Troubleshooters 09 Hot Target

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Well, okay,” Jules said.

  Robin didn’t comprehend. “Okay?”

  “I’m ready when you are.”

  Robin laughed. Then stopped. Swallowed. “Really? I don’t know. . . .”

  “This is why you came here, right? And you’re always saying I should play Jack. So . . . I’m Jack. What’s my line?” Jules asked. He knew he was playing with fire, but he so didn’t give a shit. “What’s the dialogue right before the kiss?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “Well, because it’s Jack’s line, not Hal’s. Hold on.” Robin dug in his backpack. He’d actually brought a dog-eared copy of the script and flipped to a heavily marked-up page. “The scene takes place in Jack’s room. Hal’s there. He’s brought a coupla bottles with him, and they’re drinking and talking. What if–ing. You know. What would you be doing right now if you were back home? What would you choose if you were given three wishes? And that’s when Jack fesses up. He doesn’t want to go home. He wants to stay there, in Paris, with me—Hal—forever.

  “I’m too drunk to run away,” Robin continued, “but not drunk enough to pretend I don’t understand. And I say . . .” He read from the script, “ ‘What’s it like? Not being afraid someone will find out? Not being afraid to admit it, even to yourself?’ And you say . . .”

  He pointed to the script, and Jules read the line. “ ‘I guess I was more afraid of dying without ever having lived. I am who I am. There’s a peace that comes with acknowledging that.’ ”

  “And I get really quiet and say,” Robin said, “ ‘If I knew—for sure—that I was going to die, I’d spend my last days locked in here with you.’ And I laugh, but it’s not because anything’s particularly funny. In fact, it’s so fucking pathetically sad—what I’m thinking, what I’m figuring on doing. See, it’s right after this scene that I—that Hal goes and volunteers for that suicide mission into Germany. But right now he tells Jack, ‘I’d gladly die for that—for a chance to really live, even just for a day or two.’ And that’s when he does it.” He cleared his throat.

  Jules nodded. And waited.

  Robin cleared his throat again. “Okay.” He looked at the script again for a moment, then put it down. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out in a rush. When he opened his eyes, it was wild. He was still Robin, but there was a calmness to him that Jules recognized as belonging to someone else. To Hal.

  “I’d gladly die for that,” Robin said. It was Hal’s line, in Hal’s voice, with its soft southern accent. “For a chance to really live, even just for a day or two . . .”

  There was such emotion in his eyes, such love. It took Jules’ breath away.

  Or so he thought.

  Until Robin leaned down and kissed him.

  It was the sweetest, most gentle kiss he’d ever shared, and not only did it really take his breath away, but it also stopped time.

  Then Robin pulled back, just a little, just enough to meet Jules’ eyes, to look down at Jules’ face, his mouth, before he lowered his head to kiss him again.

  All hesitation was gone, then, as Robin licked his way into Jules’ mouth, as Jules melted into his arms. Melted and then, God, melted was so not the right word for it. He had his arms around Robin, too, wanting to get close, closer. He was kissing him back, harder now, deeper, Jesus . . . He could taste Robin’s hunger and longing and more, God, he wanted more, he wanted . . .

  This. He wanted this. Please, God, he wanted this man, he wanted this to be real, not some game of pretend he was playing with another goddamn fucking actor.

  Jules pulled back. He broke the kiss, wrenching himself out of Robin’s arms.

  “Sorry,” Robin said. “Sorry! Shit! Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . Fuck, that was way too much. . . . That was my fault.”

  “No,” Jules said. “No, it wasn’t. Too much I mean. It was just a little . . . too much. Yeah, I guess it was. Considering . . .”

  “I get lost in the part, and—”

  “Yeah,” Jules said. “I was kind of picking that up. I think you probably shouldn’t rehearse this scene with Adam, because he won’t stop when he should, um, stop.”

  “Right,” Robin said. “Yes, I’ll definitely make sure . . .”

  “Other people are around,” Jules suggested.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Good.” Robin’s hand was shaking as he reached up to push his hair back from his face.

  Jules put his own hands in his pockets so he didn’t act on his urge to reach for him. “I don’t know if this is going to make it better or worse, but . . . That was amazing. It was absolutely, unbelievably, fucking amazing.”

  God, he could tell from Robin’s face that his words made it worse.

  The hotel phone rang—his wake-up call. Perfect timing.

  Robin practically jumped out of his skin at the shrill sound.

  Jules picked up the receiver and dropped it back into the telephone’s cradle.

  “I’m having dinner in the restaurant downstairs,” he said, trying to be nonchalant, trying to ignore the fact that Robin was inching toward the door, ready to run away as hard and as fast as he possibly could. “If you don’t have plans, I’d love it if you could—”

  “That sounds great,” Robin said, surprising the hell out of him. “Thank you, I’d appreciate the chance to, you know, do more research.”

  Research.

  Jesus.

  “Well, okay,” Jules said. “Let me grab my tie.” He also needed to check his face for beard burn in the bathroom mirror, put a little lotion on if he needed it.

  Yeah, he needed it.

  Robin did, too.

  Jules brought his moisturizer with him out of the bathroom, squirted some into Robin’s hand. “Chin,” he said.

  Robin looked into the mirror on the closet door. “Oh, fuck,” he said, looking more closely. “God, I never thought of that. Thanks.” He let out a laugh, and it was just on the verge of hysterical. “See, I’m learning as I go. This is valuable information.”

  Right.

  Valuable information.

  No doubt about it, as far as “I’m not really gay” excuses went, now Jules had heard them all.

  “You know that I take this very seriously, sir,” Cosmo told Tommy Paoletti as they stood on the beach. “And the opportunity to make this kind of money is . . . I appreciate it very much.”

  “I know,” Tom told him.

  “I’m just not . . . comfortable,” Cosmo said, “being on the payroll for this particular job.”

  “There are lots of other—” Tom started.

  “I’m not looking for reassignment,” Cosmo told him. “I intend to, um, stay as close to Jane—Mercedes—as possible until we catch this asshole. And, uh, afterward, too. . . .”

  Tom laughed as he looked out at the sunset. “Okay. I’m finally getting the picture. It took me a while, but . . . Okay. Holy shit, but okay.”

  “I need to apologize,” Cosmo said. “For behaving in a less than professional—”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I do,” Cosmo insisted. “The client should be off limits, and I failed to . . . I have no excuse. But Jesus God, I’m smitten, sir.”

  Tom carefully kept his eyes on the horizon as he nodded. “I can see that.” He was silent for a few moments. “You know, Cos, when Kelly told me she was pregnant—it was unplanned—I thought I’d reached a point in life where nothing could surprise me anymore. The impossible could happen—it had happened too many times—so just throw any and all expectations and assumptions out the window and enjoy the ride.” He turned to face Cosmo and held out his hand. “This is a surprise, but it’s like the one Kelly gave me—one of the nicer ones. I wish you the best, Chief. I wish you’d stay as part of the team, though. I don’t have any problem with what you and the client do on your time as long as you’re discreet.”

  But Cosmo shook his head as he shook Tom’s hand. “I don’t want there to be any misu
nderstandings between Jane and me. She’s . . . amazing. I want to make sure she knows that I’m serious.”

  Tom laughed at that. “Because you’re so frivolous the rest of the time?”

  Cosmo smiled. “She doesn’t know me that well yet. I just . . . have to do it this way. I’m sorry, Tommy.”

  Tom slapped him on the back. “You’re forgiven.”

  “Thank you,” Cosmo said. “Now. With that said, I’d like to be kept in your information loop. Because I am going to find this motherfucker before he hurts Jane.”

  Robin was freaked. Out.

  He sat in the hotel restaurant, across the table from Jules, pretending that he wasn’t on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t even read the menu. He just sat there, holding on to it, while Jules asked the waitress about the seafood special.

  He held the menu until his drink came, and then, after ordering somewhat randomly—a salad, a steak—he held on to his drink. “I’m going to need another pretty soon,” he told the waitress.

  “Please don’t be offended,” Jules said after she left to place their orders. “I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t care about you, but you may want to consider the possibility that you have a problem with alcohol.”

  “Yeah, but no,” Robin said. “See, Hal drank a lot, so . . .”

  Jules gazed across the table at him. “That’s why you drink? Because Hal drank?”

  Robin focused on his glass, the ice, the whiskey. It was too unnerving to gaze back into Jules’ eyes. It was even more unnerving to find himself staring at Jules’ mouth, remembering what it had been like to . . . “Yeah.”

  Jules laughed. “That’s such a load of shit, and you know it.”

  “You said yourself that you’re not an actor,” Robin pointed out. “You have no idea what it takes to get into character, to actually become someone else. You have to give up part of yourself so that the person you’re playing can really come alive.”

  How could they just sit here, talking like this, after . . . Was Jules still thinking about it, replaying it, remembering?

  “So, in order to play Hal,” Jules asked, “you’re giving up the sober part of yourself?”

  Kissing a man was different from kissing a woman, but not that different. Although the embrace—that was different. Jesus Christ. Robin had become aroused almost instantly. And Jules certainly must’ve known it—how could he not have?

  And God, he was still . . . He still wanted . . .

  Something. He definitely wanted something, he just wasn’t sure what.

  “Are you all right?” Jules asked, concern in his eyes. Concern and kindness. “You want to talk about it?”

  The waitress chose that moment to bring over their salads, and Jules smiled up at her, thanking her, watching until she was out of earshot before he spoke again.

  “You’re freaking because you got turned on, and you know that I know it,” Jules guessed correctly. “Why is that such a bad thing? I’m flattered. I’m actually feeling pretty good about myself right now—sexy enough to rev up the straight guy, you know? And if you’re worried that I’ll say something to—”

  Robin couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Do you think I’m gay?”

  Jules didn’t answer for several long seconds. “That’s not a question I can answer for you,” he finally said. “What I do know is that you’ve been spending a lot of time doing, well, something that feels an awful lot like pursuit. You know. Of me.”

  Pursuit? “What, a straight guy can’t be friends with—”

  “I have plenty of straight friends,” Jules told him. “I’d be happy to file you in my address book under friends, comma, straight. But you keep giving me signals that say you aren’t going to be happy if I do put you there, so . . .” He shrugged.

  “I love women,” Robin said.

  “I do, too,” Jules said. “I just don’t want to have sex with them.”

  “Have you ever . . . ?” Robin asked.

  “Yeah,” Jules said. “When I was in college. With a friend. Experimenting.”

  “And, what?” Robin asked. “It didn’t work? You couldn’t . . . ?”

  “Oh, I could, and I did. It was sex,” Jules told him. “Yee-hah, you know? I was nineteen. What was that line? ‘I would have fucked a tree if I could’ve.’ ” He laughed. “She was hot. She was wonderful, too. I loved her to pieces, but . . . something was definitely missing for me.”

  Missing for me . . . missing for me, for me, for me . . .

  “Still—” Jules kept going, as if he didn’t hear the reverberation, as if he were completely unaware of the profound significance of the words that had just left his lips. “I probably would’ve tried to fake my way through a hetero relationship, marriage even, if I didn’t have the parents I had.”

  Something was definitely missing for me.

  Jules broke a breadstick in half, ate a piece while Robin downed the rest of his drink and tried to listen.

  “They were really supportive of me,” Jules continued. “My dad managed to be . . . Well, he died when I was fourteen, which was rough, but . . . He wrote this letter that my mom gave me when I came out—you know, when I first told her I was gay. Turned out they both knew before me.” He laughed. “I must’ve been a flaming five-year-old.”

  Something was definitely missing for me.

  “But they loved me. They made me feel safe and secure about who I was, and just kind of sat back and waited to see if I’d figure it out. When Dad got the news that he needed to have the triple bypass, he, uh, pretty much knew his chances of coming out of surgery were slim, so he wrote this letter to me, telling me that he knew I was gay, and that although he wouldn’t have wished this for me—because it meant my life was going to be tougher than he’d wanted—he also knew that this was the way God made me, this was the way I was supposed to be. He wrote that he loved me, he would always love me. And he hoped I’d find someone wonderful to spend my life with, maybe even have the chance to get married and have a family of my own someday.”

  Something was definitely missing for me.

  There were tears in Jules’ eyes, and he forced a smile, blinking them back. “Yikes. Sorry, I don’t talk about him very often. I just thought you might want to know that coming out doesn’t always have to be traumatic. Like it was for Adam—getting kicked out of the house when he was sixteen. His father still doesn’t talk to him. I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine having a child and . . . What’s your father like?”

  Robin shook his head. “I don’t really know him.” He sent Robin a birthday card every year—on Janey’s birthday.

  As he watched, Jules ate more of his salad. “What would he say, do you think, if you told him you were, you know.” He met Robin’s eyes. “Gay.”

  Something was definitely missing . . . All his life, something had been missing.

  But it hadn’t been missing when he’d kissed Jules.

  Robin had to hold on to the table with both hands.

  “You okay?” Jules asked.

  Robin shook his head, no.

  Jules put down his fork. “You want to go? We can go. We should probably go.” He looked across the room, searching for their waitress.

  Robin had had sex more times with more women than he could count. Beautiful women. Hot women. Smart, sexy, successful women who could have written how-to books on keeping men satisfied in bed. He’d started when he wasn’t quite fourteen, and by age twenty-four he’d had more sex than most men had in their entire lives.

  And yet it all paled in comparison to that amazing, incredible, mind-blowing kiss he’d shared less than an hour ago.

  With another man.

  Robin stood up. “I’m sorry, I have to—”

  Jules stood, too. “Sweetie, wait for me.”

  “I can’t.” He bolted for the door.

  Jules caught up with him, caught his arm. “Robin—”

  “Don’t touch me!” Jesus, he’d shouted that. In the middle of a restaurant.

&n
bsp; Everyone was staring. The waitress and maître d’ both hurried over. “Sir?”

  Jules held his hands out, low in front of him, as if confronting a dangerous animal. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. I promise you. You just need to slow down, take some time—take a lot of time, take as much as you need—to figure things out. You know, it’s possible that you’re going to be happier when—”

  Robin did the only thing he could do—he turned and ran away.