Divided in Death

Chapter 14

She’d barely nipped into the bedroom when Roarke stepped in from the elevator.

“I just need to change, then I was coming by the lab.”

“Well, I need a minute to speak with you, and saw that Mavis and Trina had gone.”

“What about?” She started rummaging through her dresser for old, comfortable sweats. It gave her something to do with her hands as she prayed it had nothing to do with a field operation in Dallas. “Did you guys have a breakthrough?”

“No. It’s painstaking and exacting work. Slow and tedious. Feeney’s taking an hour restorative. It’s hell on the eyes.”

“Okay.” She could hardly complain about the break when she’d spent a good chunk of the evening flat on her back and covered with goo. “I’m not much help in the comp-jock area, but I’ve got some probabilities to run, some theories I want to play with. Mind’s clear. I hate that.”

“You hate that your mind’s clear?”

“No.” Her shoulders relaxed again. She was tuned to every nuance in his voice, and everything was all right. For now. “I hate that the stuff Trina does actually works-on the brain. I’m pumped,” she said, hauling out a ragged and ancient short-sleeved sweatshirt she’d buried under a stack of silk and cashmere tees. “And I’m thinking… what’re you looking at?”

“You. Darling Eve, you look-”

“Don’t start.” She waved the shirt at him and backed up two steps. Even that was a fake, she thought. It was such a tremendous relief to know he could look at her that way. To know, when he did, her blood warmed, her body tightened. “Don’t even start.”

“You’ve had a pedicure.”

Instinctively, her toes curled in embarrassment. “She did it while I was under VR, and she won’t tell me how to get it off.”

“I like it. Sexy.”

“What’s sexy about pink toes? What could possibly be sexy about that? Wait, I forgot who I was talking to. If she’d painted my teeth pink, you’d think it was sexy.”

“A fool in love,” he murmured and stepped close enough to brush a thumb over her cheek. “Soft.”

“Stop it.” She slapped his hand away.

“And you smell… exotic,” he said after easing closer for a testing sniff. “A bit tropical. Like a lemon grove in spring, with just a hint of… jasmine, I think. Night-blooming jasmine.”

“Roarke. Down.”

“Too late.” He laughed and gripped her hips. “A man needs his restorative, you know. Why don’t you be mine?”

She was his, but still she gave him a shove as his lips came down on hers. “I’ve already had my break.”

“You’re about to extend it. You taste incredible.” His lips skimmed over her jaw, then under it, and his busy hands had already unbelted her robe, slipped beneath it. “Let’s just see…”-he tugged on her bottom lip-”… what else Trina’s been up to.”

He eased the robe off her shoulders, skimmed his teeth over bare skin.

The little ball of lust that had curled in her belly expanded. She tipped her head to the side to give him better access. “I’m giving you twenty minutes, thirty tops, to get yourself under control.”

“Thirty should give me just enough time to…” He trailed off as his gaze lowered to her breast. “Well now.” His voice came out in a purr as he rubbed his thumb lightly over the replica of her badge. “What have we here?”

“One of Trina’s little brainstorms. It’s just a temp, and actually I got kind of a kick out of it after I got over the shock.”

He said nothing, only continued to stroke and circle the image with his thumb.

“Roarke?”

“I’m amazed to find myself ridiculously aroused by this. How odd.”

“You’re kidding.”

His gaze lifted to hers, and that hot blue slammed through her. “Okay.” Nerves danced under her skin. Over it. “Not kidding.”

“Lieutenant.” He gripped her hips again, and hitched her up in one clean jerk until her legs wrapped his waist. “You’d best brace yourself.”

There was no bracing against that kind of assault on the senses, that sort of brutal invasion of the system. Since the bed was too far away, he simply spilled them both onto the sofa and took her over with lips and hands.

She clamped around him. It seemed if she didn’t hold on, hold tight, she might shoot out of her own body. Sensations crowded inside her, careening through blood and muscle and nerve until she was quivering, until she was coming in a screaming rush.

Staggered, she fought for air, then met, finally met, those hungry lips with her own. Partly in lust, partly in desperate relief that they were together, at least here, they were together, she tugged at his shirt. He wasn’t the only one who wanted the taste and texture of flesh. His was hot, as if he burned from the inside out for her.

Her miracle.

“Let me.” She fought with his belt. “Let me.”

And they rolled off the sofa, hit the floor with a solid thud. Her breathless laugh shimmered through him. God, he’d needed to hear her laugh.

He’d needed to hold her, and be held.

Her scent, her shape, her flavor all burned through the lines on his already straining control. He wanted to lap her like cream, to devour her like a feast after famine. He wanted to bury himself in her until the world ended.

If it was possible to love, to want, to need too much, he’d already passed the boundary with her. There was no going back. She shuddered under him, moved under him. Her hand reached out and closed over him, and took the hard length of him into the wet, wild heat of her.

Pleasure swamped him, drenched him, a saturation of mind and body as her hips plunged up, and he drove down.

He could watch her dark amber eyes that were blurry with arousal, and he could see her lips tremble an instant before her head arched back and the throaty moan escaped her.

Undone, he pressed his lips to the symbol of what she was, and felt the heart that thundered for him beneath it. His cop. His Eve. His miracle.

He gave himself over to it, surrendered himself to her.

Her pulse was nearly back to normal when he rolled so she was sprawled over his chest instead of pinned under his weight. From that vantage point, she folded her arms and propped her chin on them to study his face.

He certainly looked relaxed at the moment, she thought, all loose and satisfied, like a guy about to take a nice little nap.

“Pink toenails and boob tats. What is it with men?”

His lips curved, though he didn’t yet open his eyes. “We’re so easily played. Really, we’re at the mercy of the female, with all her mysterious wiles.”

“You’re at the mercy of your glands.”

“That as well.” He sighed happily. “Praise God.”

“So you really go for all that stuff? The potions and lotions and paints and all that?”

“Eve. Darling Eve.” He opened his eyes now and stroked a hand over her hair. “I go for you. That should be obvious.”

“But you get off on all the jazz.”

“With or without the jazz.” He scooted her up until he could brush his lips to hers. “You’re my own.”

Her lips twitched. “Your own what?”

“Everything.”

“Slick talker,” she murmured and gave in to nuzzle him. “You’re some slick talker. Just so you know, I’m not keeping the tattoo, even if it turns you into my sex slave. Just a few days, and that’s it.”

“Your body, your choices. But I can’t say I’d want you to make it permanent. Something about the surprise of it certainly flicked a switch in me. A bit baffling, really.”

“Maybe I’ll surprise you every now and again.”

“You always do.”

She liked knowing that, and gave him a quick pat on the cheek before she rolled away. “Restorative period’s over.”

“There’s no surprise in that.”

“Get some clothes on, civilian, and report.”

“I’m not entirely sure I used up my full thirty minutes. Someone was in a bit of a hurry.”

She picked up his pants, threw them into his face. “Cover up that pretty ass of yours, pal. You said you needed to speak to me before you were overcome by my pink toenails. What about?”

“Before I get to that, I’d like to express the hope that you remain barefoot as much as possible the next several days. And moving on,” he said with a laugh when she sent him a steely stare. “Feeney and I both agree we need more jocks in the lab. With just the two of us this restoration may take weeks at best.”

“McNab will be back tomorrow.”

“So that’s three of us, except when at least one of us is pulled off for something else. If you want answers, Eve, you have to give us the tools to get them.”

“Why isn’t Feeney, as head of EDD, requesting this?”

“Because I lost the bloody flip, which wouldn’t have happened if I’d gotten my hands on the coin long enough to switch it for one of my own. But he said-I believe this is a direct quote-‘you don’t get bit by the same dog twice.’ Which is his colorful way of saying he’s aware I’ve rigged a coin toss on him before.”

“He’s no easy mark.”

“He’s not, no. And neither of us is green when it comes to electronics, nor are we slackers. As much as it pains both of us to admit it, we need help. I’ve some in mind who-”

“If you’re thinking Jamie Lingstrom, forget it. I’m not dragging a kid into an unstable situation like this.”

“I wasn’t. Jamie’s in classes, and I’m set on his remaining there. I want Reva. She’s already aware of the situation,” he continued before Eve could speak. “She’s one of the best, her clearance is top level, and she already knows what’s going on.”

“Because she’s one of the elements. It’s a tricky business to bring in one of the prime elements. To bring in another civilian.”

“She won’t have to be brought up to speed, which saves us all time. She has a personal investment so she’ll work harder than anyone. She’s not a suspect, Eve, but another kind of victim.” He paused, and his tone was cooler when he continued. “Shouldn’t a victim have a right to stand for herself, as much as to have someone stand for her, if the opportunity’s there?”

“Maybe.” They were veering toward it, toward that gulf with the jagged edges. She wanted to step back from it, and worse, pretend it wasn’t there. But the gap was building even as she stood with her body still warm from him.

“Did you run this by Feeney?”

“I did. And circled the same ground you and I are dancing on now. Then I showed him her qualifications. He’s anxious to work with her.”

“You seduced him.”

That made him smile, just a little. “That’s a bit of an uncomfortable image for me. I prefer that I convinced him. Regarding Reva, and Tokimoto.”

“Another of yours. Another civilian?”

“Yes, and there are several reasons for the choice. First, civilians with as high a security rating as these two are less likely to leak something to the media. Don’t blow,” he said, mildly, when she showed her teeth. “These choices would be less likely to leak than any others. Reva for obvious reasons, and Tokimoto because he’s in love with her.”

“Well, fucking A.”

“She doesn’t know it,” Roarke continued without missing a beat. “And he may never move in that direction, but the facts are the facts. Due to his feelings for her, and his natural interest in the work, he’ll put more energy and effort into it than most. Love does that sort of thing to you.”

When she didn’t respond to that, he turned to open a panel, and the minifridgie behind it. He took out a bottle of water. Opened it, sipped.

It wet his throat, but didn’t cool the anger that was starting to build. “Aside from that, if you bring in cops, you have to do the paperwork, deal with the budget, clear them for this level of operation, and so on. I have a bigger budget than the NYPSD.”

“You have a bigger budget than Greenland.”

“Perhaps, but the point is I have a vested interest in solving this problem, and protecting my Code Red contract. I’ve quite a bit to lose if we don’t find the answers with some expediency. Because of that, because of what was done to a friend of mine, because I know what the bloody hell I’m about in this area, I’m recommending we bring in the best people for the job.”

“You don’t have to get pissy about it.”

“I feel pissy about it. About the whole shagging thing. I don’t sit easy when people I care about are in this kind of turmoil, and it’s fucking frustrating to be picking my way through the holy mess of those units working toward retrieval, and to be doing that, spending my time there instead of spending it finding out exactly who was responsible for what happened in Dallas.”

A small, hard ball of ice dropped in her belly. And there it was, the big, glowing elephant in the room she’d hoped to ignore, and it was trumpeting. “That’s what’s under it, isn’t it? All of it.”

“Aye, that’s under it and over it, it’s around it and through it.”

“I want you to put it away.” Her voice stayed calm even as her belly clenched. “I want you to put it aside before you cross a line I can’t ignore.”

“I have my own lines, Lieutenant.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Lieutenant.” She picked up her badge that lay on the dresser, and slapped it down again. “Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD. You can’t stand there and talk about doing murder to a murder cop and expect me to ignore it and pretend it’s nothing.”

“I’m talking to my wife.” He slammed the bottle down so water sloshed out and onto the glossy surface of the table. “A woman I vowed to cherish. There’s no cherishing, there’s no living with myself if I stand back and do bloody nothing. If I fold my hands while those responsible for what happened to you go on with their lives as if that was nothing.”

“Their lives don’t matter to me. Their deaths, at your hands, do.”

“Goddamn it, Eve.” He spun away from her and dragged on his shirt. “Don’t ask me to be what I’m not. Don’t ask it of me. I never ask it of you.”

“No.” She steadied herself. “No, you don’t. You don’t,” she repeated, very quietly as that one point struck her as truth, inarguable truth. “So I can’t talk about this. I can’t think about it or fight about something we’ll never come close to agreeing on. But you’d better think about it. And when you’re thinking, you should remember I’m not a child like Marlena. And I’m not your mother.”

He turned slowly, and his face was cold, and set. “I never mistake who you are, or who you’re not.”

“I don’t need your kind of justice because I survived what happened to me, and made my own.”

“And you cry in your sleep, and shake from the nightmares.”

She was close to shaking now, but she wouldn’t cry. Tears wouldn’t help either of them. “What you’re thinking about won’t change that. Bring in whoever Feeney agrees to. I have to work.”

“Wait.” He walked to his own dresser, opened a drawer. He was angry, as she was, and wished he knew how they’d so seamlessly turned from intimacy to temper. He took out the small, framed photograph he’d placed there, then walked over to hand it to Eve.

She saw a pretty young woman with red hair and green eyes, healing bruises on her face, and a splint on the finger of a hand she held against the boy.

The gorgeous little boy with the Celtic blue eyes who had his cheek pressed against the woman’s. Against his mother’s.

Roarke and his mother.

“There was nothing I could do for her. If I’d known… I didn’t, so that’s that. She was dead before I was old enough to fix her face in my memory. I couldn’t even give her that much.”

“I know it hurts you.”

“It isn’t about that. They knew about him. The HSO, Interpol, all the global intel organizations. They knew about Patrick Roarke long before he traveled to Dallas to meet with Richard Troy. But she, the woman who birthed me, the woman he murdered and tossed away didn’t even merit a footnote in their files. She was nothing to them, as a small, helpless child in Dallas was nothing to them.”

She hurt for him, for herself, and for a woman she’d never met. “You couldn’t save her, and I’m sorry. You couldn’t save me, and I’m not. I’m good at saving myself. I’m not going to argue with you about this because it doesn’t fix anything. We’ve both got a lot of work to do.”

She set the photo on his dresser. “You should leave this out. She was beautiful.”

But when Eve left the room, he put the photo away. It was still too painful to look at those images for long.

They gave each other a wide berth, working in their separate areas late into the night. Sleeping, for once, with a sea of bed between them and neither attempting to bridge it. In the morning, they circled around the distance that had spread between them, carefully avoiding each other’s territory, and cautious of their moves when that territory overlapped.

She knew Reva Ewing and Tokimoto were in the house, and was leaving them to Feeney while she bunkered in her office, waiting for Peabody and McNab to get in.

She could focus on the work at hand for long periods, running her probabilities, then sifting through data to create other scenarios. She could study her murder board, and reconstruct the crimes, the motives, the methods from what evidence she had and begin to see a picture.

But she only had to shift that evidence to one side and a different picture formed.

And if her concentration wavered, even for an instant, there was yet another image. One of herself and Roarke on opposing sides of a bottomless chasm.

She hated that her personal life interfered with work. Hated more that she couldn’t stop it from creeping into her thoughts when she needed to train them on the job.

And what was she upset about, really? she asked herself as she stalked back into the kitchen yet again for coffee. That Roarke wanted to hunt up and bloody some HSO agent she didn’t even know? She was fighting with him, and just because they weren’t yelling and slamming around didn’t mean they weren’t fighting still.

She’d figured out that much of the marriage game.

They were fighting because he had a rage like a trapped tiger about what had been done to her as a child. Layered over it, sharpening the claws and teeth of the trapped tiger was the rage over what had happened to his mother.

Brutality, violence, neglect. Christ knew they’d both lived with it and survived. Why couldn’t they live with it still?

She shoved through the kitchen door to stand on the little terrace beyond, and just breathe.

And how did she live with it? The work-and, yes, sometimes she used the work until it dragged her down to exhaustion, even misery, but she needed what it gave her, through the process, through the results. Standing not just over the victim but for the victim, and working to find whatever balance the system allowed. Even hating the system from time to time when that balance didn’t meet her own standards.

But you could respect something, even when you hated it. The nightmares? Weren’t they some sort of coping mechanism, an unconscious outlet for the fear, the pain, even the humiliation? Mira could probably give her a whole cargo-load of fancy terms and psychiatric buzz on the subject. But at the base they were just triggers, for events she could stand to remember. Maybe a few she wasn’t sure she could stand. But she coped.

God knew she coped better with Roarke there to pull her out of the sticky grip of them, to hold onto her, to remind her she was beyond them now.

But she didn’t deal with what had been done to her by meeting brutality with more of the same. How could she wear her badge if she didn’t believe, at the core, in the heart and soul of the law?

And he didn’t.

She scooped a hand through her hair as she stared out over the riotous late-summer gardens: the full green trees, the sheen and sparkle of the world he’d built, his way. She’d known when she met him, when she’d fallen in love with him, when she married him, that he didn’t, and never would, have the same in-the-bone beliefs as she had.

They were, on some elemental plane, opposite. Two lost souls, he’d once said. So they were. But as much as they had in common, they would never meet smoothly on this one point.

Maybe it was that opposition, the pull and tug of it, that made what was between them so intense. That gave that terrible and terrifying love such power.

She could reach his heart-it was so open to her, so miraculously open. She could reach his grief, give a kind of comfort to him she hadn’t known herself capable of. But she couldn’t, and never would, fully reach his rage. That hard knot inside him he covered so skillfully with elegance and style.

Maybe she wasn’t meant to. Maybe if she could reach in, take hold of that knot and loosen it, he wouldn’t be the same man she loved.

But God, my God, what would she do if he killed a man over her? How could she survive that?

How could they?

Could she continue to hunt killers knowing she lived with one? Because she was afraid of the answer, she didn’t look too deeply. Instead she stepped back inside, filled her cup again.

She walked back into her office, stood in front of her board, and pushed her mind back into work. Her answer was an absent and faintly irritated “What?” when someone knocked on her door.

“Lieutenant. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“Oh. Caro.” It threw her off to see Roarke’s admin in her sharp black suit at her office door. “No problem. I didn’t know you were here.”

“I came in with Reva. I’m going into the midtown office, to work. I needed some details from Roarke on a project. Well, that doesn’t matter.” She lifted her hands in a rare flustered move, then dropped them again. “I wanted to speak to you before I left, if you have a moment.”

“Sure. Okay. You want coffee or something?”

“No. Nothing, thank you. I… I’d like to close the door.”

“Go ahead.” She saw Caro’s gaze go to the board, the stills of the murder scenes, the garish ones of the bodies. Deliberately, Eve moved to her desk and gestured to a chair that would put the images out of Caro’s line of vision. “Have a seat.”

“You look at this sort of thing all the time, I imagine.” Caro made herself take a long look before she ordered her legs to move, and took the chair. “Do you get used to it?”

“Yes. And no. You look a little wobbly yet. Maybe you shouldn’t be going back to work so soon.”

“I need to work.” Caro straightened her shoulders. “You’d understand.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“As does Reva. I know getting back to what she does will help her state of mind. She’s not herself. Neither am I. We’re not sleeping well, but we pretend we are, for each other’s sake. And this isn’t at all what I came here to say. Rambling isn’t like me either.”

“Guess not. You always struck me as being hyper-efficient. Have to be to handle Roarke’s stuff. But if something like this didn’t throw you off-stride, I’d have to figure you for a droid.”

“Just the right note.” Caro nodded. “You know what note to take with victims and survivors, witnesses or suspects. You were brisk, even brusque with Reva. That’s the sort of tone she responds best to when she’s stressed. You’re very intuitive, Lieutenant. You’d have to be… to handle Roarke.”

“You’d think.” Eve tried not to let the words that had passed between them the night before replay in her head. “What do you need, Caro?”

“Sorry. I know I’m taking up your time. I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done, and are doing. I realize you look at variations of what’s on that board every day. That you deal with victims and survivors, listen to statements and questions, and work toward finding the answers. It’s what you do. But this is personal for me, so I wanted to tell you, to thank you, in a personal way.”

“Then you’re welcome in a personal way. I like you, Caro. I like your daughter. But if I didn’t, I’d be doing the same thing I’m doing now.”

“Yes, I know. But that fact doesn’t change my gratitude. When Reva’s father left us, I was devastated. My heart was broken, and my energies scattered. I was only a bit older than you,” she added, “and it seemed the end of the world. I thought, ‘What will I do? How will I get through this? How will I get my baby through it?’”

She stopped, shook her head. “And this isn’t of any possible interest to you.”

“No.” Eve gestured Caro back down when she started to rise. “Finish it out. I am interested.”

Caro sat again, sighed. “I will, then, as all this keeps running through my mind. I had, at that time, very few personal resources-some secretarial skills I’d let rust as I’d wanted to be a professional mother. There were debts, and though he’d incurred most of them, he was smarter and, well, meaner than I was.”

“Must’ve been pretty smart, then.”

“Thank you. I wasn’t as… seasoned then as I am now. And he had better lawyers,” she added with a ghost of a smile. “So I was in a pit, financially, emotionally, even physically as I let myself become ill with the stress and grief. I was very, very frightened. But it was nothing-no more than a bump that leaves you momentarily off-balance-compared to this. Reva might’ve been killed.”

Caro pressed a hand to her lips, visibly fought for control. “No one’s said that, but it’s there, the possibility of what might have been. Whoever did this thing might have killed her instead of using her to cover the tracks.”

“She wasn’t. Might-have-beens shouldn’t scare you.”

“You don’t have children,” Caro said with another, stronger smile, but her eyes were beginning to shine with the tears she was fighting off. “Might-have-beens are the monster in the closet for parents. She might have been killed, or she might be in prison waiting for trial if you weren’t so very good at what you do. If you and Roarke hadn’t been willing to help. I owe him a great deal. Now I owe him, and you, a great deal more.”

“You figure he wants payback for pitching in for you and Reva?”

“No. He never does.” She opened her purse, took out a tissue and dabbed at her cheeks. Every movement was economical. “It annoys him. And you, I imagine. You’re so well-suited.”

Eve felt her throat close, and only managed a shrug.

“I wondered if you would be. When you first came to the office, so fierce and tough. And cold. At least that’s how I saw you. Then I saw him, after you’d gone. He was baffled and dazzled and frustrated. A rarity for Roarke.”

“Really? Well, that made two of us.”

“It’s been an education watching the two of you find each other.” She replaced the tissue, closed her neat black handbag. “He’s an important part of my life. It’s good to see him happy.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so asked a question that was circling in her brain. “How did you come to work for him?”

“I took a secretarial position, entry level, and did drone work at an advertising agency here in New York. My skills weren’t as rusty as I’d thought, and I’d scraped together the money for some classes to reacquaint myself with them. For the most part I was a gofer in one of the legal departments for a time. Then I was a revolving clerk, moving from department to department, filling in where and how I was needed.”

“Getting a little bit of everything.”

“Yes. It pleased me, and I thought of it as training. It was good work, and paid well. At a point, I suppose it’s been about a dozen years ago now, Roarke took over the company where I worked, and the company-along with several others-moved into the midtown building.”

Her voice was stronger now as she took herself back. Took some distance from the present. “Shortly after, I was promoted to an assistant to an assistant in one of the project development arms of the company. A year or so into that, I was asked to sit in on a meeting-just to keep notes, fetch coffee, and look presentable as Roarke himself would be attending. The New York branch was quite young then. There was such energy, and most of it came from him.”

“He’s got more than his share,” Eve added.

“He certainly does. During the meeting, one of the execs snapped at me when I didn’t move fast enough to suit him, and I responded with something about his manners being as unattractive as his suit, or some such thing.”

“So Reva gets her temper from you.”

Caro let out a half-laugh. “I suppose she does. Roarke ignored the little altercation-or so I thought-and continued with the meeting. At some point he asked me to run the holo of the building he was designing, and later to bring up the data on something else. He had me hopping around, doing tasks that weren’t in any particular domain, but those years of revolving had paid off. Still, once my annoyance with the exec was cleared, I was terrified I was going to be fired. The meeting lasted more than two hours, and it seemed like years. When it was over, all I wanted to do was find a corner and collapse. But he gestured to me. ‘It’s Caro, isn’t it,’ he said in that wonderful voice of his. ‘Bring those files and come with me, would you?’”

“Now I knew I was going to be fired, and I was frantic thinking of how I’d find another job, keep Reva in college, make the payments on the condo I’d bought three years before. He took me in his private elevator, and I was shaking inside, but I wasn’t going to let him see it. I’d had enough humiliation from my ex-husband to last me a lifetime, so I wasn’t going to let this young turk see how frightened I was.”

“He knew,” Eve commented, picturing it.

“Of course. He always knows. But at the time I was proud of my composure, and assumed it was about all I had left. He asked me what I thought of…” Her forehead creased. “I’ve forgotten his name. The exec who’d snapped at me in the meeting. I answered back, very crisply as I thought I was already heading out the door, did he mean personally or professionally, and he grinned at me.”

She paused a moment, angled her head. “I hope you won’t take offense if I add something here.”

“Go ahead. I don’t offend all that easy.”

“I was old enough to be his mother, and when he looked down at me and grinned, I felt it in the pit of my belly. The power of his sexuality, in a situation that wasn’t, in any way, sexual. I’m surprised I could form a coherent thought or word after the exposure.”

“I get that, too.”

“Undoubtedly you do. When he grinned at me and said he was interested in both my personal and professional opinion of this exec, I was just mortified and stunned enough by my own completely inappropriate reaction to tell him I thought the man was competent enough in his job, but on a personal level he was an ass.”

“The next thing I know I’m in his office, and he’s offering me coffee, and asking me to wait just a moment. He went to his desk and went to work while I sat there in complete confusion. I didn’t know then that he’d pulled up my file, was checking my work evals, my security ratings.”

“And very likely what you’d had for breakfast that morning.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Caro agreed. “Then he said, pleasantly, that he was looking for an administrative assistant who could think on her feet, who had good judgment of situations and people, and who wouldn’t serve him a plate of bullshit when he wanted the truth. She’d have to be efficient, tireless, and loyal, as she’d answer only to him and there would be times he’d ask the… unusual. He continued on, outlining the job description, but I’m not sure I was hearing it all clearly. And he named a salary that made me very grateful I was sitting down. Then he asked me if I was interested in the position.”

“Guess you were.”

“I said, with heroic calm, that, yes, sir, I would be very interested in applying for the position. That I’d be happy to sit for an interview and any tests required. He said we’d just had the interview and I’d already passed the tests, so I might as well start now.”

“He’d had his eye on you before.”

“Apparently so. And because of it, I was able to finish raising my daughter in comfort, in security. And to discover myself. So I owe him a great deal. You’ve settled me down,” Caro said with a sigh. “Just by taking me through all that. You’ve reminded me that you get through a crisis by doing what needs to be done next. So I’ll leave you to do what you have to do next.” She rose. “Thank you for taking the time.”

“I figure Reva’s got some of your spine. So she’ll get through this and out the other side.”

“I’m counting on that.” Caro walked to the door, then turned. “This is a small thing, but I think it might please you, that it might be just a little something I can give back. A lot of busy people have their assistants or admins select gifts for their spouses. Birthdays, anniversaries, tokens to make up for an argument. He never does. Whatever he gives you comes from him. Perhaps that’s not such a small thing after all.”