Forever in Your Service

by Sandra Antonelli

  “Only Bryce. Departmentally speaking, she’s seen as a loyal employee, one harbouring feelings for me, but she’s not considered to be...” Kitt glanced at Mae petting Felix, “...my type.”

  “She’s certainly not twenty-three.”

  “Careful, Reedy.”

  Head shaking, Reed stared at Kitt, irritated. “I thought you were supposed to be good at your job, commendations and such, and you never imagined she might—”

  “I make him sloppy,” Mae cuddled the dog close, “careless, unfocused.”

  Kitt watched her drop a kiss on the animal’s snout, but her eyes were fixed on them. “Yes, you do,” he said.

  “Touching.” Reed frowned. “What does she know about me?”

  “Exactly what you wanted her to know, Simon.”

  Mae set Felix on the carpet and squinted at them both. “Why don’t you ask me what I know?”

  Kitt scratched his neck. He needed to shave. “This is not the time for speculation about who knows what about whom.”

  The dog sniffed at Reed, paws clasping around his knee for a second before Reed swore and gently pushed him away. With a soft, contemptuous snort, he went to the door, opened it and paused. “Is there anything to eat, petal? Have you made dinner?”

  “Mae. Her name is Mae, and find your own dinner, Simon, she’s not your butler.”

  “She’s not yours either.” Reed’s jaw shifted from side to side, eyes hard on Kitt.

  “Simon.” Mae got up, stretched her arms overhead. “You’ll find leftover risotto, a quiche, cold roast beef, and mustard potato salad in the kitchen fridge. I’ll be down soon to clean up and prepare for tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch.”

  “Thank you, Mae.” Reed jerked open the door and left the room.

  Mae shut the door Reed had left gaping wide. Felix trotted across the carpet, hopped up onto the bed and snuggled down between the throw pillows. “If you really want Reed’s help,” she said, “you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

  “That’s your strategy, not mine. You’re honey, I’m bully.”

  “You shut all it out and shut it off, but not everyone is you. I don’t care if you had a relationship with him any more than I care about all those women you were involved with before me, but not everyone can let go of feelings or turn them on or off.”

  “I really don’t give a damn what Reed needs or wants.”

  Kitt heard a faint, ‘Liar,” as he went into the walk-in wardrobe. He grabbed Reed’s duffel and found the zippered case he wanted. Slightly larger than his hand, he took the case to the chest of drawers, opened it, and began to sift through the objects inside; a pen, a stickpin, a pair of reading glasses, a small blue pouch, a tie clasp, a stainless-steel watch, a key fob for a BMW, and a yellow lighter, placing everything on top of the chest of drawers before he reached for the pouch.

  Mae watched him begin to unknot the strings of a little blue bag. “What do you want me to say to Bryce tomorrow?”

  “Keep the bits of truth. You’ve found a second wine cellar and no evidence of counterfeit wine.”

  “Then what.”

  “Then I’ll talk to him.”

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “If anyone wakes and wonders, we’ve taken Reed’s car to the landscaper’s drunken bunny lecture. Meanwhile, we’ll begin gently, in a non-threatening manner. With you speaking to Bryce first, for a few minutes.”

  “Because in your current mood you can’t speak to him in a non-threatening manner?”

  “Yes, that and call it a gut feeling—one I assure you has nothing to do with me thinking with my stomach.”

  “I didn’t say anything about your stomach.”

  “No, but it crossed your mind.” Kitt found what he’d been looking for and held out the tiny, pale pinkish-coloured object to her. “This one ought to fit. Here, have a look.”

  “What is it?”

  “Genuine spy-craft equipment. Go on, take it.”

  She slipped on her glasses, drew the item from his hand, and inspected it. It was the size of a small peanut, slightly pointed at one end. Warily, Mae eyed him over the top of her reading lenses.

  “Goodness, I didn’t expect a frown. I thought you’d be thrilled to finally see a stock prop from the world of espionage and spy thrillers.”

  One eye squinted. “Exactly where am I supposed to... Is this inserted or do I swallow it?”

  Kitt chuckled. “It goes in my ear, not yours. This bit is yours.” He held out a piece of jewellery.

  “Oh. Yes, of course.” Mae gave the little stickpin a cursory once-over and looked at the earpiece a little closer. There was a tiny, clear stalk barely visible, an antenna she guessed.

  “Did you think it was a suppository?” Kitt took the earpiece from her hand.

  Her laugh was a minute pop of air. “No, I wondered if it might be inserted subcutaneously, like the microchip a technician put in Felix.”

  Kitt glanced at the dog. “I already know I’m under your skin as much as you’re beneath mine, but in the morning,” he pushed back a curving swathe of hair from her chin, and touched the shell of her ear, “I’ll be listening.” Kitt moved closer, his fingers inserting the stickpin into the lapel of her dark dress. “With this, like so, in plain sight, yet out of sight, but never, ever out of mind.” His thumb ran down her jaw. She’d washed her face, removed traces of dust and Derek’s blood, a slice, a purple bruise all that remained of those violent moments.

  “Yes, to your detriment.” She smiled faintly.

  “And yours.”

  “You’re tickling me.”

  “Do forgive my clumsiness.” He let his fingers drop away and leaned against the chest of drawers. “There are benefits of not needing to cooperate with others to complete an operation. No one to answer to, no toes to worry about stepping on, no international treaties to mind. And this time, it’s not necessary to tape anything to your breasts, as when you insisted on joining the Largo action last July. I didn’t want you there then, any more than I want you here now, but at least now there’s no tape.” His mouth flattened and he shook his head with annoyance. “Christ, that tape left such a rash on your poor diddies.”

  “You remember the oddest things.”

  “I think the fact we should focus on here is I remember.”

  “Yes.” Mae rolled the earpiece between her fingers, staring at the motion. “I’m sorry you remember. I’ve wondered how you live with the things you’ve done, how they affect you, if they affect you at all, and I can see that they do. You’re not heartless or ruthless as one might assume. As, I admit, I thought you would have to be. You could have killed Derek. I expected you to kill Derek. I wanted you to kill Derek, but you actually have some kind of moral code.” She met his steady, passive gaze, her brows arched. “You don’t like killing, do you?”

  “Let’s keep that quiet, shall we?” He straightened.

  Mae took off her glasses and licked the scar at the corner of her mouth. “It’s not about nationalism or conceit or regret. You actually believe you’re doing good.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “Oh, you do. You buy into the one man can make a difference, one spy can save the world from itself mentality. You believe the fictitious film spy codswallop as much as the rest of us. Perhaps you do? Perhaps, my hole. You do.”

  “You have such delightful a way of putting things.”

  She held up the earpiece, grinning wryly. “I bet you really like the gadgets too.”

  Kitt’s mouth may or may not have fleetingly quirked.

  Mae went on smirking. “So I’ll be in your ear?”

  He pulled the stickpin from her dress. “Yes, you’ll be the devilish little voice and conscience on my shoulder, as you have been since the day you put me in my place with a tray of homemade Chelsea buns and told me you didn’t suffer fools. We already know Taittinger is a fool.” Kitt turned to the items on the chest of drawers and lifted the stickpin. “Let’s hope he’s not also a p
rick.”

  “You know, I think this story has had enough puns from Taittinger.”

  “Why does he get all the fun?” Kitt pulled his shirt over his head, his movement careful, cloth covering his grimace, but not his grunt of pain. “Please, check if Reed has an Oxford or some kind of button-down shirt in the wardrobe.” He left Mae in the bedroom, went into the bathroom and washed his hands and face. The wide mirror above the marble vanity showed livid bruising, red, blue, and purple, spread down his right side. He turned slightly and caught the bloom of colour on his right flank and the mottled skin above his kidney. He draped the towel over a shoulder and prodded the tender rainbow.

  Mae lay a rather ugly blue and white Oxford shirt on the vanity. “All in a day’s work,” she muttered, eyes meeting his in the mirror.

  His grimace faded into a dry grin, his head cocking ever so slightly to one side. “My love, bruises are just temporary tattoos.”

  “No, no. A bruise is a badge of honour.” She matched his wry smirk. “And you’ve been honoured worse than that.”

  “Indeed.” He turned about, reached out, and touched the little scar at the corner of her mouth. “This is just a scratch.”

  “Yes, a mere flesh wound.” Her eyes travelled over his variegated ribs before she met his gaze again.

  “Actually, it’s not a flesh wound, it’s a soft tissue wound.”

  “You had to go and get technical.”

  “No, I had to go and get punched.”

  “The silly things you’ve borne for my safety.”

  “Silly? Not gallant, not chivalrous, not heroic?”

  “As I said, all in a day’s work.” She clasped the two shortened fingers tickling her chin and ran her hand down his discoloured ribs, her touch delicate.

  Kitt’s breath caught.

  “I see what a nuisance I can be.”

  He gave her a faint smile and drew her hand from his torso. “You’d be less of a nuisance if you’d fetch me some ice.”

  “Of course,” she said, let his fingers go, slid another towel from a rack, and left him in the bathroom.

  Kitt grabbed the toothpaste and flipped open the top. Instead of finding his toothbrush, he wound up standing there, looking at bruised skin and bare feet, Colgate in hand, hating the sudden feeling of being left alone.

  He’d come so close. Alone. God almighty, alone, it was a startling sensation he’d never had before, even when he was the only one left alive in an oven-like shipping container, even when he’d been dying in that oven-like shipping container. His own company had been enough, always been enough, but alone meant something else entirely now, and the idea of his own company being enough had become unfathomable. What he’d tried to do had been a practical necessity, wrong, even if it was right. Mae had to understand that. He wanted her to understand.

  Idiotically, Kitt glanced at himself in the mirror again, at the tube of toothpaste in his hand. Minty blue gel hung from the white mouth, bright blobs on the grey-white tiles. He’d strangled the life from the tube. He threw the Colgate in the basin and went into the bedroom.

  Crouched by the chest of drawers, the door to a bar refrigerator open, Mae had upended an ice tray in the towel she’d taken from the bathroom. “It’s not what I wanted, Mae,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. You’d prefer something more pliable.” She rose, handed him the ice. “Peas. Frozen peas would be better.”

  He pressed the cold compress to his ribs. “It’s not what I wanted. What I said, what we were doing before Derek, you getting in that car, you walking away, it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing, it’s the right thing now, even if it’s wrong, but it’s not what I want.”

  “Oh, that.” Mae sighed, a thin, acquiescent mmn, and shut the fridge. “I’ll get you the peas,” she said, and went to the door. She paused, hand on the knob and turned, mouth pursed for a moment. “What do you want?”

  Kitt crossed the room in a few strides until there was a ruler’s length of distance between them, the space so minuscule and so vast. He looked down into her face, at the thin, red scabbed scratch on her cheek, at green-flecked hazel eyes staring back. “You. Any way you will have me. You don’t really want to marry me and I don’t want a very long engagement. Still, I’d have you any way you’d have me, except that’s not practical, not safe, and I understand your trepidation. Finally. I see exactly what you mean. The potential of losing you in two ways and being responsible for that in more ways than one, it’s not what I want, and that was not what I wanted. I thought it was better to live with a lonely heart rather than a broken one, yet neither option is right.”

  Another mmn hummed in her throat. “Maybe it’s right.”

  “You think it’s right?”

  “Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe we can talk about this when we are both home again.”

  “Whose home, mine? Yours?”

  Her lips parted slightly and something in her eyes flickered. It wasn’t defiance, acceptance of the truth, or sadness for what they both knew was best, but whatever that flicker was Kitt saw it as she held his gaze. “Does that matter?”

  “Mae.”

  This time her sigh was noisy. She dropped her eyes and rubbed the back of her head. “We’re both eejits, you know. Look at what we have. Who has that? We’re feckin’ eejits. Does it hurt very much?”

  “It’s mauling my guts.”

  “I mean all that bruising. Does the bruising hurt?”

  “It throbs, like my heart does for you.”

  She groaned. “That’s terrible.”

  “I know.” Kitt moved aside and sat on the arm of the chair beside the door, pulling the hand towel from his shoulder, setting the cloth on the seat back. “I had a dream. We were driving, you and I, a leisurely drive, like the weekend we went to the Cotswolds and had that ghastly ploughman’s lunch in Burford. But in my dream, we weren’t in England. I don’t know where we were. We took our time and drove, going along a twisting road that seemed to go on forever. The trees were changing colour. The sky was so blue. You set your hand on my thigh. You smiled at me and made a lovely suggestion. It was so simple, so straightforward. How could I say no?”

  “Oh, it was that sort of dream.”

  “No, it wasn’t that sort of dream. We drove that twisting road together, drove and drove until we found a little house with a small garden, a stone fence and lots of trees, apple trees I think. Christ, we were happy, so happy I didn’t want to wake up. We kept driving that long, winding road, your hand on my thigh, you smiling at me, and we kept coming back to the same little house with the garden, the stone fence, and apple trees. Finally, finally we stopped there. We got out of the car and went into the garden. There was a dog waiting there for us. It was a very nice dream.”

  She said nothing for a long moment, simply gazed past him and out the window at the blackness outside. When she turned, and looked him, a faint smile tipped the corners of her mouth. “Is that what you think I want?”

  “No, I think it’s what I want, a home. With you. And I don’t know how to convince you, you are my home. Do you know I never believed I had a soul? Except I’ve come to realise something very strange. You are my home. You are my soul.”

  She drew a breath, her exhale a half sigh. “You know, you had me. Almost. I was right with you, even with the bit about the dog and being your home.”

  “I liked the bit about the dog.”

  “Yes, I pictured Felix.”

  “Where did I go wrong?”

  Head shaking, tsk-tsking, she said, “You mixed up your Brontës. We are not Emily Brontë, we are Charlotte. ‘You are my soul’ is too ‘I am Heathcliff.’ You know it is.” She shook her head. “Mr Rochester and Mrs Fairfax, or yes, even Jane, yes, Jane Eyre, that’s a fair comparison to make of us, given your brooding moodiness and my high and mighty moral principles, however crumbling they may be, but Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights?” Mae rolled her eyes. “He’s a psycho and she’s not
much different... Then again, perhaps you’re correct. Perhaps you have the right Brontë after all.”

  His eyes narrowed slightly. “If one considers the depiction of debauchery and alcoholism in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I’ve always thought Anne Brontë a better fit, yet that was before I met you, my sweet, sweet Jane Valentine. And my very awkward, unoriginal, yet fanciful point is simple. Life is what you make it, and this is what I’ve made it. This is what I’ve known. Until you. Now I want a different life, a life with you. I have to keep you safe. When this is over, when we’re home again, we’ll pick up where we were, we’ll go on as we were.”

  “You mean as we were before or after you proposed a very long engagement?”

  “Both. Together, but separate, to keep it as The Consortium sees it.”

  “I don’t want that. I don’t want a very long engagement.”

  He looked at her, gaze steady, unblinking. “Is that why you returned my ring so easily?”

  “Easily?” Mae laughed faintly. “I returned your ring when you made it clear you were leaving me. Again.”

  “Technically, you were leaving me.”

  “Semantics.” Mae rubbed the back of her head again. “Semantics, Kitt.”

  “Hamish. How’s your head?”

  “I’ve quite an egg.” She moved her hand and met his eyes and leaned toward him, bending forward a little. “Feel it.”

  Kitt slid fingers into her hair and traced over the lump she’d sustained when he’d slammed her into a brick wall and squashed her, an assassin sent to kill her sandwiched between them. “Oh, you have. A little bit of a scab too. You need some ice. Good thing I have some.” He shifted the freezing compress from his ribs, ready to lay it against her skull, but she touched his chin, fingernails scuffing through his beard and down his throat.

  Kitt dropped the cold towel, ice cubes dislodged, hitting his bare feet as he stood, and his mouth was on hers, hands in her hair.

  He bumped her into the door, and kissed her slowly, with immeasurable tenderness that she matched until she laughed, the sound buzzing his lips.