Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Murphy had returned and gone back out again, leaving behind a brief note: “No need for exterminators—Rivka’s house is exceptionally clean of pests.”

  Meaning he’d procured an electronic sweeper from somewhere—damn, he was good at doing that—and checked the house for listening devices.

  The place was clean—they were free to talk openly.

  Still, Tess had been silent as she’d disinfected the cut on the back of his head. After that, she went behind the curtain into her little pantry, to set up her computer and try to get online.

  Jimmy stretched out on top of his bedroll on the kitchen floor and tried not to remember the way her eyes had sparkled, up in the tower of the nearby boarded-up Church of the Saints, after they’d gotten that portable sat-dish in place, after she’d opened her phone and discovered that the freaking thing actually worked.

  “We’re not going to be able to use our phones outside of a certain radius of this dish,” she’d informed him, forgetting for a moment that she was angry with him. “This building’s just not high enough.”

  Tess had actually been serious about getting up onto the roof of the much taller, twenty-eight-story Grande Hotel, down in Kazabek’s business district. While Jimmy would go into the condemned building if he absolutely had to, he’d sweat bullets the entire time. And this didn’t count as an absolutely have-to situation.

  Especially since Tess had told him she’d need to go back to the sat-dish regularly to change the power pack.

  He closed his eyes, praying for the miracle of sleep.

  But his shoulder hurt where part of the roof of that school had fallen in on him today. And his head hurt where that chunk of shingle tile had hit him while he and Tess were in that alley. And his brain hurt from having to be on super high awareness whenever he was around Tess, which was turning out to be every freaking minute of every flipping hour.

  And every little noise that Tess made behind that curtain was completely driving him crazy. Reminding him that she was there, mere meters from him. Reminding him that he was still just as attracted to her as he’d been that night she’d invited him into her apartment.

  Which was stupid.

  Been there, done that.

  He knew, when he’d left Tess’s apartment that night—that amazing, incredible, terrifying night—that she wasn’t the type to mess with. She wouldn’t realize that, even if he stuck around for a week or two, what they had going was only a one-night stand.

  She would have thought it was something more.

  Something special.

  Something enormous that scared the crap out of him, and . . .

  Shit.

  Tess had gotten really quiet tonight after Jimmy had told her that Decker was interested in her. The look in her eyes had been one he couldn’t read.

  Shit.

  The thought of Deck with Tess should have been a good one. Two people he really liked, together and happy. That was a good thing, right?

  But instead he was feeling this . . . Christ, was it jealousy? It was. He wasn’t just jealous, he was teeth-grittingly jealous.

  And he didn’t know why.

  Okay. He was a lying sack of crap. He knew why. It was because he’d broken his number one rule. He’d slept with a woman—Tess—who actually liked him. Really, honestly liked him. She liked him before, during, and after he slept with her. She also liked him before, during, and even after that conversation in which he’d told her . . . He still couldn’t believe the things he told her.

  And he was jealous because—and surely this was another sign of the coming apocalypse—he really liked her, too.

  In fact, he “liked” her so much, he’d completely lost control when they got it on.

  Twenty-five seconds.

  Jesus God.

  Jimmy still couldn’t believe that he’d lasted for only twenty-five seconds that first time.

  Tess had been breathing hard beneath him. He could feel her heart pounding.

  “Did you really come?” he’d asked, unable to believe that she’d had enough time. “Or were you just being polite?”

  Tess had laughed and held him even more tightly, wrapping her legs around him, too. “That was very real,” she said. “It was amazing.”

  Jimmy had lifted his head to look down at her. She was serious. “You mean I don’t need to bother with that four-page apology I was drafting in my head?”

  Tess pushed his hair off his face, running her fingers back through it. He had to close his eyes at the sensation—it felt unbelievably good.

  “If you’re not in a hurry,” she said softly, “maybe you could stick around. We could do that again.”

  Jimmy opened his eyes. “Yeah, and maybe—who knows?—next time I’ll take a full thirty seconds. That is, if you can bear it.”

  She laughed, her eyes dancing.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered. She was back. Tess the angel.

  But she rolled her eyes. “Honesty, Nash. Remember?”

  He kissed her because he didn’t want to argue. He could’ve kept on kissing her for an hour or even a solid year, but she pulled back.

  “Is your leg all right?” she asked, and at first he didn’t have a clue as to why she would ask that. His leg?

  But when she moved out from under him, he saw blood.

  He’d bled on her sheets. On her.

  Jimmy pulled her up and into the bathroom. “Wash,” he ordered, turning on the shower and gently pushing her in. He saw her face before he drew the shower curtain shut and added, “I’m negative. I’m tested regularly. But I have no idea where that knife that stuck me has been.”

  She pulled back the shower curtain to look at him, her eyes wide. “Knife?”

  He pulled it closed again, put down the cover to the john, and sat, bringing his leg up so he could get a closer look at his damaged calf. “I get dinged up pretty often. And most people don’t give their switchblades a super-sanitary cleaning.”

  It wasn’t long before Tess shut off the water. She opened the curtain, pulled a towel off the rack on the wall, and dried herself. When she got her first good look at his leg, she stopped short. “Oh my God.”

  “It looks worse than it is,” Jimmy said, pushing himself to his feet both to hide it from her and to take a quick turn in the shower.

  “I have a first aid kit in the hall closet.” She went out of the bathroom, towel around her. But he heard her come back in almost immediately. “I can’t believe you call getting stabbed ‘dinged up.’ ”

  Jimmy washed all of himself, not just his leg—which definitely looked less awful without all the drying blood.

  “Stabbed is stabbed,” he told her through the shower curtain as he used some of her sweet-smelling shampoo. “Dinged happens when a knife is pulled, but you don’t get stabbed. If a blade is brought into a fight, chances are someone’s going to bleed. But believe me, there’s a big difference between dinged and stabbed.”

  He finished rinsing himself, turned off the water, and opened the curtain. Tess had put a clean towel on the rack, and he used it.

  She’d also set what looked like a tackle box on the sink counter and was rummaging through it. She’d put on a bathrobe, too—one of those thick terry cloth ones, in a deep shade of green.

  His leg was oozing, just a little, but he was careful of the towel as he dried around it. “Sorry about your sheets.”

  Tess threw him a look over her shoulder. “Yeah, that’s what I’m most concerned about.”

  He had to laugh. “It’s really not that bad.”

  She found what she was looking for—some kind of antibiotic cleaner. “Sit,” she ordered, then got down on the floor in front of him.

  It was a double turn-on—being ordered around by a woman who was on her knees.

  “This is going to sting,” she warned him.

  “It’ll sting less if you lose the robe—and let me do it.” He took the washcloth from her, pressing it against his broken skin. Shit, she wasn’t kidding. Bu
t it was unmanly to whimper. Besides, she was actually slipping out of that robe.

  Oh, yeah. Not a chance of him whimpering now. At least not about his leg.

  Still, he scrubbed at it, making sure it was clean, making it really hurt in the process. The pain was hot and sharp and sweet.

  “Are you sure you aren’t going to need stitches?” Tess asked.

  He lifted the washcloth to look underneath. She looked, too.

  “You were too stabbed,” she accused. “That’s definitely a stab.”

  “No, it’s not,” he scoffed. “It’s a nick. That blade was at least four inches long. He was just swinging wildly. He barely even cut me before I took him—” Out. Christ, what was he saying?

  Tess was looking up at him, her eyes wide again as she knelt on the floor, her robe a pool of emerald green behind her.

  Jimmy forced his mouth up into a smile. “Hey, you know, we left our beer in the kitchen.”

  But she didn’t move. “You ‘cleared the roof,’ ” she said, and he could see that she finally realized what that meant.

  “Yeah.” He couldn’t hold her gaze, afraid of what he’d see there, deep in her eyes. Afraid of what she might see in his eyes—as if the reflection of that last shooter’s face still lingered, a face filled with sheer panic as he finally realized just how deadly this game was that he was playing, as he realized instead of killing tonight, he was going to be killed.

  Jimmy tried to bring Tess’s focus back to his leg. “You know, I think I could use one of those butterfly Band-Aids. Oh, and a disposable razor if you have one.”

  His request successfully distracted her.

  So he kept that particular tangent alive. “Don’t tell Decker, but I’m a total baby when it comes to Band-Aids—you know, the way the adhesive sticks to hair when you try to pull it off?”

  Tess laughed and Jimmy knew that she now understood what the razor was for. She didn’t even have to get to her feet as she opened the cabinet under the sink and dug one out of its packaging.

  He took it from her, took off the little protective cover, and . . . Crap, his hands were shaking again. What was wrong with him?

  Tess didn’t seem to notice. She was up on her feet, looking for that Band-Aid. Except, damn it, she found it before he was done using both hands to shave two little patches on either side of the wound.

  She didn’t say anything, not even when he dropped the freaking razor. But she unwrapped the bandage herself instead of handing it to him in the paper package.

  “How many were up there?” she asked as casually as she might’ve asked how many apples he’d bought at the grocery store.

  But it was not a casual question. It was very carefully worded. She didn’t say people. How many people were up there? How many people had Jimmy sent to the morgue tonight?

  “Three,” he said as she put the bandage on his leg, her fingers gentle and warm. What was wrong with him? Three was nothing. A mere blip on the body count scale. He knew that. And what was he doing even answering her? This wasn’t something he ever talked about.

  You don’t talk about it, because you don’t think about it. He could still hear Vic’s voice, playing in his head. It had been almost twenty years, but it was still there, loud and clear. You do the job, you wash your hands, you go have a good meal, get laid if you’re lucky enough. And you get a good night’s rest because tomorrow’s coming.

  “They were there to kill Decker.” Tess didn’t ask it as a question.

  Because you don’t know what new shit’s coming at you, with the dawn of that new day. All you know is that it’s not your shit. It’s not your loose ends. It’s not your mistake for saying something that you shouldn’t have said to someone you shouldn’t have said it to. Capisce?

  Jimmy answered it anyway. “Yeah.” They were there to kill Deck.

  He was clean, he was bandaged, but she was still touching him, her hands solid against his leg, her interest just as palpable.

  “You kept them from doing that, you know,” she said quietly.

  “Doing that and a crapload of other things.” Like waking up tomorrow morning.

  “You saved Decker’s life,” she told him. “You got us safely out of there. We all could have been killed.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Not really. It wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, yeah, if Deck had gone out the front door without knowing they were there. . . . The shooters I took down had training, but not enough. They put one guard at the door to the roof, then assumed they were safe, that they didn’t have to watch their backs. They didn’t have a clue that I was up there.”

  He wondered, with a tiny part of his brain that stood off to the side and watched this exchange dispassionately, if she knew that he was talking more about this than he ever had before, with anyone.

  Why?

  Yes, she was impossibly beautiful in a certain light, at certain times. Like right now. Her eyes took his breath away.

  But big fucking deal. He’d taken a whole parade of beautiful women to bed, although never quite like tonight. He’d gotten it on with them and then he’d made his excuses—“Whoops, I’m getting a call from HQ, gotta go save the world”—and left.

  So what was he doing, still here?

  He didn’t have to look far to find an obvious answer. He wanted to make sure she knew that he normally lasted significantly longer than twenty-five seconds. That was freaking embarrassing. He was still here because he had to make it up to her. He had to take her to bed again, to make it good this time.

  Had to? What a liar. He wanted to.

  But that was a lie, too, because, really, sex was just a good excuse to stick around. But it wasn’t the real reason he was here.

  “I can’t imagine what it feels like, to . . .” Tess couldn’t even say it.

  “It feels too easy.” Whoa, where did that come from? What does it feel like to take another man’s life? It feels like nothing. Like just another day that started when the sun rose, and ended the way most of his days ended, with a good night’s rest after getting laid.

  Except Jimmy couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to sleep.

  Maybe that’s what was going on here. Sleep deprivation was used as torture in some countries. It was used to break people down, to get them talking. Maybe that was why he was saying things he’d never said to anyone. It feels too easy. Shit.

  He stood up. “Am I going to freak out your neighbors if I walk into the kitchen like this?”

  Tess was still sitting on the floor. She had the strangest expression on her face. “That’s what happened, isn’t it? That’s how you got stabbed.”

  “Dinged.” He went into the kitchen—the blinds were closed—and found his beer.

  “The first two didn’t hear you coming.”

  Jimmy didn’t have to turn to know that Tess had come to stand in the doorway. He could see her clearly enough in his peripheral vision. She’d put her robe back on. What a shame.

  “So you made sure the third one did,” she continued softly. Gently. As if she were talking to a frightened animal or a small child. Or someone she cared about very deeply.

  And Jimmy knew the truth. He was here because he liked her. He really, really liked her. And she liked him, too.

  He was here because his hands had been shaking far too often lately, and he wanted someone to forgive him for all of his sins.

  He needed someone to know, instead of just guessing or assuming from all of the rumors that regularly circulated about him.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” he told her. But yeah. He must’ve made some noise. . . .

  “And yet it was still too easy,” she whispered.

  How did she know that? He didn’t even know it himself until she said it.

  He couldn’t look at her. Not even from the corners of his eyes. He finished his beer and turned to the sink to rinse out the bottle.

  He heard her coming toward him. Felt her warmth. And her slight hesitation.

  But then she put
her arms around him, hugging him from behind, her arms around his chest, her body pressed against his back.

  It took him by surprise. He’d been expecting a tentative hand on his shoulder or arm, not this full embrace.

  “I’m glad that it’s easy,” she said fiercely. “I’m glad that you’re stronger and smarter and better trained than those men on the roof—than everyone that you go up against. I’m glad that you’re the one who walks away. Just . . . oh, Diego, next time give yourself permission to do it without getting . . . dinged.”

  He didn’t know what to do or say in response to that, and when he opened his mouth, “My name’s Jimmy” came out.

  She was smart, but he didn’t wait for her to figure it out. He explained. “Diego’s not my real name. Well, it sort of is. It’s Spanish for James, but . . .”

  “Jimmy,” she repeated. She kissed him. Right on his back. Next to his shoulder blade.

  He wasn’t sure what it was that made him keep talking. It might’ve been that tiny kiss—a kiss that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with tenderness and genuine caring. Or maybe it was her arms around him, or the solid warmth of her body against him, or the fact that he could speak to the bottom of the kitchen sink, to the tiny, smiling cartoon cow that looked up at him from the decorative knob of the drain strainer, without risk of the cow turning away in disapproval.

  “I get dinged up a lot,” he admitted. “Sometimes I think I might . . .” The cow smiled up at him. Tess held him tightly.

  But he couldn’t say it. He didn’t even really know what he was trying to tell her.

  Tess spoke then, her voice quiet as that cow smiled on. “Do you think you’re somehow trying to, I don’t know, punish yourself? For being so good at . . . what you do?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that so much as . . .” Oh, Christ. He wanted to leave. Why didn’t he? It would take almost no effort to break free from her arms, to pull his clothes back on and walk out the door. He could get into the Agency car and drive until the sun rose, the radio up so loud that he wouldn’t have to think.

  Instead he stood there as she whispered, “What, Jimmy?” As she struggled to understand.