by Leah Braemel
Shit. There was no use lying. “Yes.”
“You let me think you wanted to talk to me.”
“I didn’t have to let you think anything. I was glad you picked up. I liked talking to you.”
“You lied to me about where you were, and yet you let me continue to think you were in Africa. You let me worry about you when you were safe the whole time.”
Not safe exactly. The op could have gone very differently if Davis’s source had been discovered. “I didn’t lie this morning. I told you I was safe. What more do you want from me?”
“Lying by omission is still lying.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You could have said, ‘I’m not in Africa.’ Instead you told me about being out in the country, watching the sunset.”
He could almost see the wheels in her head turn as she replayed the conversation, see the moment she realized his error.
“It couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t allowed to say where I was, or anything about the mission.” I’m still not supposed to. “It’s part of my job, Sandy. It’s what I do and who I am. You know that.”
“Look, I know you can’t give me details when it comes to stuff with Hauberk. I get that.” She took a step back when he moved toward her. “Okay, maybe I didn’t get that, exactly. But do you know how scared I was when I thought you were in the middle of that coup? And you let me think you were still there.” Damn, her eyes were glistening. He’d done that to her. Yet here she was standing so proud, so strong, refusing to give in to the tears.
If she was going to be part of his life, she’d have to learn to deal with it. He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and sighed, knowing she was about to walk out the door. Out of his life. “It’s part of the job, sunshine. If you can’t deal with it, you know where the door is.”
The sadness in her eyes, the pain in her voice tore through him. She reminded him of a puppy dog someone had kicked to the gutter and abandoned.
Unable to face her any longer, he walked into his bedroom and stopped beside the bed. He smoothed his hand over the quilt. Even if she left, she’d still be here. Long after her scent faded from his sheets, she’d still be there in the quilt. She’d be in the pictures she’d so thoughtfully framed and hung on the wall. Anytime he saw that dark green she’d painted his walls, he’d be reminded of her.
The shadow in the doorway betrayed her presence seconds before she spoke, “I don’t like that you can lie to me so easily. I need to be able to trust that you’re telling me the truth. Even if it’s just to say, ‘I can’t tell you where I’m going or what I’m doing.’ I could take that.”
She said that now but soon she’d be throwing it back in his face. “I thought you were leaving.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
No. But she’d leave anyway. She should leave. “I can’t change who I am, Sandy.”
“I’m not asking you to. I feel like I don’t know you. That you don’t want me to know you. I learned more about you talking with Scott this weekend than you’ve ever told me about you.” She caught his hand. “I’m simply asking that you let me in. That you trust me enough to be honest with me.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking. You haven’t a clue who I am, or what I’ve done. Scott doesn’t even know.”
“So tell me. Who are you, Troy? What have you done?”
For such a simple question, the answer was so complicated. Yet it wasn’t, was it? “I’m an assassin. Oh, a government-sponsored one, but I killed—kill— people for a living. And I’m very good at my job.” He faced her. “Last night I put my gun barrel to the forehead of an unarmed man and pulled the trigger. I put two bullets in his chest to take him down, and then I walked over to him and waited until the light went out of his eyes and put another in his brain just to make sure the fucker was dead.” He finally looked her in the face and found compassion, along with tears, filling her eyes. “I’d do it the same way if I had to do it over again. Is that honest enough for you?”
“You did it for Scott. And for Dev. I heard what you told Scott, remember?”
“Why I did it wouldn’t make a difference to the courts. He was unarmed and I shot him anyway. Face it, I’m a murderer.”
“I’ve read the reports both from our people and from the newspapers. Garcia was responsible for dozens of deaths.” Her voice was soft but sure. “You probably saved dozens if not hundreds more. He was the murderer.”
“So am I.” He’d killed so many times he’d lost count. No. That wasn’t true. He knew each and every kill he’d made. He may not have known their names but he could tell her their hair color, their age. He could still see the looks on their faces when they’d died. Surprise. Shock. Anger. Hatred.
She grabbed his forearms and shook him, surprising him with her strength. “You are different than him. You killed people who deserved to die. He killed innocents.”
So have I. The trust in her eyes, the softness of her voice forced him to look away. His gaze landed on a picture she’d framed and set on his dresser. The one of him and his father, taken a week before he’d died. Before he’d been murdered. Not that his father was innocent, but his father’s death, and his part in it, had been the start of that slippery slope.
“Let me in, Troy. Tell me who you are. What you want, what you think. Your hopes. Your dreams.”
“I don’t have dreams. I am who I am, Sandy.” He held out his arms. “What you see is what you get.”
“I don’t believe that.” She wasn’t lying; she didn’t see what he really was. How could she? You had to have evil inside you to understand evil. There wasn’t an ounce of evil in her body.
“Trust me on this. I’m not the type you take home to introduce to the folks.” Shit. That wouldn’t help him convince her to stay now, would it? Guess he’d given up that dream the minute he’d left for Val Varde.
Sam was right. He never should have gotten involved with her. Because now he knew what he could have had, what others had. And he’d never have it again.
“I’m not leaving, Troy. I’m not.”
No one had ever stuck around long enough to care.
“Please. Talk to me. Let me in.”
“Why?” he shouted. “I lied to you about where I’d gone. I can guarantee you I’ll lie to you again.”
“As you said, it’s part of your job, Troy. I should have remembered that.”
Jesus fucking Christ. He speared his fingers through his hair at her steadfastness. “You don’t get it. Troy McPherson’s not real. He doesn’t exist. I’m really Colin. Colin Fitzgerald. And I’m a murderer, Sandy. I kill people for a living.”
“You kill people the government’s asked you to kill. People who deserve to die. You wouldn’t hurt me. I know that.” She took a step forward, and another, until she was inches away from him and laid her hand flat on his chest. “Please, Troy. Colin. Let me in.”
Shaken by her implicit trust, he stared at the photos once more. The one of Scott and him at Buckner Academy, of his mother and father with him as an infant. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know. How about we start with simple things like what’s your favorite color? Or your favorite dessert? What’s your ideal vacation?”
“Navy. Sherry trifle, and snorkelling in the British Virgin Islands.” Oh Christ. He couldn’t do this. “What do you really want to know, Sandy? Cut the bullshit circling around. Just ask me what you want to know straight-out.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper, “Do you still blame yourself for your father’s death?”
She knew about that? Ah, yes, she’d spent the weekend with Scott. Who had told her the sanitized, official Brannally version. She deserved the truth about him and all his ugly secrets. She needed the truth, if only to open her eyes as to who he really was.
“His death is entirely my fault. Oh, I may not have pulled the trigger but he’s dead because of me.”
“You were ten years old. You believed your friend when he said you should—”
> Was he really going to do this? “It didn’t happen that way. I knew I was taking him to his death. I may not have consciously realized they’d kill him right there in front of me, but I think I suspected it.”
“I don’t understand.” He touched her cheek, loving and despairing that every emotion she felt was right there for him to read with not a trace of subterfuge or denial. She would never have made a good mole, he realized. She was too open. Too honest.
“There was no friend I was to meet at the park; there never was. I deliberately betrayed my own father and led him to his slaughter.” And still she looked up at him, so trusting. God, she killed him. “Da was a member of the IRA. He made bombs for them. Bombs that killed people. Innocent people. One day, my da and his mates decided to place a bomb in a room above a shop where a group of the loyalists were meeting later that day. But they hadn’t told my mum about it. She was there picking up some fish when the bomb went off.
“I heard him talking about it with some of his friends a couple nights after her funeral. They were talking about how the bomb had gone off prematurely and what he’d done wrong. I hated him, Sandy. I wanted to kill him myself. But I didn’t think I could have done it. He wasn’t a big man, but he was on guard, you know?” He could still hear his father’s thick accent, feel the weight of his father’s hand on his head. Stop your whining, boy. It’s sorry I am that she was there, but your ma knew we do what we have to to get these feckin’ Brits out of our land.
Chapter Twenty
Sandy doubted Troy realized his accent had thickened. Or that his voice was cracking, or that tears glistened in his eyes. She’d lived such a pampered existence, while he’d grown up surrounded by violence.
He was silent for a long moment, lost in his memories. She was about to prompt him when he took a deep breath and continued, “So one day on my way home from school, I overheard some loyalists chatting. I stopped to talk to them. Told them what da had done, told them he was planning to bomb a market where there’d be more innocents killed.”
Most ten-years-olds still idolized their fathers. How hard it must have been to know your father was a murderer capable of coldly planning the death of innocent women and children.
“They asked if I’d bring my father to meet them at the park around the corner from our house.” He’d lapsed into a monotone recitation, as if he were deliberately stuffing all his emotions away. Which he probably was. “They said they wanted to try to convince him to be an inside man for them. I agreed. To this day I don’t know if I consciously knew they’d kill him right there. At that point, it didn’t matter to me. When he was lying at my feet, his blood draining into the gutter, all I could think was that justice had been served. That he deserved to die for killing Ma.” His harsh laugh didn’t fool her into thinking he wasn’t feeling guilty. “What does a feckin’ ten-year-old kid know about justice?”
More than his father, though she didn’t voice the thought.
“After Da’s death, all his friends came ’round the house. Told me how they’d avenge him, promised they’d find the fucker who sold him out and make him pay. They promised that when I got older I could join them, that they’d teach me to shoot and make bombs so I could get my vengeance against the bloody Brits. That they wouldn’t let Paddy’s boy grow up thinking his father died for nought.
“The next day Senator Brannally showed up at the door along with four security guards and the press. He said that he’d been in contact with an uncle of my ma’s in New Hampshire. That as my nearest living relative, my uncle had appointed the senator as my temporary legal guardian and he was to take me back to the States with him.” He shook his head. “Next thing I knew I was on a plane flyin’ over the ocean with the senator telling me he’d make sure the IRA never bothered me again.”
“What happened to your uncle?”
“He died a few months later in a car accident and left my guardianship to the senator. There wasn’t much money but the senator stepped up and made sure I wanted for nothing. He paid for my education both at the Academy and later at Boston College.”
He lay on the bed and draped his arm over his eyes. “Turned out I’m my father’s son after all. I learned how to make bombs and how to shape them so they’ll kill the people on one side of a room but not the other. How to disguise them so people wouldn’t find them until it was too late. How to kill people in hand-to-hand combat without making a sound. I know what parts of the body can be hurt causing maximum pain with minimum effort. I was good at it, Sandy. I still am.”
She crawled on the bed beside him. “If it didn’t bother you, you’d still be in the Diplomatic Service.” And he wouldn’t be telling her this as if it were a confession. No, despite his denials that killing didn’t bother him, she bet he could see the face of each one of his victims. And that each one of them had deserved to die.
He dropped his arm. “I’m a killer. Don’t make me into something I’m not. After I killed Garcia? I slept as if I hadn’t a care in the world.”
She took his hands in hers and squeezed. From the dark circles under his eyes, she doubted he’d slept as well as he’d claimed. “You did what you had to, Troy. You slept because the world is a better place, a safer place, without him in it.”
“I’m no different than him. No matter what type of spin you try to put on it. I killed him in cold blood and it doesn’t bother me a whit. Is that the type of lover you want?”
Yes. “You are different than he was because you’re sitting here having this conversation with me right now. You’re worried about what I think about what you’ve done. He wouldn’t have cared what anyone thought.”
“You keep telling yourself that.” He rolled onto his side, away from her.
After a brief debate whether to leave him alone, Sandy undressed, crawled onto the bed and snuggled against him. Though his breathing evened out she knew he wasn’t asleep, but he obviously didn’t want to talk about it, or anything, anymore.
As much as she complained about her family and her mother interfering in her love life, she still loved her family. Troy—Colin—had to live with the knowledge his father had killed his mother, and others. Would she have been capable at ten of dealing with that knowledge? Probably not. Yet at ten years old, he’d come up with a plan, albeit a flawed one as it had left him orphaned. Thank heavens Senator Brannally had gotten him out of Ireland. But he’d lost all family after that and had been alone.
She pressed a kiss to the spot between his shoulder blades. “You’re not alone anymore, Troy. I’m right here with you.”
Troy awoke, immediately noticing three things. First, he had to piss like a goddamned racehorse because he hadn’t hit the can before he’d fallen asleep. Second, his stomach was gnawing its way to his backbone because he hadn’t eaten since before he’d left Val Varde almost twenty hours before. Third, and much more enjoyable, Sandy lay snuggled against him. This was what he wanted to wake to every morning. Not the bladder and hunger issues, he amended, but Sandy’s warm body soft and pliable against his.
He shifted to his side so he could watch her sleep. Her hair had fallen across her face so he brushed the strand that had stuck to her bottom lip. Without waking, she rolled onto her back. The sheet fell away at her movement, baring her breasts. They were every man’s fantasy. Curvy and luscious, the nipples a soft pink matching her lips.
His stomach growled at the same time his bladder sternly informed him that any thoughts of waking Sandy with a morning woody would be out of the question. He eased from her side and padded into the bathroom, closing the door before he turned on the light so he wouldn’t wake her.
The face looking back at him in the mirror was the same he saw every day. Yet it seemed different today. Oh sure, there was two-days’ growth of beard that he seldom sported, and the circles under his eyes were a bit darker thanks to the damned jet travel. But telling her about what he’d done, who he really was?
“What’s she done to you, mate? You’re goin’ all soft over her.�
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And he liked it. Leaving his reflection to ponder the changes, he stripped off his clothes and took care of the most pressing matter, then turned on the shower. Feeling invigorated, though his stomach still grumbled, he toweled himself off and walked naked to the bedroom where Sandy still slumbered.
She’d sprawled out since he’d left the bed, taking up not only her side but half of his too. Damned if it didn’t bother him a whit. He crawled back into the bed and hefted himself up on one elbow to look down at her. With the winter weather, her skin was whiter than normal, her freckles standing out against her milky skin. He kissed the bridge of her nose, half expecting to taste cinnamon. Her forehead was similarly given a kiss, followed by her chin. He worked his way down her body, placing soft kisses and caresses along a meandering path.
She was soft and pliant, warm. Inviting. Her breathing changed from its regular slow breaths of a deep sleep, telling him she was awake even though her eyes hadn’t opened.
Though he knew she expected him to go straight to her pussy, he took his time, continuing his exploration of her body, kissing his way down one long limb. He paid special attention to her toes, his thumbs rubbing her sole, careful not to tickle. His trip back up the other leg was just as slow, taking extra special time at her knee and the tender skin of her inner thigh. Once again he knew he surprised her when he bypassed her mound and headed back up her body.
Her fingers threaded through his hair, tightening in a futile attempt to stop him when he approached the ticklish spot above her hips. He lifted his head and watched her eyes open. Oh yeah, this was exactly the way he wanted to wake up every morning. Moving ever so slowly, he touched his lips to the tender skin of her belly. “Morning, sunshine.”
“Someone woke up full of ideas.” With a tiny wiggle, she lifted her hips, adjusting the angle so his erection slipped through her folds. Heaven couldn’t feel any better than it did to be nestled in her moist heat, her breasts pressed against his chest, her lids sleep-heavy over smoky blue eyes that promised more than great sex.