Discipline.
This was as far as he was going to let her in.
“Okay, then,” she said softly. “I think you know the answer already. You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
She took a deep breath. “Relationships are a two-way street. There’s give and there’s take. You see it as self-sacrifice because you don’t see the other side of the coin—what the other person has given up. There’s always another side. Always. It may not happen at the same time, but there’s always give and take in a relationship. Compromise. Sacrifice. You give things up for the other person’s sake because that’s how it works. They give things up for you, too.”
He sat for a long time saying nothing. She knew he was processing what she was saying. He was looking for the flaws, the way out.
She added the kicker. “You have to give a little to get something back.”
His eyes narrowed. “Really.” His jaw flexed. Even the corners got hard and defined.
She lifted her hands up, as if she was explaining the obvious. “You don’t give anything. You screw women, you do your job and you leave people behind. If you just once gave something, someone might give something back.”
“You have no idea who I am,” Daniel growled.
“I have a better idea than you think,” she returned. “I bet you live alone in an apartment or condo without a garden and the last time you were there was months ago.” She lifted her brow, as Daniel did when he was silently asking for an answer.
His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t been there for months because a revolution got in the way of going back.”
“I’m right on the rest of the details,” she insisted.
His chest lifted and fell. “Yes,” he said heavily.
“I’m betting you don’t have a best friend, or if you have someone you call a friend you haven’t seen them in years, perhaps even a decade, or maybe since high school or college.”
Daniel licked his lips. “We had a disagreement.”
“And your pride wouldn’t let you patch it up,” Olivia guessed.
A furrow dug between his brows. “This isn’t funny.”
“Because I’m right?” She touched his thigh. “What did your friend do that was so horribly wrong?”
Daniel had to take two breaths to get it out. “He saved my life.”
She sat back, astonished. “So there have been people in your life who care about you. You just ruthlessly prune anyone out of your life who does care. When do you plan on booting me out the door?”
“God, don’t.” He leaned forward, resting his head on the heel of his hands. “Don’t do this, Olivia. Please don’t.”
“Relationships are an act of faith.”
“Please tell me you are not talking about love.” His voice was muffled by his hands.
She picked her words with care. “I’m talking about people. The human race. Perhaps you should try joining it. If you give back—”
His head shot up and his gaze stabbed her. “Give back? Like you give back? Like you gave and gave and gave for your ex?”
She recoiled. “How do you know…?” How could he possibly know about Jerry? Then she relaxed. “You don’t know anything.”.
“I know as much as you do,” he snarled. “I know that you married not long out of high school. I know he worked all day and left you at home without a career. I bet it was only after the divorce you found out about all the other women he’d had affairs with. A string of them, some of them women you knew well. He was fucking them every which way from Sunday while you were washing his socks and pressing his shirts. So after the divorce you got yourself a career and a defensive shell a turtle would be proud of and no one and nothing has got inside that shell since then.”
She swallowed. Daniel’s summary was so uncannily accurate it was scary.
Daniel leaned forward. “You might like sex, but you’re so scared of getting hurt again you keep everyone at elbow’s length with that ice wall around you. You’ll die a withered up old lady, wondering why no one loves you.”
The tears burned at the back of her eyes but she kept them at bay through sheer willpower. “Is this how you cut people out of your life, Daniel? Is this how you’re going to get rid of me? By making me bleed so badly I want to leave?”
Shock skittered over his face and his eyes widened. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her to him, holding her tightly against him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m so sorry, Olivia. I didn’t realize I was doing it. It just comes out of me, like poison. You have this exalted opinion of me, but I’m really a bastard. I don’t want you to go. Not yet. Stay. Please stay.”
Her tears did flow then, for he was speaking Spanish again.
She slid her arm around his neck and let herself cry and let Daniel soothe her. His hands stroked her back and her face and he kissed her brow and temple and lips. Then his index finger slipped under her chin and tilted her face up so she was looking at him.
He took a deep, calming breath. “Vistarians have this idealized image of what makes a good Vistarian man. I’m not one of them, although I always wanted to be one. My friend, the one you guessed I had—Duardo…he’s one of them. He’s fine, honorable, a brilliant soldier. I’m just the son of a bastard, in fact as well as in nature.” He rubbed his hair with his hand. “I get my coloring and my eyes from my grandmother’s family tree. British. That’s why I pose as a British businessman with a built-in suntan.”
He dropped his hand to her shoulder and it stayed there, big, heavy and warm. “My mother left my father and me when I was seven. I don’t know why. My father would never tell me and he died when I was eleven. I didn’t have any other close relatives, so I got farmed out to families in Pascuallita. Duardo’s family took me in for a time. That’s when I met him. Then Duardo’s father got sick and they had to find another place for me. I got passed around a lot after that, so I joined the army when I was sixteen and that took care of the passing around.” He took a breath and she knew that it was costing him to talk about this. Perhaps this was the first time he’d ever spoken of it aloud.
“You still didn’t belong, even in the Army, did you?” she guessed.
“No, but I was good at it and it was something to do. Then they decided that the Intelligence Unit would be a perfect fit for me and they were right. It’s a good place for lone wolves, there. After that, it was much easier going.” He took a breath. “Except I found out the world has more people like me, than like the Vistarians I wanted to be like. That was a shock when I first realized it. It was my job to find and work with people who will betray their country and you know what? Women will do it faster than men and they will do it for love. Men can be bought quicker than women. I understand that, but not why someone will do it for love.”
He was silent for a long time. Olivia tried to sit up, but he held her still.
“No, wait,” he said softly. His hand came up, the fingers together. The tips touched her lips. It was an oddly formal gesture. A very Vistarian one. She wondered if Daniel was aware of just how much he reverted to his native gestures and customs when he was speaking Spanish with her. She didn’t think he was aware of just how much his personality had been changing in the last few hours. It was as if his real nature was unearthing itself—one that had been buried beneath roles and masks and fake personalities and nationalities and accents and customs. Repressed and kept out of sight. It wasn’t as if he was actually changing personalities or morphing into a different person. It was as though he was slipping on a different coat.
One that suited him far better than the last one, Olivia thought.
“I said some terrible things to you a few moments ago,” he told her, his thumb stroking along her jaw. That was another aspect of the Vistarian Daniel. He touched. He reached for her far more easily than before.
“You don’t have to do this,” she told him, knowing what he was about to say. “I wasn’t exactly gentle myself.”
He
shook his head. “Only you were right and I was wrong. I was wrong and I’m sorry. You should never change except for one thing. You should break down the ice wall. Let people in again. The world has far more assholes like me and your ex in it than the sort of upstanding Vistarians you should love, like the Duardo Peñas of the world, but you should try to find one. You deserve one.”
“As it happens, if we ever get out of this, I know exactly where to find one.” She kept her face immobile, fighting to hide the truth that must surely blaze from it if she gave in to any expression at all. Surely he could see that truth?
Daniel’s jaw shifted just a little. The smallest amount. Shock. “You do?”
She gave a small nod. “I haven’t done anything about it until now. These events here, well….” She shrugged. “I’ve decided that if I make it out of here, I’m going to do my best to get him to stay in my life once and for all. I’m sick of waiting for him to figure it out for himself.”
“He’s an idiot,” Daniel declared. “Tell him I told him so and that he should thank God every day you choose to be in his life.”
She smiled. She couldn’t help it. “I will.”
* * * * *
There was no disorientation when she woke the next time, but there was no warm body beneath her either. Instead, she found a mound of pillows, heaped to hold more or less his shape. They smelled of him. Vaguely, she remembered being moved, earlier. A kiss on the temple. Soft sounds around her.
Late afternoon sun streamed in the windows.
The chair and wedge were still in under the door, but the ceiling tile was back in place. She slid her hand under the pillow that was nominally hers on the other side of the bed and felt cold metal.
Daniel had left her the gun.
She could almost hear his voice in her mind, the words in Spanish. She could guess the answer to the question if she had asked it. “Of course you must keep the gun. I can always steal another one. We are surrounded by guns, are we not?”
Olivia shivered and sat up. She was wide awake. She lifted the gun into her lap and looked at it. There was a stylized “HK” on the front end of the barrel and a more normal looking “USP” farther back from it. The letters were stamped again close to the bottom of the handgrip. The initials meant nothing to her.
The safety lever was sitting so that a white mark lined up with the red dot on it. She held the gun up now, miming Daniel’s movements and assumed that from the way Daniel had moved the safety to “off” during the night that it was now “on”.
Just that few seconds holding the gun up made her realize how heavy it was. Daniel had made it look lightweight, holding it motionless in the air for those long moments Serrano had been manipulating the door last night. Her hand had begun to shake within seconds.
She took a minute to figure out how to eject the thing that held the bullets and when it popped out an inch or so, she jumped. She pulled it out and examined it.
The top bullet in the clip seemed extraordinarily large to her eyes. Big, bronze and lethal. She wondered if these were .45s. They looked to be about 45 millimeters across.
There was no way to tell how many bullets there was in the clip. There was also no way to tell if there was already a bullet loaded in the chamber of the gun, as some professionals liked to do to have a spare up their sleeves. She wasn’t going to look up the barrel.
If it came to using the gun, it didn’t matter how many bullets there were in it. She was just going to fire the damn thing and try to hit lethal parts of other people’s bodies. Having an extra bullet or not wouldn’t matter a damn.
She put the clip back in and looked up at the ceiling. Like Daniel, she was going to have to hide the gun during the day. She was on Serrano’s shit-list. If she was found with a weapon, he’d do more than just slap her around.
She pushed all the pillows and covers off the bed and balanced the desk chair in the middle of it. The mattress was a hard and unforgiving thing and now Olivia was grateful for the uncomfortable box. She carefully balanced herself on the chair and found she could reach the ceiling. She pushed up the same tile Daniel had lifted aside, slipped the gun up inside the ceiling and rested it on the cross brace of the tile supports. It wouldn’t do to have the gun push through the delicate ceiling tiles because it was too heavy.
She used both hands to maneuver the tile and let it drop back into place, then climbed back down onto the bed, put the chair back under the desk and headed for the bathroom.
Time for a shower, then dress, makeup and to head downstairs to the public rooms.
She halted and leaned against the bathroom door as it occurred to her that for a handful of magical, wonderful hours she had forgotten to feel like a hostage. She had been Olivia Davenport. Free, alive and—although Daniel didn’t know it—in love.
He had given her exactly what she had asked for, a highlight to make the worst day of her life the best, instead.
Smiling, she pushed herself off the door and closed it.
Chapter Eleven
It was getting close to five-thirty and the waiters were banging china around in the dining room, when Olivia appeared at the lounge bar doorway, escorted by an armed guard.
Daniel didn’t need to look up to know it was her. Just the murmured whispers, the turned heads and the elbows in ribs were enough to tell him she had arrived.
He kept his head down, scanning the three-month-old Times.
“She looks weird,” Jenny said, getting up from the table next to him. “They must have really worked her over this time.” She hurried away.
That jerked his head up. Olivia would have come through the dining room to reach the bar so he scanned the back end first.
She stood alone, looking for a place to sit. The guard had already left her there. He was heading back to his post. Daniel could glimpse him through the arches, passing through the dining room.
For a moment, Daniel’s heart stopped. So did time. Sound muffled down.
Olivia was wearing jeans. He didn’t know she even possessed such things. On her, with her legs, the jeans seemed to go on forever and ever. They were not just any old jeans.
At the beginning of the diplomatic junket, when the Insurrectos had been on their best behavior, there had been social occasions arranged, including tours to the local markets and commercial districts and the precious silver mines. They had been designed to demonstrate the Insurrectos had established peace and were maintaining it. Olivia must have brought some of the local clothing while she was on those tours.
Oh my God, Daniel breathed in his mind, looking at her wearing them now. Vistarian women had a way with jeans that Daniel personally preferred to the latest fashion that clung to a woman’s leg all the way down to the ankle. These clung everywhere, too, sort of. They were low cut, rising only as high as her hips, making a man wonder how a woman held them up, even as he admired the hips the jeans were clinging to. They were a distraction to a man, especially if he happened to be behind a woman. He was lost if she was walking away from him.
The jeans were designed to go over boots, so they were gently flared over the calves. Vistarian women did something to them that included some of the beautiful black lace that came from up in the mountains around Pascuallita, so that when she walked, the jeans flared out and the lace was displayed. It gave a glimpse of slender ankle and calf beneath. Daniel didn’t care how much flesh might be on display elsewhere—give a man a hint of flesh that was supposed to be covered up and he was intrigued. Vistarian women’s jeans were the most distracting, disarming garment Daniel had ever seen for such simple workmanlike clothes.
On Olivia, they turned into a seductive enticement that might leave him stuttering along in her wake.
She wore proper Vistarian boots beneath them, making her even taller. Black boots, with the right heel. In those heels, she would be able to look him in the eye.
There was a black belt threaded through the belt loops of the jeans and one of the elaborate filigree silver belt buckles that
the country had begun to produce before the revolution had shut down all the silver factories. Where Olivia had got it from was a mystery. Perhaps Serrano had forced a factory open at gunpoint just to impress the diplomats. The filigree lace matched the lace on her jeans and the lace of her camisole. She wore a camisole as her top and nothing else, except for one of her light summer jackets.
Daniel swallowed.
No one else in the bar would know that what she was wearing was lingerie. No one else would know that she habitually went without a bra. It meant that she must have dressed this way for him. To tease him. To drive him mad.
It might work yet.
She was wearing sunglasses to help with the illusion that she was still recovering from the harshness of Serrano’s questioning session. Daniel wanted to hug her for remembering to play it as if she were weak and pathetic. The more Serrano thought he had pulled all the stuffing out of her the less he would consider her a threat.
She had also left her hair down. The fast clean and air drying last night must have ruined her usual attempts to get it all twisted up into one clip and the clip itself was possibly still in some dark corner of the room where she had been questioned. She had brushed her hair, but it was anything but straight. It tumbled and curled and bounced down to her waist, a sea-foam-colored glorious mane that made his hands itch to plunge themselves into it and hold her head still while he did all sorts of wicked things to her.
Daniel realized that his whole body was held taut as he stared at her, while his thoughts tumbled through his mind like water over a cascade. Wild thoughts. Impossible thoughts.
His heart creaked with the strain of some of them.
She’s perfect, came the whisper.
Olivia pulled the sunglasses down to the end of her nose as Jenny threaded her way through the tables, heading for her. The blue eyes fixed on him, direct and uncompromising. Her expression didn’t change because she knew everyone was watching her but he knew she was acknowledging him.
It was as if someone had taken a cleaver to his chest. If he hadn’t been sitting down, he would have fallen.
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