by J. D. Robb
“That stung more,” Roarke decided, and ordered himself a glass of cabernet from the AutoChef.
He sipped contemplatively while watching his woman battle. Outnumbered, and in two cases well outweighed. But holding her own. And she needed this, this hard, physical challenge. To help vent some of those hard, emotional fists pummeling inside her.
Still, he hissed in sympathy as she took a punishing blow to the face.
Well, he thought, she was more or less holding her own.
They came at her at once, and she blocked one by flipping him over her back, evaded another with an agile shoulder roll, but the third caught her with a sharp backward kick that sent her down again.
“Why don’t I tone it down a bit,” Roarke suggested.
She gained her feet, blood in her eye now. “You do, and I’ll kick your ass when I’m done with these.”
He shrugged, sipped. “Your call, darling.”
“Okay.” She shook her arms, circling as they did, noting the female was favoring her left leg now, and the black male was winded. “Let’s finish this up.”
She went for the black guy. He might’ve been the biggest, but the groin shot had hurt. Using the woman as a decoy, Eve flew into a double spin, a snapping side kick, easily blocked, and used the momentum to carry her around, push her forward so that her upper body, head, and fists all connected with the black man’s crotch.
This time he went down, and stayed down.
She blocked blows with her forearms, her shoulders, gauging her ground, taking the defensive and drawing both her opponents in close.
A short-armed punch to the jaw snapped the female’s head back, and the elbow Eve jabbed into her throat took her out.
Eve grabbed her falling body and shoved it at her last opponent.
He had to spin away, but came back at her. They were both puffing now, and the sweat stung her eyes. She doubled over when his foot landed in her gut. And he was fast—but not quite fast enough to snap his leg back before she gripped his ankle and heaved.
He used the move to carry himself over into a flip, punched the landing with a grace she admired. Even as she was hurling at him, springing up to a flying kick. Her heel landed on the bridge of his nose, and she heard the satisfying crunch.
“That’s game,” Roarke said. “End program.”
The figures faded away, as did the dojo. She stood, in her work clothes now, catching her breath. “Good fight,” she managed.
“Not bad. You finished them up in . . . twenty-one minutes, forty seconds.”
“Time flies when you’re . . . ow.” She rubbed her right inner thigh. “What I get for not warming up.”
“You pull something?”
“No.” She bent to stretch it out. “Just a little tender.” She blew her hair out of narrowed eyes as she glanced toward Roarke. “Twenty minutes?”
“Twenty-one forty. Not quite the high score. I did it in nineteen twenty-three.”
She lifted her head, squinted at him as she pulled the heel of her right foot to her butt in a stretch. “Under twenty first time out?”
“All right, no, not the first time. That took me twenty and change.”
“How much change?”
He laughed. “Fifty-eight.”
“I’d say the difference is negated as you programmed the game. Gimme a sip of that.”
He offered her the glass. “Feel better?”
“Yeah. Nothing like punching your fist into a face to brighten up the day. I don’t know what that says about me either, but I don’t care.”
“Then we’ll have another game. Recreational hour’s not up,” he said before she could protest. “Initiate Program Island-3.”
They were on a white sand beach that flowed into water of blue crystal. There were flowers—pink, white, rosy red—strewn along the shoreline. Jewel-colored birds winged into a sky as clear and blue as a glass bowl.
Floating gently on the sea was a wide white bed.
“There’s a bed on the water.”
“I’ve never made love to you on the water. In it, somewhat under it, but never on it. You like the beach.” He lifted her hand to his lips. “I like the idea of floating away with you.”
She looked at him. He wore a thin white shirt now, unbuttoned so it rippled in the breeze, and loose black pants. His feet were bare, as hers were.
He’d programmed her for white as well, she noted. Floating white dress with wire-thin straps. There were flowers in her hair. A long way from a black gi and flying fists. “From combat to romance?”
“Can you think of anything that suits us more?”
She laughed. “Guess not. I wouldn’t have been able to step away like this for an hour, not a couple of years ago. I hope I’m better for it, all around.”
She took his hand, walked with him into the warm, clear water. And laughed as they rolled onto the bed. “It’s like a really sexy raft.”
“And infinitely more comfortable.” He brushed his lips over hers. “I stepped away whenever I chose. But I was never able to take myself away, as I can with you. I know I’m better for it.”
In another world there was death and pain, grief and rage. And here was love. The white sand and blue water might have been fantasy, but this world was as real as the other. Because he was real, they were real.
“Let’s take ourselves away, then. Float away.”
She drew him to her, mouth to mouth, heart to heart. The bed dipped gently on the blue water, and the restlessness inside her eased.
She tasted the wine on him, rich, and felt the warm, moist air bathe her skin as he touched her.
A dreaming time now, she thought. Without the hard brightness of that other world. Without the pain and the blood and the incessant violence of the everyday. Calming and soothing, a kind of easy arousal that steadied the heart and fed the soul.
When she held him like this, when her mouth was on his in a long, long kiss, she could forget what it was to be hungry and hurting. Being held like this, she knew she could go back to the hurt stronger.
She slid the shirt from his shoulders, let her hands explore warm skin, tough muscle, let herself float as the bed floated, when he nudged those thin straps down her arms.
The warrior was his. The woman who had only moments before waged combat, defeated foes with a concentrated and fearsome violence, was soft beneath him, pliant and eager and impossibly sweet.
She would battle again and again, shed blood and spill it. Yet, miraculously, she would come back to him, again and again. Soft and pliant and eager.
He murmured in Irish. My love. And trailed kisses over those strong shoulders, those long arms where muscles were carved in alabaster. He slipped a flower from her hair. Tracing it over her even as his lips traced. Making her shiver.
“This is something special.”
“The flower?”
“The flower, yes. Extra.” He twirled it on its stem while he watched her. “Will you trust me?”
“I always trust you.”
“I want to give you this. To give it to both of us.”
He flicked the petals over her breast. And with his tongue he tasted them, and her.
She arched up, floating still, still floating, but higher now as if the wave of heat lifted her. Desire shimmered through her like the wine. She could hear birdsong, some exotic, erotic music with the quiet underscore of water lapping against the shore. She could hear his voice, the music of it, as he drew the white gown away.
The sun, his hands, his lips, all on her skin—as hers were on his. The bed rocked on the water, soothing as a lullaby.
Then he swept the flower between her legs.
The sensation had her fingers digging into him. “God.”
He watched her, watched that baffled pleasure run over her face. His cop, his warrior, and still oddly innocent about her own pleasures.
“It’s called the Venus Bloom, and is grown on a colony on Green One. Hybridized,” he said, brushing it over her, watching her eyes
blur, “with certain properties that enhance and heighten sensation.”
Her breasts were tingling from it as if the nerves were raw-edged and exposed. And when his mouth closed over her, his teeth a light nip on her nipple, the shock of it had her crying out. He pressed the flower against her as he suckled.
Her body erupted.
She lost her mind. It was impossible to think through the barrage of sensations, the unspeakable pleasure. The shock of it had her body pulsing, plunging as the orgasm gushed through her.
“When I’m inside you . . .” His voice was thick with Ireland now, his eyes wild and blue. “When I’m in you, Eve, it will do the same to me. Taste it.” His mouth crushed to hers, his tongue sweeping in. “Feel it.” He crushed the flower against her. “Come again, I want you to come again, while I’m watching you.”
She bucked, riding out the storm, brilliantly aware of every cell in her body and the pleasure that flooded them. “I want you inside me.” She gripped his hair, dragged his mouth back to hers. “Feel what I feel.”
He eased into her, slowly, so slowly she knew from the tremors in his body how rigidly he controlled himself. Then his breath caught, and his eyes, his beautiful eyes, went blind. “Christ.”
“I don’t know if we’ll live through it,” she managed, and wrapped her legs around him. “Let’s find out. Don’t hold back.”
He wasn’t sure he could have, not now, not with the sensations that pounded him, not with her reckless words ringing in his ears. He let the chain snap and rode it with her, wave by hot, towering wave.
When the last swamped him, it swamped them both.
She wasn’t sure she would ever get her breath back, or the full use of her limbs. Her arms had slid away from him, limply, until her fingers trailed in the water.
“Is that thing legal?”
He was flat out on top of her, breathing like a man who’d climbed up, or fallen off, a mountain. And his laugh rumbled against her skin. “God, only you.”
“Seriously.”
“We really ought to have Trina tattoo that damn badge on your breast permanently. Yes. It’s been tested, and approved, and licensed. A bit tricky to acquire yet. And as you can see, its effects are transitory.”
“Good thing. Wicked effective.”
“Erotic, arousing, enhancing, without taking away the will or choice.” He lifted the flower, twirled it, then tossed it into the water where it floated. “And pretty.”
“Are all of these like that?”
“No, just the one.” He kissed her again, savored the fading heat on her lips. “But I can get more.”
“I bet.” She started to stretch, and frowned at the sound of a beep.
“Ah. Looks like we’re through the first levels, and my attention’s required.”
She sat up, shoved at her hair. She took one last look at blue water, white sand, and flowers strewn like jewels on the shoreline. “Playtime’s over.”
He nodded. “End program.”
18
EVE SAT AT ONE OF ROARKE’S SUBSTATIONS AND began to pick her way through the lives of Kirkendall and Clinton. They needed a base of operations, a place to set up, to store equipment, to plan strategies and do sims.
A place to take someone like Meredith Newman.
She started with childhood—Kirkendall in New Jersey, Clinton in Missouri. Kirkendall relocating to New York with custodial parent at the age of twelve. Clinton doing the same, to Ohio, at the age of ten. And both had enlisted in the army at eighteen. Both had been recruited into Special Forces at twenty.
Corporals Kirkendall and Clinton had both trained at Camp Powell, Miami.
“It’s like a mirror,” Eve said. “No, like magnets. They just kept duplicating each other’s moves until they slapped together.”
“No talking.”
Eve frowned over at him. Sleeves rolled, hair tied back, he hammered at a keyboard with one hand and tapped icons on a viewboard with the other. And for the last ten minutes, he’d been muttering in a stylish combination of Gaelic—she supposed—and the weird Irish slang he fell into when revved up.
Bugger this, bollocks to that, shagging, bloody, and a heavy sprinkling of fucks that sounded more and more like fook as he geared up.
“You’re talking.”
“Feisigh do thoin fein!” He rattled that off, sat back for a moment, and studied his board. “What? I’m not talking, I’m communing. Ah yes, there you are, you bitch.”
Communing, she thought as he hunkered over the keys. Get him. But she turned back to her own work. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get caught up watching him. He made a hell of a picture when he was in the zone.
The army had—as the army did—shuffled them around over the next few years. They’d lived in military housing, even after they married their respective spouses—within three months of each other. And when they had opted to leave the military, to buy homes, they’d plunked down in the same development.
She toggled back and forth between locations, financials, added Isenberry into the mix. And slid into her own zone.
When the in-house ’link beeped beside her, she wished she could curse in Gaelic.
“Detective Baxter and Officer Trueheart have arrived and would like to speak with you.”
“Have them wait in my office.” She clicked off, then shot the data and the notes she’d been working on to her office unit. “I’ve got some stuff,” she said to Roarke.
“So do I. I’m in Kirkendall’s CIA file right now. Busy, busy boy.”
“Tell me one thing. Do agencies like that pay fees—outside fees—for wet work? For special assignments?”
“Apparently. I’m finding a number of what’s listed as ‘op fees’ in his file. His top seems to be a half mil—USD—for the termination of a scientist in Belingrad. He worked fairly cheap.”
“How do we manage to live in the same world when you actually exist on a plane where half a million is cheap?”
“True love hobbles us to the same post. Freelancers can get double that for an assassination. Easily.” He looked up from his work. “I was once offered that, at the tender age of twenty—to do away with the business rival of a weapons’ runner. A bit difficult to turn it down—quick money—but murder for pay has always struck me as tacky.”
“Tacky.”
He just smiled at her. “I’m in now, so I’ll keep with it, and run through Clinton’s and Isenberry’s. It won’t take long now, as I’ve already punched through.”
“I’ll be in my office. Just for curiosity, what does . . .” She paused, brought the Gaelic phrase back in her mind, and mangled it in the repeating.
Surprise flickered over his face as he angled his head. “Where did you hear that?”
“Out of your mouth a little while ago.”
“I said that?” He looked mildly shocked—and if she wasn’t mistaken, a little embarrassed. “Well, what does come back to you. Just a flash from my youth. A very crude one.”
“Oh, then, as a cop who’s worked the tidy and genteel streets of New York for eleven years and counting, I’d be shocked by crude language.”
“Very crude,” he repeated. Then shrugged. “Basically, it’s fuck yourself in your own ass.”
“Yeah?” She brightened. “How do you say it again—the right way? I could use it on Summerset.”
He laughed, shook his head. “Go to work.”
She walked out, mumbling the phrase.
And walked into her office in time to see Baxter take a big bite of a loaded burger. Since there were no takeout bags in evidence, and the smell was real meat, she deduced it came from her own kitchen.
“Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” He grinned and chewed, and gestured toward Trueheart, who was chewing on an identical meal—with the grace, at least, to look slightly shamefaced. “We didn’t stop for fuel. Eats are better here.”
“I’ll give your compliments to the chef. Are you going to report, or just push dead cow in your mouth?”
“Both. Reached out to the primary on Moss, and on Duberry. Team working Moss, they crossed all the hatches. Nothing to go on. No specific threats filed. Moss hadn’t mentioned anything to his wife, his associates, friends, neighbors, about any threats. He and his kid drove upstate to this cabin he owned one weekend a month. Man-to-man time. Fishing and shit. Vehicle was parked, private garage—full vid surveillance, droid security. Droid on showed no tampering, but had a thirty-minute break on his disc. Same with the security cams.”
“What kind of cabin?”
Baxter nodded, picked up one of the fries he had ordered along with the burger. “We thought the same. Why go through all that when it’d be easier to take him out in a cabin upstate. Troy?”
Trueheart swallowed hastily. “The cabin’s in a gated, recreational community, and the security is good. The investigators believed, due to the nature of the explosive device and the ability to jam the lot security, that the possibility was strong on urban terrorism. Several other vehicles were destroyed, and the lot suffered some structural damage.”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “Smarter. Add the urban terrorism element to murk the waters.”
“There was no evidence to conclude Moss was target specific, but if so, they concluded it was because he was a judge, not because of any particular case. Moss had also been approached as a possible mayoral candidate, so the team factored in politics.”
He cleared his throat, and continued when no one commented. “There was no evidence, no reason for them to look at Kirkendall at that time. He’d made no threat, and his case had been resolved about three years prior to the incident. With, ah, what we have now, we can look at Kirkendall, his pattern and pathology, and conclude that he hit Moss in the city rather than at the cabin because it, um, murked the waters. And it was more of a challenge. More of a statement.”
“Agreed,” Eve said and watched Trueheart take an easing breath. “What about the device?”
“Well, that’s pretty interesting.” Baxter gestured with his burger. “And another reason the primary and team concluded urban terrorism. What they were able to sweep up from scene, then sim, indicated a military-style device. This wasn’t any homemade boomer some yahoo stuck together in his basement because he was pissed off some judge made him pay child support. Lab guys creamed over it—primary’s words—plaston base, and it don’t come cheap, electronic trigger designed to blow when the engine engaged, and . . .” He made a wide gesture, pulling his arms apart. “ . . . explode outwards for additional damage.”