduit, a pipeline between the CIA and Central American rebels. The French wanted him for running guns and munitions to some Basque terrorists." She shrugged. "What do you do in a spot like that? I had Paolo check Dom out for me, then I stepped back and let events take their course. The French got their man. Didn’t make me real popular with the State Department for a while, but I was a civilian, what could they do? I’d done what they asked, and besides, they needed my talents on occasion, so they just flagged my file with question marks and kept on using me."
"You don’t have to do this," Cameron whispered.
Acasia smiled slightly. "I’m the one who brought up holes that need filling. Anyway… Central America’s a small place. I was doing a lot of work down there, and Dom and I kept running into one another. I don’t know that I ever really trusted him—or he me—but sometimes you don’t have a lot of options. He helped me out of a couple of jams for Futures and Securities, I helped him out a couple of times, he started bringing things, equipment, around to the clinic. He was…" She hesitated. "Familiar. We developed a… dangerous fascination for one another."
"You were lovers."
"We slept together, yes." She looked at her hands. "He cared about me… as much as he could, and I… there hadn’t been anybody in a very long time. We knew one another intimately, but not well. He used to be a man of… honor? I don’t know if that’s the word or not. He wasn’t always a mercenary. I’m not sure how that happened. Maybe he just saw one death, one piece of stupidity, too many. Maybe he developed some sort of conscience." She shrugged. "Maybe he got tired of never really having full control over a situation. Or maybe he got one offer of power and money too many and couldn’t hold out any longer."
Another shrug. "What I do know is that I hadn’t seen him for about four months, and then I took some supplies in to Fred, and Dom had become Sanchez’s right–hand man. There were rumors that he found out for certain that the Zaragozan National Liberation Front had killed his wife or his brother or someone a few months before I met him, and that the thirst for revenge sent him to Sanchez. It’s possible, but I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that four years ago Fred asked me to help a lay missionary get some of the ZNLF’s wives and children out of Zaragoza. Dom met us with a group of his well–armed cronies, and five kids, the missionary and a mother were killed."
She looked away, her jaw working against the memory. "Six months later I helped set him up for the ZNLF. I thought he was dead." She gazed at Cameron without apology. "I prayed that he was. And since he’s not, if he sent someone out to kill you, you could say I’m responsible for that, too."
He studied her, feeling chilled. He remembered this side of her, the evasiveness followed by shocking doses of honesty—the cold edge of her anger, the way she’d barraged him with unemotional truths about herself, as though testing his stamina, almost begging him to prove her trust in him wrong. He remembered how he’d felt sometimes, how he felt now: as if he wanted to walk into the sunset and never come back. As if he wanted to kill to preserve the possibility of life. As if nothing would ever be carved in stone for him again.
He straightened, regarding Acasia thoughtfully. "The day you played trapeze artist on the railing of the Fifth Street Bridge and fell off, I promised myself I’d kill you if you survived."
"Your point?"
"Trying to carry on a relationship with you is like trying to walk through a mine field by following somebody else’s footprints and all of a sudden finding they stop in the middle of the field. Where do you go from there?"
Acasia eyed him squarely. "Okay, here it is, straight on. I’m afraid for you. You wanted to know about me and Dom, and now you do. He scares me, Cam. He’s dangerous. Knowing you want to go after him to avenge Byrd scares the hell out of me. The fact that I’m after him, too, doesn’t make me very comfortable, either. And it leaves us in limbo. We can’t go forward, and we can’t go back. We want to be together, but we can’t be, not until we tie up some loose ends that may never be tied. We feel… something… for each other, but we can’t be sure of each other. We’re dangerous to one another, and we may always be. And, most of all, we don’t want to compromise ourselves by pretending there’s a tomorrow when there may not be. So where are we?"
Cameron rubbed a thumb across her cheek. She was so beautiful, so determined. So devastating. "I don’t know. Not where we were yesterday. With any luck, not where we’ll be tomorrow."
"Oh, that’s good," she said dryly. "What is that, some kind of threat? Or a philosophy, like the difference between a glass being half–empty or half–full?" She eased closer to him.
"You choose."
"Uh–uh, not me. You want to look at tomorrow, you find someone who’s not a coward."
Cameron moved closer to her. "I accept."
"Accept what?"
"Your terms."
"Huh?"
"Finding someone else if I want to look at the future. I can barely handle today myself." He grazed her arm with his knuckles, guiding her to stand between his knees.
She twisted her fingers into his shirt. "You’ve always been able to handle today, tomorrow, next week and ten years from now. You’ve always had goals, plans." She looked up at him pensively and draped her arms loosely over his hips. "That’s always been the basic difference between us."
Cameron cupped her shoulders, then slid his hands up her neck. She tipped her face up to him, and he rested his forehead on hers. "Maybe last week."
"Now, too." His breath teased her lips. "Cam, please. Let’s not start something we’ll both wind up sorry for."
He left the imprint of his lips on her mouth. "I won’t be sorry, Casie. The ground rules are the same as they’ve always been with you: no regrets."
"Cam…"
"You said it at Fred’s, Casie. Take what we have. I want what we’ve got. Even if it’s only a day or two, I want it."
"I don’t know if I can handle that anymore."
His tongue traced the line of h
er jaw, tickled her earlobe.
"Cam, don’t do that. You know it makes me crazy."
"There’s a reason."
"But we have to talk…"
His hands traveled down her back, pressed her to him. She sighed when his hands slipped between them, to open the buttons of her blouse.
"Casie?"
Warmth came in waves. "Hmm?"
He nuzzled her mouth open and kissed her thoroughly, deeply, with passion. "Shut up and let me love you."
Acasia’s eyes drifted closed. Yes, she thought. Just for a little while. Yes, please.
Chapter 14
THE TREMORS STARTED in the center of her and washed outward, then reversed, whirlpooling inward, drowning her in sensation. Her fingers twisted in the silky sheets of Cameron’s bed, tearing them from the mattress.
"Casie, look at me."
Acasia opened her eyes to see him, gasping when he plunged and stiffened, threw back his head on a guttural groan, and emptied himself into her.
I love you, she thought, but all she said was, "I’m hungry."
Cameron chuckled. "A woman of many appetites, are we?"
"I may be, but you’re not, fortunately."
Cameron’s chuckle became a full–blown laugh. "I’ll second that. Okay, let’s find you some food."
"I’d be forever grateful." She rolled her hips upward and tightened around him, and Cameron nuzzled her mouth.
"I’ll take you up on that promise later." He rolled off her and went to retrieve a pair of gym shorts from his dresser, sliding open two of the side–by–side drawers, emptying them of sweaters, socks and underwear. "You can have these until we can arrange for a chest for you."
Warily, Acasia crawled down the bed until she was beside him. "I didn’t bring that much with me, so don’t go to any trouble."
"It’s no trouble. Trust me."
Lightly Acasia dusted a finger through the items on Cameron’s dresser top, her gaze shifting from one drawer to the other. "I do, but—"
"But sharing my dresser is a bigger step than sharing my bed, right? I’m serious, Casie. You’ve had a problem all week with me trying to give you some space in my life. It’s as if you think that if things go sour I might leave fingerprints in your life—and if things don’t go sour, God only knows what I might expect from you in return."
