by Cherrie Lynn
She almost wished he had stayed. Jace made her think of a lion pacing its cage, all its lethal grace restrained by nothing but the bars surrounding it. Only there were no bars between them.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him at last, when silence became insufferable.
“I don’t know.” Or he’s not saying.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh yeah? Care to clue me in?”
“You’re wishing you’d slammed that door in my face the first time we met, and left it shut, and ignored my note, and never thought of me again.”
He was silent for a long time. With each second that ticked by without his denying her claims, she felt another piece of her heart break off. But at long last, he reached over, took her hand, and said, “No. Despite everything, I don’t wish that at all. I couldn’t have forgotten you if I tried.”
“And there’s still that part of you that believes me?”
“It’s there, but if that part of me ends up getting one of us killed—”
“Look, I can’t even begin to guess what the future holds, but if anything happens, the only blame that can be laid at my feet is that I came to you in the first place. That’s it. I don’t know what else I can do to prove it to you. I’ve said all I can say, done all I can do. So…if you want to lock me right here in this room until my sister dies or I die or we get blown up or whatever it is you expect to happen, my conscience is clear except for that one thing: that I came to you for help. I hope you’re able to live with that.”
He’d stared at her unnervingly the entire time she’d spoken, as if absorbing every word and the body language behind it. “I already live with a lot, Lindsey. You have to see how this looks from my perspective. These people are my family. The only family I have. Tell me you don’t believe Sully is lying about the traceback?”
“I see from your perspective, but you’re making no attempt to see from mine. All I’m saying is that someone else did this. They had to, because I didn’t. I did not. It’s really as simple as that.”
“What exactly went wrong while you were loading it?”
“It crashed,” she said thoughtfully. “It errored out. I panicked and rebooted. Then it installed. The system was a dinosaur; I blamed it on that.”
His fingertips rubbed absently at his sensual lips, and she realized how much she loved watching him think.
“Jace, Lena knew where you were somehow. She told me to come here. Do you honestly think the people who have her don’t? You said it before, they know everything about us. Seems to me all this is just some trick to make you not trust me. I don’t know why, but…maybe that’s all it is?”
“Maybe,” he said, morose. “We’ve been here long enough. It’s probably time to move again.”
“Again?”
“Again. Just a question of getting it done before we’re compromised.”
Did that mean he’d disappear from her life? Like a puff of smoke?
The pain of it bit so deep she gritted her teeth, not trusting herself to speak for a moment. Not wanting him to see how it hurt. “Did you move after this guy—Rhys—after he was booted out?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” she said softly, rubbing at a smudge on the glossy tabletop. She only made the smudge bigger. Much like everything in her life right now, the more she tried to fix it, the worse it got. She would get her sister back—she had to. But she would lose him in the process. “It is my fault, then, isn’t it? I compromised you when I showed up here the very first time. But I didn’t know. I promise. I was scared. I didn’t know what I was walking into. I guess I still don’t.”
He was always so avid when she spoke of these things. It rankled a little. It meant he was seeking out some hole in her story. Some chink in her armor. Sighing, she crossed her arms on the table and put her head down, unable to bear the sight of his mistrust at that moment.
The worst part of everything, perhaps, was that he sounded so beaten. When his people had left the room, they seemed to have taken his strength with them. She didn’t want to be the cause of any rift in this family of his.
She lifted her head and looked at him. “I just find it so funny that Lena is the manipulative one, and I never have been, and everyone is treating me like…like I figure people treat her. You’re looking at me like you would her if she walked in right now.”
He watched her, and for some reason, she thought of the time he helped her make Lena’s bed because she was an emotional wreck. The same man looked at her now with such wariness, such mistrust despite his claim of wanting to believe her, and she didn’t know how to make that go away.
“Not hardly,” he said at last, his tone a shade lighter than it had been before. “That would be abject horror. It would be like Satan walking into the room to take the rest of all I hold dear.”
She had to chuckle. Even he cracked a smile.
“Lindsey, everything I know about you says that you wouldn’t betray me like that. My gut tells me. And I usually follow my gut, but I’ve been wrong before. That’s all.” And people had died, she knew. His beautiful dark eyes stared at some distance filled with memories only he could see, and her heart wept for him. She would take that burden from him if she could.
I’m falling for him.
It was so simple in its enormousness. I’ve already fallen for him.
She closed her eyes, fighting that knowledge before it could take root in her mind, in her heart.
Her feelings didn’t matter. Because even when everything worked out and Lena was back where she belonged, Jace would be gone.
To him, Lindsey was a vulnerability. Now it was even worse—she was a human Trojan horse. He had let her in of his own volition, even welcomed her, and she had possibly destroyed them all. He wouldn’t let her infect them again once he cleaned her out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jace felt her presence like warmth against his back as he worked. She was curled in the corner of his couch, staring at nothing, obviously bored out of her mind, since he wouldn’t let her touch any devices. But she suffered without complaint, so quiet that it made him ache for her. Something seemed different about her since the meeting. Before, she’d been supremely pissed off. Now, she seemed infinitely sad.
He tried to focus on his monitor. On his work.
He didn’t have much to say, either.
Couldn’t she see that he didn’t want to doubt her, dammit? But his team pulled him in one direction, and she tugged him in another. His loyalty told him to go. She couldn’t ask him to toss away years on a whim, not when there was evidence of her duplicity.
Lena would’ve known where to find Jace—she was fucking CIA. Lindsey didn’t realize that, though, so she seemed genuinely confused about why her traceback was a big deal. She’d said as much in the conference room, and he couldn’t explain without blowing her sister’s cover.
Sully had nailed it when she’d told him to stop thinking with his dick. He had to do his job, keep his mouth shut, and then he had to send this girl on her way. Far, far away from him. Too much history, too much heartache, and even looking at her today, at the mirror image of Lena’s face, brought all his history back like a sucker punch.
He was already too hotheaded. He didn’t need Lindsey making him irrational on top of it. After what he’d confessed today, he had to play it cool for the immediate future or Cap was likely to boot his ass as fast as he had Rhys.
There were plenty of empty apartments on this floor, and she could have any one of them, but then he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on her. The only thing worse than feeling her tantalizing presence behind him would be not feeling her at all.
“Motherfucker,” he grumbled, letting his weight fall back in his chair, rubbing his eyes hard with the heels of both hands.
“What is it?” Lindsey asked, alarm flashing through her voice
. He glanced back at her and saw she was ramrod straight, staring at him with her big, beautiful green eyes.
You. Everything. “Nothing,” he told her.
“Oh.” Her posture relaxed. “You scared me. I thought maybe you found something bad.”
It was bad. It was all bad. “We’re going to both go nuts sitting here like this, aren’t we?”
“Yes. What do you suggest?”
He wanted to take her away until it was all over. He wanted to drink margaritas on a beach where it was hot and humid; he wanted to lick the salt from her sun-warmed skin. Wanted to lay her back across white sand while the surf washed around their feet and make love to her until she asked him to stop from sheer ecstatic exhaustion.
“What is it?” she prompted timidly, and he guessed he’d been staring at her like a psycho, imagining doing all those things.
“I wish I could’ve met you some other way,” he told her. “I wish things were different.”
“They aren’t, though. They never will be.” He knew then, as she said it, this was the source of this profound sadness that had come over her. She’d been feeling it, too.
He propelled himself out of his chair. “We at least need some kind of distraction, don’t you think?”
“Like what?”
“Well. It just so happens…”
Her gaze followed him as he made his way over to the entertainment center, where any girl who owned a Zero Wing shirt and was a Legend of Zelda fan would appreciate his gaming setup. If indeed she is a fan of those, something lurking in the darkest corner of his mind whispered. All the old doubts from when he’d listened in on her for those three days came back to swamp him.
He had all the old consoles, though some were shoved in the back of a closet—a retro-gamer might get on his ass about that, but he was willing to take the chance. “I have Breath of the Wild,” he told her, “or I have the original Zelda stashed somewhere, if you’d rather play that.”
“Oh my God, seriously?”
“Sure.” She looked practically giddy. Seemed convincing enough. “Funny how we like a lot of the same things, isn’t it?”
A melancholy smile crossed her face, but he watched as it fell and consternation clouded her features. “How did you know I like The Legend of Zelda?”
He let her work that out on her own.
“Seriously. We never talked about that, did we? You came to my apartment once, but I don’t have anything on my walls or… Okay, I’m sure of it. We have never, not once, discussed Zelda. I would have remembered. It’s my favorite series of all time. But, I mean, that’s not something you just pull out of thin air about someone.”
She would get to it.
“I left you alone while I got ready that day. You were early. What did you do?”
“I listened through your mic. I heard you playing it. Pretty clever, knowing I would do that.” It shredded him to say it. But he had to. He had to keep her away. Even if he had to break her heart to do it, and he knew her well enough by now to know that it would.
“Knowing you would— What? You bugged my fucking apartment?” She uncoiled herself slowly from his couch, and he also knew by now that Lindsey didn’t only turn red when she blushed. She turned red when she was working herself into a towering rage.
“Come on. You knew I would.”
“You knew how freaked out I was about Lena’s captors possibly seeing me through her webcam at her apartment, and you did that to me?”
He shrugged. “I had to know what you were up to when I wasn’t around. Who you might talk to. I have to say the Zero Wing and Zelda stuff was pretty clever. Things I like, things that might endear you to me.”
“Believe it or not, you aren’t the only person in the fucking universe who’s heard of or loves Zelda. I’ve played every game in the series. I’ve been playing it since I could hold a controller.”
She was on her feet now, glaring, and if looks could kill, he’d have a knife right between his eyes. “And you think—you honestly think I pretended to like these things to get you to…what, to like me? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You said you believed me—”
“I said I wanted to. I said part of me does. There’s still a much bigger part that thinks there might be more at play here than you’re letting on, yeah. That I have to still be open to the possibility that you’re even worse than your sister.”
Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. He expected a verbal lashing to burst forth, and he would deserve it, but instead she said, “Test me.”
“What?”
“Test me. Ask me anything about Zelda. If I can’t answer, I’ll let you tie me up and gag me for the duration of my stay here. I’ll admit to whatever you want me to admit to. Let Sully torture me, hell, I don’t even care. But if I can answer your questions, you have to believe me. About everything. There’s no way Rhys or whoever he is could program thirty years’ worth of gaming knowledge into my head. I think even you would agree with that.”
He crossed his arms, tilting his head and studying her. Damn. The challenge in her eyes was enough to back down even him. And maybe he’d talked himself into a corner. “All right. In the original, where is the entrance to Level Nine?”
“Spectacle Rock,” she snapped back. “Unless you’re talking about the Second Quest, in which it is in the farthest northwestern corner of Hyrule.”
Jace frowned. “Where is the Hammer found in The Adventure of Link?”
“Death Mountain. God, Jace, challenge me at least.”
He shifted on his feet and brought a hand to his mouth, racking his brain. She was good. This was backfiring on him horribly. “What does the Cane of Somaria do?”
“It creates blocks you can push onto switches to activate them. Hum the ‘Serenade of Water.’”
Any other time, he would have been able to, but the tune was nowhere to be found in his head. He gaped at her for a second, but before he could reply, she’d done it for him. “You call yourself a Zelda fan? What about the ‘Bolero of Fire’? The ‘Inverted Song of Time’? Let me do both of those for you.” She did. “What are the names of the two Composer Brothers in Majora’s Mask?”
“Flat and Sharp,” he said eagerly, then caught himself. When the hell had this been turned back around on him?
“Let me tell you something, Jace Adams. I am a bigger Legend of Zelda nerd than you’ll ever be. I’ve been to see Symphony of the Goddesses twice, and I bawled my eyes out both times. I’ve played every game through multiple times. In fact, the biggest insult you’ve given me isn’t to mistrust me, it isn’t that you invaded my privacy, it’s that you questioned my Zelda fandom.”
Jesus Christ, on top of everything, he’d been out-geeked. She’d determined which was worse of all the blows he’d dealt her, but he wasn’t sure he could distinguish right now. “All right, Linz, I’m sorry. I believe you…about that.”
She pointed a finger at him, stabbing it to punctuate each word. “No! No. That wasn’t the deal. And you know what? I take back my terms. You don’t get to apologize to me. That’s a luxury, and it’s beyond your reach as of this very moment.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come this close to actively hating a human being in my life. Maybe you deserved everything you got all those years ago. Maybe Lena knew exactly what she was doing when she destroyed you, and for the first time, I think I’m glad she did it. If I ever see her”—she caught her breath in a sob—“when I see her, I’m going to give her a high five on a job well done!”
He deserved that. It was still hard to stand here and listen to it, her normally sweet-toned voice shrieking at him in fury, when what he wanted to do was take her in his arms and do something, anything, to calm her, make her see his side. Maybe it wasn’t even the right side, maybe everything he believed was wrong, but it was all he had to go on. Nevertheless, he attempted, walking nearer to her
while she crossed her arms and refused to look at him.
“All right, I won’t apologize. You’re right. I don’t even deserve to try. That still doesn’t change our situation.” He paused, still several feet from her. “I concede you’re a bigger Zelda nerd than me.”
A chuckle. There was no humor to be found in it, and she still wouldn’t look at him. Jace shoved both hands through his hair, knowing there was no way to dig himself out of this mess. Not with her, not with his team. He was right in the middle of this tug-of-war, and it was tearing him apart inside.
He knew which way he wanted to go. But he also knew which way he needed to go.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t want to do that to you. I felt like I needed to. For our safety. Surely you can understand that. Not forgive it but understand it.”
“No. Maybe someday I will. Right now? I feel violated. By you. By someone I had begun to feel incredibly safe with.”
“You knew I would check up on you, or you wouldn’t have given me your alias.”
“Pardon me for not considering that you might go that far. All I can think about is what you might’ve heard, what personal things you might know about me now that I have absolutely no clue about.”
“You like South Park and The Simpsons. You seem to lead a quiet life. That’s about the extent of it.”
“And knowing that, do you really consider me duplicitous enough to be involved in some scheme to bring you down?”
“If you’d seen some of the things I have—”
“But I haven’t, see. That quiet life you mentioned is exactly what I have and what I like. It’s all I know. I’m not putting on some kind of performance for you. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Lena got all the master-manipulator, adrenaline-junkie genes, and she’s welcome to them. I don’t ever want to go through something like this again.”
He steeled himself against her emotions. It was all he could do. A lie, it all had to be some elaborate lie. Because in some twisted way, if she weren’t playing him, it would be even worse than if she were…because he would have treated her this way when she didn’t deserve it.
