Dark of Night

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She pulled back to look at him, laughter lighting her face and making her eyes sparkle and dance. “New one, huh?” she asked as she began to move against him.

  He nodded. “Oh, yeah.” His experience with sex, pre-Sophia, was ridiculously limited, and she knew it because, well, he'd told her the truth.

  They'd talked about a lot of things in those first few days A.S.—after Sacramento—and while he hadn't been ready to go into full, gory detail about his farce of a relationship with Kathy-slash-Anise, he had confessed to Sophia that his full sexual oeuvre was limited to five interactions with one woman who didn't particularly like him, even though she'd pretended otherwise.

  Sophia hadn't fainted at that news, no doubt because her own baggage was also quite cumbersome when it came to sex.

  That first morning they'd woken up in each other's arms, they'd made a promise to be honest in regard to their intimacy—since it was a potential minefield for both of them.

  So, yes. Having sex standing up in the middle of the bathroom was a new one for him. Although there really wasn't much he could do but stand there holding her, the muscles in his arms and shoulders getting quite the workout.

  Which maybe meant he was a wimp, because she was petite and didn't weigh more than a hundred pounds. But Dave was discovering that holding on to a hundred-pound woman was a very different experience than holding on to a hundred-pound woman while having sex with her. “Ah, God,” he said. “Soph …”

  “Thumbs up or down?”

  “Oh, up,” he told her. “Big up.”

  “Me too,” she gasped, her breath warm against his ear. “But feel free to, you know, set me on the counter, by the sink, if you need to—”

  “Not a chance.” Dave loved where his hands were, loved the sensation of her legs and buttocks straining to push him more fully inside of her, but when he shifted slightly to get a better grip, he discovered—eureka!— there was something he could do besides simply stand there and not drop her. He shifted again to hold most of her weight with his left arm, freeing up his right hand to touch her again, with slightly better aim.

  She sighed his name, and that, combined with the increased speed of her rocking motion, was enough to bring him teetering to the edge of his release, so he touched her harder, deeper, and she came with a moan and a shudder that he loved as much as he loved his new drawer and closet space. And in that fraction of a heartbeat, in the brief instant of time between his knowing that he, too, was going to orgasm —now—and the deep rush of mind-blowing pleasure that was already starting to surge through his body, he remembered the phone call.

  He'd yet to tell Sophia that her father was in the hospital.

  Dave came with a crash, with a shout—“God, I love you!”—pulling her warm, pliant body more tightly against his, as she kept coming around him, urging him, as always, to give her more, more.

  It should have diminished his pleasure—his remembering the unhappy message he'd promised to deliver. It should have made him ashamed for forgetting something so important in the first place.

  It should have, but it didn't.

  Sophia's father was a rat-bastard and few besides his sister Maureen would miss him when he was gone.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Dave said when he got his vocal cords working again.

  Sophia just laughed, still clinging to him, nuzzling his neck, ankles locked just beneath his butt.

  Arms shaking, knees wobbly, he carried her out of the bathroom and dumped her onto the bed, collapsing beside her. “That was a solid thirty on the fun scale.”

  She laughed again. “When is it ever not a thirty?”

  In an effort to lighten things up—mostly for his own sake, since the simple fact that he was in a relationship with the woman of his dreams was often enough to get him choked up—Dave had suggested a rating system, one to ten, for each new-to-him sexual position, of which there were many. And yes, in all honesty, it was a way, too, for him to acknowledge his lack of experience—by addressing it straight on, with humor.

  “Sweetheart”—he opened his eyes to do his best Bogart—“for me, just being in a room with you is a twenty.”

  She had her head propped up on one elbow so that she could look down at him, her eyes wide and serious as her smile slowly faded.

  “You know that I love you, too, right?” she finally murmured.

  He gazed back at her for several long moments before he responded. He waited until he knew for sure that his voice wouldn't vibrate with emotion. “You don't have to say that.”

  “It's true,” Sophia insisted. “These past few months have been …” She shook her head. “Sad, because of Nash dying, but… Also … I don't know if I've …” She looked down toward the jumble of bright blue sheets beneath them and started again. “I can't remember ever being this …” She searched for the right word as Dave waited, his heart in his throat. She met his gaze again, her eyes guileless and nearly as blue as the sheets. “Content.”

  Not quite the word he was hoping for. Still, he smiled because he was okay with it. Fact was, he'd be okay with a wide variety of less than words. Such as satisfied. Comfortable. At ease.

  At peace.

  Dave knew he was Sophia's second choice. He'd accepted that weeks ago, the very first night they'd made love. It would be enough. It was enough.

  “I'm glad,” he told her now, reaching up to push her hair back behind her ear, and it wasn't a lie. He let her look long and hard into his eyes so she would know that he meant it, that he accepted her words for what they were—something good, if not fairy-tale perfect.

  Her mouth quirked up into a smile. “You have no idea how hot you are, do you?”

  “What?” Dave laughed as he realized what she'd said, and then rolled his eyes. “Yeah, actually,” he said, “I'm pretty sure I do. I fall somewhere between pickled and poached. Maybe, right after I get a haircut, for about two minutes, I can pass for steamed and … As fascinating as this discussion is, can we save it for tonight? Because—and I should have told you this before, but you stupefied me with your nakedness. …”

  “I'm still naked,” she pointed out, that lip again between her teeth as she played with the hair on his chest, and dear God, Dave could see a whole lot of as long as we're going to park in the south lot dot dot dot in her eyes.

  “Right,” he said, as his body stirred at the thought of staying in bed with this woman—his woman—for the rest of the morning, “so I better talk fast. That was your Aunt Maureen on the phone, Soph. Your father's back in the hospital.”

  Jimmy Nash had been dead now for nearly two months, and he could confirm, absolutely, that being dead sucked.

  And, yeah, it was true that not being dead had its occasional negative moments, too. For example, getting out of bed for the first time, after the surgeon removed a small but deadly chunk of lead from his chest. That had been unpleasant.

  And watching his memorial service via webcam—that hadn't been as much fun as he'd imagined it might be. In fact, he'd been stunned—and deeply moved—by the sheer number of operators from the SpecWar community who'd shown up to pay their last respects. It was SRO inside that church. On top of that shock, it had bothered him immensely to see friends like Dave and Sophia mourning his passing when he was sitting right here, alive if not quite well, in a hospital bed.

  But most of his not being dead was positive. Waking to find Tess Bailey curled up in the chair beside his bed. Waking to find Tess reading in the chair beside his bed. Waking to find Tess running her fingers through his hair or holding his hand as she sat in the chair beside his bed. …

  All by itself, waking was pretty positive, particularly when Jimmy thought about how close he'd come to never waking again. But with her freckles and her sunshine-filled smile, with that palpable love for him in her eyes, Tess made his waking miraculous.

  Deck made it pretty damn good, too. Yeah, Lawrence Decker spent a shitload of time on watch in another chair on the far side of that hospital room. And he always knew e
xactly what to say, each time Jimmy had surfaced from his narcotics-induced haze.

  “Tess is safe. You're safe. We're all safe.”

  It didn't matter how many times Jimmy came up out of the fog. Decker would reassure him, over and over again, that they were safe. Until Jimmy finally believed him.

  An FBI agent named Jules Cassidy had helped Deck fake Jimmy's death—a con that had been brilliantly realized. Of course, circumstances had provided the perfect setup. Jimmy had been critically injured in a fire-fight with some very bad men—although not, ironically enough, the same bad men who now wanted him dead. He was rushed to a hospital in Fresno via medevac chopper and had, in fact, flat-lined on the flight. This gave additional teeth to the idea that he might not survive his surgery and, in fact, that was the very story Decker and Cassidy had used.

  James Nash, aka Diego Nash, was pronounced dead on the operating table at Cedar Vista Hospital in Fresno, California at 6:14 P.M., Wednesday, 30 July 2008.

  Only a handful of people knew otherwise—and Jimmy trusted them all, completely. There wasn't even a surgeon floating around out there as a potential liability because Cassidy had worked some kind of voodoo at the hospital. Jimmy suspected it involved hacking into and changing medical records, which was probably some kind of a felony, since the agent was acting on his own accord. But Cassidy was purposely keeping his FBI superiors and the entire Bureau out of the loop when it came to the fact that Jimmy was still alive.

  In fact, Jimmy's new identity—one Lloyd Howard—had been fabricated without the help of any kind of government protection program. Decker and Cassidy agreed that it was important to hide the fact that Jimmy was alive from any and all government agencies.

  Because at this point? They were pretty sure that the very nasty men who wanted Jimmy dead had access to government records—even those labeled top secret.

  They were pretty sure that the bad men they had to take down—in order for Jimmy to very literally get his life back—worked for the mysterious and clandestine no-name Agency's black ops sector.

  They were pretty sure about that because, at one time, Jimmy Nash had worked for the Agency's black ops sector, too.

  “Good morning.”

  Tess smiled as she looked up from her book. “Hey,” she greeted Decker, who came to the end of the bed and actually reached out and held on to Jimmy's left foot.

  “You ready to blow this popsicle stand?” he asked Jimmy.

  Who laughed and then winced at the surge of pain. “Yeah. I wish.” He held up his arm, IV tubes still attached. “I'm still attached to the mother ship.”

  Before the words were out of his mouth, Deck turned to the door, where one of the nurses—Paula, buxom and jolly, a proud new grandmother—came bustling in. She shut off the drip, and almost before Jimmy could blink, she'd extracted the needle from the back of his hand.

  “This goes back in, Mr. Howard,” she warned Jimmy sternly, which was countered by the permanent twinkle in her lively brown eyes, “at the least little sign of dehydration. You want to go home? You'll push fluids. Do it right, we'll release you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Tess spoke for him, disbelief in her voice.

  Decker was grinning. “Blood test came back clear.”

  “But …” Tess was still concerned.

  “It'll be easier for him to rehab off-site,” Deck told her, not saying more than that, since Paula was still in the room. It wouldn't just be easier, it'd be safer. For all of them.

  Truth of the matter was, as safe as he'd been made by the news of his “death,” Jimmy still worried every time Decker or Tess left his room. He knew he was safe, and they were, too—when they were with him. But the only way he'd ever be fully convinced that the threat was completely gone, would be for him to identify and track down the men who'd threatened and then tried to kill him.

  Right now he knew barely nothing. Several vague clues. An e-mail address that he'd already tried to track, that had gotten him nowhere. A shirt that he'd worn on one of the days they'd tried to eliminate him—stained not only with his own blood, but with the blood of the man who'd tried to take him out. The vaguest of descriptions of that man, who'd attacked him in the darkness of a moonless night.

  Jimmy hadn't gotten a visual, just a sense of the man's size: average height and weight, medium build.

  Which narrowed his search down to, oh, about a quarter of the world's population.

  A DNA test on the shirt could provide far more specific answers, but it would also tip his enemy off as to his current still-alive status. Decker and Cassidy had agreed about that. Their plan was to wait to do that test until Jimmy and Tess were out of this hospital and ensconced in an even safer place. Which was looking to be tomorrow. Saints be praised.

  “Don't worry,” Deck was reassuring Tess. “We'll get him back up to speed in no time.”

  “He'll be getting into trouble before you know it,” the nurse reassured Tess, then turned to give Jimmy a mock evil eye, “if he pushes fluids.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy said as she left the room, as Decker made certain that the door was tightly shut behind her.

  “Are you sure …,” Tess started.

  “The infection's gone,” Decker told her. “He's healing nicely. It's time.” He turned to Jimmy. “Cassidy wants to bring in additional security for the move to the safe house. He's going to give me a list of names. I want you both to go through it. If anyone on his list makes you at all uneasy—”

  “I don't care who's on the list,” Jimmy interrupted, “as long as it includes Dave Malkoff.”

  But Decker was already shaking his head.

  “Why?” Jimmy asked. “Deck, I have two friends on this entire planet. You and Dave. And Dave thinks I'm dead. He also happens to be one of the smartest operatives we know.”

  Decker's smile was gone—he was back to his usual grim.

  Tess leaned forward to take Jimmy's hand, but it wasn't just to calm him down. She had something to tell him, and he could tell from her face that it wasn't going to be good news.

  “Oh, shit,” Jimmy said, looking from Tess to Deck and back again. “What happened to Dave?”

  “No, no,” Tess quickly reassured him. “He's fine. He's just …”

  “Sophia happened to Dave,” Decker told him, and the words didn't make sense.

  “Dave and Sophia hooked up,” Tess translated, and Jimmy realized that the concern he'd seen on her face had been for Decker, who'd had some kind of twisted thing for Sophia for years now. Fool that he was, he'd never acted on it. And now, apparently, Dave had intervened. Jimmy's disappointment for Deck was curiously mixed with a sense of “you go, boy” for old Dave. Dave and Sophia. Holy Mother of God.

  “It happened the night that, you know …,” Tess continued, but he didn't know until she added, “The hostage rescue outside of Sacramento … ?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Jimmy asked.

  She shook her head. Not kidding. “They've been hot and heavy ever since.”

  “Wait a minute.” He needed her to clarify. “Are you telling me that the night that I died, Dave and Sophia decide to skip the grieving and fuck like bunnies?”

  Tess winced at his verb choice, glancing quickly at Decker, who was shaking his head.

  “Sorry.” Jimmy realized what he'd just said. “I just thought that, you know, Dave would be a little upset. Sophia, too. Christ.”

  “People deal with grief in all kinds of ways,” Tess reminded him. “And I'm also sure that Sophia knew …”

  She didn't finish her sentence. She didn't have to.

  What Sophia had known was that her last hope of starting something with Decker had died with Jimmy Nash. Sophia had believed—as had the rest of their friends and co-workers—that with Nash out of the picture, Deck would insert himself into Tess's life, dick first.

  And everyone also believed that, without Nash and all of his bullshit around to distract her, Tess would instantly recognize how terrific Decker was, and how perfectl
y suited they were for each other.

  And Jimmy's fiancée and his best friend would get married and live happily ever after, leaving Sophia out in the cold. Jimmy, too—but his cold would be the six-feet-under kind.

  “Look, I'm … happy for her,” Decker said now, about Sophia— proving what a Boy Scout he was. Because he meant what he'd said. “I'm happy for Dave, too. He's wanted this for a long time.” He cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable with this entire discussion, because at the bottom of it lay a truth they all studiously worked overtime to avoid mentioning: that Decker had, once upon a time, had feelings for Tess.

  “Seeing them together is… This whole thing is …” Deck shook his head and started again. “It's harder than I thought.”

  Jimmy knew his friend wasn't talking merely about seeing Sophia with Dave. Decker was talking about being seen in public with Tess, pretending that he and his dead best friend's fiancée had turned to one another for comfort. That was what was harder to do than Deck had thought.

  No shit, Sherlock.

  And Jimmy would've wagered the entire contents of his bank account that Sophia's watching Decker pretending—yeah, right—to want to be romantically involved with Tess was at least partially responsible for her propulsion into Dave Malkoff's waiting arms.

  But wait. The festival of jealousy didn't stop there.

  Jimmy was guilty of having a carnival-load of it himself—watching the footage of Deck putting his arm around Tess's shoulders at the memorial service, holding her hand as she leaned toward him for comfort. He'd gotten pissed off, imagining Decker kissing Tess good-night so that those fuckers who'd tried, numerous times, to kill Jimmy would believe he truly was dead.

  It sucked the biggest dick ever.

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave. …

  “I'm sorry,” Jimmy said again, because he was the spider who'd started this multi-level charade spinning in the first place.