Dark of Night

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Please note I'm keeping your desk between us,” Tracy continued. “I've sensed a certain … volatile element when we're in close proximity. And yet…” She reached out her hand, sliding it across the cluttered surface of his desk. “I can't seem … to stop myself from …”

  Holding her gaze, he reached out and interlaced her fingers with his. But then he looked down at their hands on his desk, and he turned her arm over, so he could examine the cuts and scratches she'd gotten from trying to break into Jo Heissman's kitchen.

  “I'm so sorry about this,” he murmured as he brushed his thumb gently across her wrist.

  “I'm not,” she said. “I was trying to save you. It was silly, I know, but… I'd do it again, in a heartbeat.”

  And there they sat, just holding hands, as Decker's fatigue once again hardened his face into an expression that was oddly part wistful and part grim.

  His hand was warm and large, with big, blunt fingers that were tough and callused. He was holding on to her only loosely, and she ran her own fingers between his and across his broad palm, loving the contact, as innocent and sweet as it was. It wasn't hard to imagine, though, what it would be like for him to touch her in far less innocent places with those big hands.

  He sighed, and Tracy knew he was trying to figure out what to say, and how to say it, so she reluctantly let him go. He didn't try to hold on to her, which wasn't a surprise.

  She sat back in her chair and just looked at him as he sighed for a second time. So she said it for him.

  “I know that you can't do this,” she told him quietly. “Not here, not like this. I know it's so far outside of your comfort zone that… I wouldn't do that to you, Deck. I'm just teasing when I …” She shook her head. “It's just another game. You know, pretending that we might actually get busy in here.”

  He nodded. “I can't,” he said. “I'm only halfway through Nash's list and—”

  “I know,” she told him. “And it really is okay.” She forced a smile, tried to lighten what she was saying. “It was very motivating, though. It will continue to be motivating. Let's figure out who we're up against, take them out as quickly as humanly possible—and then have dinner. At my place. Without the dinner. Unless you want to lick it from my naked body. Because that would totally work for me.”

  Decker laughed. He closed his eyes and shook his head, and when he looked at her, it was—again—with that soul-melting heat. “You're hurting me,” he said.

  “Honey”—she purposely used his standard term of endearment for any and all women—“it cuts both ways. And please note that when I said I understood and that it was okay? I didn't say I'd stop teasing you,” she told him. “But only when the door's closed and no one else can hear.” She stood up to open it, but first leaned slightly across his desk and lowered her voice. “Do let me know, though, if your comfort zone starts … expanding.”

  He laughed again, and she couldn't help herself. She reached out and lightly touched his face, her fingers sliding against the smooth warmth of his skin, then rasping against his growth of beard. “This is outrageously sexy,” she said as she caressed his chin, “but for that dinner thing… ? I think I'll make you shave.”

  Decker laughed again, but he was definitely sounding choked— which was nice—as she turned and opened the door.

  And got back to business. “We should meet with Lindsey,” she told him briskly. A glance at the clock on Deck's desk told her that they'd taken that full ten minutes—it just hadn't been as satisfying as she'd imagined, back when she'd first confused the pretending with reality. Back before she hadn't given much thought to exactly how noisy it would get inside of Decker's head if they actually did have sex, here in his office. “We need to coordinate who's arriving where, when.” She stuck her head into the hall and raised her voice. “Hey, Linds? You got a sec?”

  “Hey, where've you been?”

  As Dave sat down on the edge of the bed, Sophia pushed her hair back out of her face.

  “ Surreal-land,” he said as he looked at her. The light was on in the bathroom, the door open a crack. Nobody was supposed to look good in fluorescent light, but Sophia did. She looked soft and warm and still half-asleep. “I'm kinda still there.”

  She thought he was still freaked out by the news of her pregnancy. “I'm sorry that I blindsided you—”

  “No,” Dave said. “Soph, this is… I just got off the phone with James Nash.”

  Sophia looked at him and as he looked back at her, she woke up. She sat up. “What? How?”

  He told her, all of it, the whole long story that Nash has given him over the phone, and she cried, and okay, he even cried a little, too. But then he told her that Nash, Alyssa, Jules Cassidy, and Decker all believed that the knife attack and subsequent framing of Dave for Barney Delarow's murder had nothing to do with Anise Turiano, and everything to do with Nash.

  “It was a test,” Dave said, “to see if I knew whether Nash was really dead or still alive. The apparent thought being that if I knew Nash was alive, I would've contacted him after being attacked. Santucci, by the way? Nash's name before he became Nash.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sophia breathed.

  “Nash said he wanted to tell me,” Dave told her, “right from the start, but…” He cleared his throat and said it. “Decker wanted distance. From me. And you.”

  She nodded and, unable to hold his gaze, looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap. “Please, can we not have a fight about Decker right now?”

  “He's at the Troubleshooters office,” Dave told her. “He wants us to come there. He says we'll be safer, and I agree. We should pack up and go. As soon as Tom gets back, if you're up for it.” Their boss had gone to make sure his family was safe. After he brought Kelly and Charlie to the office, he would be back to help Ken escort Dave and Sophia over there.

  “Are you up for it?” she asked. “Did you sleep? Because I know you're not going to sleep once you get to the office.”

  “I'm fine,” he said, and stood up to get his things from the bathroom.

  But Sophia stopped him with a hand on his arm. “We probably won't have a chance to talk after we get over there, and I know I said some things before that hurt you—”

  “You don't have to explain,” he said.

  “But I do—”

  “No,” he said, gently shaking her free and turning on the light on the bedside table. His cell phone was there, plugged into the base of the lamp, and he unplugged it and slipped it into his pocket. “I know I said that I'd change, that I'd be whoever, whatever you want me to be, but that's insane. And stupid. You know me. You know me. I'm the same man I've always been. And you either want me or you don't. You either love me or you don't. I can't make you love me—”

  “But you did,” she said. She'd followed him to the edge of the bed, and knelt there, pillow in her lap. “Somehow, you did. That night in Sacramento, I told myself I was having sex with a friend. A dear friend, who loved me. That was what I wanted. To be loved. But then you kissed me, and … God, Dave. And I thought, okay, maybe it was just because I hadn't had sex in a long time, and I pretended for a while that it was just about that—the sex. And I convinced myself that you were exactly what I needed because you were safe, because you would never, ever leave me— and even if you did, it would be okay because I didn't love you the same way I loved Dimitri.”

  Dave stood there, wishing he were sitting down, unwilling to press his hand against his side because then she'd know he was hurting, as he waited for her to finish. God, he was too tired and in too much pain to cry.

  “I know this,” he said quietly, “I know. I don't expect you to love me the way you loved Dimitri. Or even Decker. I would never assume that you—”

  “But I do,” she said. “You're not listening to me. I do love you. I love you more than I ever loved Dimitri, more than I ever loved Decker, because I wasn't friends with either of them, Dave. Not the way I am with you.”

  He struggled to understand—as
well as to stay standing.

  “You're my best friend,” Sophia told him, and he focused on her face, on that gracefully shaped mouth that he loved to see curving up into a smile, “and you're my lover—you're my everything, including the father of my child. You're my life, Dave. And when I saw you in that parking lot, and you were bleeding and I thought that I might lose you, it scared me to death. Because I wasn't supposed to care. I wasn't supposed to love you that much.” The tears that she'd been fighting escaped, flowing down her face, as she whispered, “But I do. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I do.”

  “Wow,” Dave heard himself say, as if from a million miles away. “This is a really, really good dream.”

  And the world went black.

  Tracy slept on Decker's couch.

  He'd turned off the overhead light when she'd first dozed off, then spread a blanket over her when she went into a deeper REM cycle.

  He sat now, in the circle of light thrown from his desk lamp, listening to her quiet, steady breathing, working his way through the list of black op assignments that Nash had done in the name of the Agency and the United States of America.

  It was unlikely he was going to find anything. It was probably Tess who held the key.

  Because, along with names, locations, and a brief description of the assignment, Nash had also marked the dates of those ops during which, even if he hadn't been overtly attacked, he'd barely escaped with his life.

  The first time had been just shortly after Tess and Nash announced their engagement to be married.

  It was probably pathetic that Decker remembered that date so clearly. But the news had left him—while happy for Nash—feeling oddly depressed. He'd indulged and bought himself a new truck. So yeah. He remembered the date.

  And was it a coincidence that Nash's first attack had come so closely on the heels of his engagement to Tess? Deck didn't think so. He thought it was far more likely that Tess, with her years of working at the Agency as support staff, knew something that, combined with Nash's knowledge— gained from crawling through Agency mud—was enough to make their enemy sweat.

  Which didn't mean Decker didn't finish going over that list with a fine-tooth comb. He did, and then he went through it again.

  When he finished that second time, the office was silent.

  Lindsey was probably napping.

  Or she was in the lobby with Jo Heissman, who had actually wept at the news that Nash was alive. They'd put her to work making a list of all of the Agency operatives she knew who worked for the black ops division during her own tenure there.

  At the very least, it was keeping her busy.

  In a few hours, Lopez was going to be relieved by two other SEALs from Team Sixteen—the result of Decker's epic ass-kissing. Cosmo Richter would take over his babysitting duties, while Bill Silverman prowled the perimeter of the office building.

  Despite all of Tracy's SOS messages, no one else was scheduled to arrive until late morning, at best.

  Ric Alvarado, the head of the Florida office, and his wife Annie had flown in to run security for Robin Cassidy while the actor was on set. When the news came down about the motel blast and the three dead John Wilsons, they'd tossed Robin onto a helo and flown his ass back to safety.

  When Tracy called, Ric and Annie had been halfway to the safe house themselves, via van. Instead of turning around, they were continuing on to their destination. Both Alyssa and Jules wanted them out there, Tracy had reported. “It frees them up to come down here, if they need to.”

  “Frees who up?” Decker had asked.

  “Not Jimmy,” Tracy had assured him. They'd all agreed that Nash should remain at the safe house. “Everyone's on the same page about that. At least everyone but Jimmy.”

  Deck's smile was tight. “I bet.”

  “Jones is in Atlanta,” Lindsey had reported. “With Martell Griffin. They're catching the next flight out here.” She checked the list she was carrying. “The rest of the Florida contingent is already on the red-eye. Ric anticipated needing them. They'll head for the safe house, too, which'll free up Sam and even Tess.”

  “No,” Deck said. “I want Tess with Nash. Please tell Alyssa. And Jules. That's important. Nash won't stay put unless she's there.”

  “Will do,” Lindsey said.

  “How about you?” Tracy asked. “Did your ass-kissing give you anything other than a pair of SEALs and some badly chapped lips?”

  Decker smiled. “Nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It did, actually,” Decker told them. “I called in all the favors that I could. We'll have most of the SWCC team back here, but not until early afternoon. I tried, but I couldn't talk Commander Koehl into rescheduling their morning training op. But I did manage to convince him to let us keep Lopez for a while longer.” He looked at Lindsey. “Mark—and the rest of Team Sixteen—won't be back until the end of the month.”

  Lindsey tried her best not to get tense. “Is there a problem I should know about?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Deck said. “Koehl sounded pissed about the delay, but not too pissed.”

  “I'm going to bank on my faith in you, boss,” Lindsey said. “I'm going to trust that you will tell me if there is a real problem, okay?”

  “Count on it,” Decker promised quietly.

  “So is that it?” Lindsey asked. “Cosmo, Silverman, Lopez, and a bunch of SWCC-boys?”

  “We'll get Gillman, too—at about the same time we get the men from the Special Boat Squadron,” Deck corrected her. “Until then it looks like we're in wait mode.”

  Lindsey nodded as she headed for the door. “I'll tell Lopez not to go anywhere.”

  “Take a break, while you're at it.”

  “With all due respect,” Lindsey said, “you're looking like you could use a break first. I'm good for a few more hours. And I know Lopez is—”

  “Lopez is off his game,” Decker told her. “He didn't see me drive up.”

  “Really.” Lindsey frowned. “I'll make sure he takes a nap when Cosmo gets here. But like you said, we're in wait mode. So with all due respect—”

  “I have more reading to do,” Decker said, careful to not look at Tracy.

  Lindsey nodded. “If you say so, Chief. I hope you'll reconsider, though. I know I don't have to remind you that you've had a recent gunshot wound. And the fact is, all hell could break loose in the very near future, so—”

  “Thank you.” He dismissed her.

  And with that, she was gone, closing the door—tightly—behind her.

  Decker turned to look at Tracy, and they just sat there for a long moment, in silence.

  Then she stood up. “I'll get out of your way, too.”

  “Don't,” he said. “Please? Stay. Just… Keep me company?”

  Tracy didn't hesitate. She also didn't try, in the slightest, to make it be about sex. Because she knew that it wasn't. “Of course,” she said.

  But now she stirred, and Decker looked over to find her awake and watching him from his couch.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said. “The blanket fairy made a special delivery while I was sleeping.”

  Deck smiled at her. “I've been called a lot of things, but never that.”

  “I'd like to see you in sparkly wings.” She stretched beneath the blanket. “I think I'll add that to my list of things I'm going to make you do. It's about number twenty below shaving, though, which goes right above making you lick me all over.”

  “Making me,” he said, through a throat that was suddenly tight. “Why do you suppose that's so appealing. To me?”

  She somehow knew that he was dead serious, and her flirty tone instantly evaporated. “Why should it matter?” she asked quietly, seriously. “If you like it, Deck, you like it. Why should there be a wrong way or a right way to have sex? And if there is, who gets to define right? The Pope? Your mother? My mother—kill me now? As long as everyone's a consenting adult—that should really be the onl
y rule. If I say yes, and you say yes… ?” She laughed. “We're not talking about having sex on the front lawn. We're being private. If we're someplace safe and we've closed and locked our door … ? Let's please not bring my mother—or anyone else's mother or father—into the bedroom with us.”

  Tracy wasn't done. “Because what feels good is subjective. Telling someone how to have sex is as absurd as telling them what kind of ice cream they should like best, when there's a world of flavors out there.” She sat up. “I know you don't like to talk about Emily, but I find myself wondering what it was that she said or did to you—”

  “It wasn't her fault,” Deck interrupted. “She said nothing. She didn't… know. We never talked about… sex.”

  Tracy was surprised. “Never? Like, not even, Hey, hon, you want to do that thing where you do that thing … ?”

  “We didn't really talk about… anything,” he admitted. “And then when Andy died, she tried for a while to … But… I just pushed her farther away.”

  “Andy,” Tracy said. “Your friend who was killed in the Khobar Towers attack.”

  Decker nodded.

  “Was he a SEAL?”

  “Air Force. Pilot. He flew F-15s.”

  “Huh,” she said. “How did an enlisted SEAL manage to become friends with an Air Force officer?”

  “Past life,” he told her, but it was clear that she didn't understand. Probably because that expression was just something Andy used to say. This is my buddy Larry. We were friends in our past life, pre-ROTC. So he explained. “We were tight since fifth grade. Andy Klein was the funniest kid in Ms. Bergeron's class at Oakmont Elementary.”

  “That's amazing you stayed friends all that time.”

  “Doubly amazing,” he concurred, “since I was a Navy brat. That was the longest we ever lived anywhere. My dad was stationed in Korea and my mother didn't want to go, so …” He shrugged. “We lived with my grandmother in Jersey, for three glorious years. And no, I'm not being sarcastic. It was great not to move every six months. And even when we did move— summer after seventh grade—we still visited regularly. Andy and Caroline—he had a twin. They lived across the street from my gram, so … I spent a lot of summers with them both. Right up through high school graduation.”