"Tyler," she said at last.
He glanced at her.
"How good is Seth? Really."
He muted the television. "Best I've ever seen, ma'am," he said softly. "It's a privilege serving under him."
"And as a person? You trust him as a person?"
Tyler's gaze raked over her face. He put the remote down. "You've seen the new scar on his back, Ellie. I know you have."
She nodded.
"We were in Afghanistan ten weeks ago," Tyler said, his voice soft.
"Tyler," Sam said warningly. Tyler held up his hand, waving her off. He didn't even look at her. "We were in Afghanistan. We got there because of bad orders that Seth argued against from the get-go, but he got told to suck up and march on. So he did, because that's what you do because of the chain of command. So we're in the mountains with no food, almost out of water and the bad guys are on our tails. We knew it was only a matter of hours before they'd catch up with us because we were too weak to go any faster because we hadn't eaten for three days and we didn't know the terrain. We'd all given up, except Seth made us keep going through sheer bloody will power. He'd just look at us and we'd find the strength to keep walking until we could maybe find a sweet spot where the radio would work and we could get out."
Sam had stopped working. Gabrielle saw her hand move away from the mouse from the corner of her eye. But she couldn't look away from Tyler, whose gaze had turned inwards.
"What happened?" Gabrielle asked softly.
"We got cornered in the maze of canyons," Tyler said. "And pretty much gave up. All except Seth, who literally grabbed us and shook us. I think he might have knocked our heads together if he'd had the physical strength left to do it, but he'd been going without food longer than any of us...but I only found out about that later. He made us climb. Out of the shaft. Up higher. Stroke of brilliance. It gave us the elevation we needed to get the radio working, and it let the helicopter reach us. It also landed us at the feet of a sacred temple that the bastards wouldn't sully with their own boots, so we got the breathing space we needed to haul ourselves into the chopper." Tyler smiled grimly. "But that didn't stop them from shooting at us as we shimmied up the rope. Seth covered us as we climbed, of course."
"Why 'of course'?" Gabrielle demanded, feeling sick as she mentally painted the scene in her head.
"The commanding officer of a troop or a platoon is the first one on the scene and the last one to leave," Sam explained. "It's kind of a stiff upper lip tradition."
"But Seth follows it," Gabrielle breathed.
Tyler's eyes grew somber. "He threw himself over me as I was getting into the helicopter," he said softly. "I was too damned weak to haul ass fast enough. So he did it for me. He took the bullet, Gabrielle. That's the sort of commanding officer, the sort of man he is. And I would die for him, plain and simple." He picked up the remote and turned on the television again. "Yeah, I trust him as a person," he added casually, answering her original question, lifting his voice above the sports scores.
About five minutes later, she heard Seth's heavy steps on the verandah. He stepped inside and leaned over, shedding snow from the knees down, brushing it off his coat and stamping his feet.
Then he straightened up and she clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in her cry. Blood smeared his neck from a cut that ran from his Adam's apple almost horizontally, two inches across his neck. It had run down into his sweater and soaked into the neck. The hem of his sweater was also blotched in red, where he had tried to wipe the stuff with his fingers.
"It's superficial," he said, looking straight at her. "A surface wound, Ellie. That's all. I've had deeper shaving cuts."
"Self-inflicted ones," Tyler said evenly. "Your razor turn on you in the last fifteen minutes?"
Gabrielle could feel hysteria beating at her chest, wanting to escape and explode all over the room. She wanted to give vent to her relief, her joy that Seth was all right, alive and standing there in one piece. She wanted to beat on his chest with her fists and flay him with her retrospective panic. It would express in a few heaven-sent selfish minutes all of the worry of the last fifteen.
But it wouldn't serve anyone except herself. It was what the old Gabrielle would have done.
She got to her feet and found her legs were trembling. But they held her up. She moved over to Seth and rested her hands on his shoulders. She wasn't surprised to find her hands were trembling. "Let me take your coat off. No point in getting blood on it and you've got blood on your fingers."
Seth let her take his coat off.
"Tyler," she said, as she hung it up. She fought hard for an even tone and calm expression. "In the bathroom, there's a small first aid kit. Swabs and disinfectant. Could you get that, please?"
"Yes, ma'am," he murmured.
"Anything I can do, Ellie?" Sam asked.
"No, I have it under control, thank you," Gabrielle told her. She tugged on Seth's arm. "Come and sit over here at the table. Let's clear the blood and see what you've got under there."
Now she was moving and speaking, the panic pushed back and she could hide it better. She led Seth to a chair and pushed on his shoulder. "Rest back so I can get at the wound."
He was watching her warily. Waiting for her to crumble.
She held her jaws together tightly, but she couldn't quite look him in the eye.
Tyler brought the kit and filled the lid with warm water and diluted disinfectant. Gabrielle used the solution to mop up the blood from Seth's neck, discarding cotton balls as they grew too bloody, until she drew nearer to the wound itself.
"Wipe over it," Seth said. "I can stand it and I don't know how clean Ronny's knife was. The wound has to be cleaned."
"It was a knife then," Gabrielle said. She had suspected it from the shape of the long, thin wound. Her gut clenched. "I'm going to kill him."
"Later, Ellie. For now, just clean," Seth said softly.
She wiped over the wound itself and Seth hissed. The thin wound showed shallow and clean for a moment, then thin dots of blood oozed.
"Barely a cat scratch," Tyler declared. "Couple of veins. I wouldn't even put a plaster on it."
"Wipe again, Ellie," Seth said. "Just to be sure."
She wiped and winced as Seth hissed in another breath. But no more blood ran.
She dried the rest of his neck with the towel Tyler offered her.
Seth sat up, touching his neck just below the wound. "All in all, I was lucky," he said. "He caught me by surprise. Last thing I was expecting from him."
Gabrielle grimaced. "Ronny has a dangerous streak when he's cornered. Always has."
"That's the thing. He wasn't cornered," Seth said. "Your fathered offered to fly him and Destiny back to New York in the family jet. Just the two of them, to get away from the family pressures." Seth caught her around the waist, looking up at her. "It's alright, Ellie," he said softly. "Everything's fine now." And he kissed her lips softly, right there in front of Tyler and Sam, before getting off the chair, moving to the bar and cracking the seal on the bottle of Canadian rye there.
Gabrielle touched her lips, shocked.
"Hey," Sam said softly.
Gabrielle looked at her. Sam pushed a box of tissues across the table toward her and touched her own cheek.
It was then Gabrielle grew conscious of the fact that she was crying, the tears artlessly rolling down her cheeks. She pulled one of the tissues out of the box and blotted her cheeks. Then a second tissue.
Tyler's hand squeezed her shoulder and it felt warmer and truer than many hugs she'd had in her life.
Seth poured two stiff fingers of the rye and took a deep swallow.
"We're going to have to get you another shirt," Gabrielle told him. "You've ruined that one."
He grinned. "We can send Ronny the bill." He took another mouthful of rye, then lowered the glass, looking at the laptop Sam was working on. "They're your photos, Ellie?"
Gabrielle turned to check. Sam was busy transferring photos from the
camera to the borrowed laptop, and Gabrielle caught her breath. "Yes!" she breathed, thrilled. "That's them!" She moved around the table. "You did it, Sam!"
"Yes, ma'am," Sam said quietly.
Seth and Tyler came and stood behind her, watching as the photos flipped one after another on the screen, holding for perhaps ten seconds as the software transferred the image to the laptop's hard drive.
"You know some very interesting people, Ellie," Tyler murmured.
"Comes from being part of my family," Gabrielle replied.
Seth's hand settled on her shoulder. "These are very good," he said, his voice warm. "At least, I think they are. I'm not an expert. Has an expert ever seen your work, Ellie?"
"God, no!" she said quickly. Fervently. "I live and work in Hollywood, Seth. I'm surrounded by the best of the best photographers and cinematographers in the world. I'm not about to expose my little efforts to any of them. Gabi-Hell dabbles at photo-portraiture? You know what the media would make of that?" She shuddered.
The individual photo displays ceased and the software assembled all the photos on the screen in long strips of thumbnail images, one above the other.
Seth studied them. He circled a group of them with his finger. "Could I see those, Sam?"
Sam enlarged them on the screen and arranged them in date and time order. The images were of Destiny and Ronny, which Gabrielle had taken at Thanksgiving at her father's house in New York. Gabrielle had spent most of the day behind her camera, she remembered. The five shots that Sam expanded on the screen were taken over the day, some of them within minutes of each other, and they almost told a story. The first was of Ronny and Destiny clutching a crystal glass each, their shoulders nearly touching. A less than happy couple, as they stared off in opposite directions.
Seth tapped the image and looked down at her. "Ronny is an alcoholic, Ellie. His favorite drink is Absinthe."
Gabrielle nodded. The news was not the shock it should have been. Over the years she had absorbed enough signs and signals that now Seth's pronouncement merely confirmed what she had already subconsciously known.
Tyler gave a low whistle. "Absinthe is still manufactured with the thujone in it, even here in Canada. Depending on where he gets the Absinthe, he could be dealing with more than just getting falling down drunk."
"And Destiny?" Gabrielle asked, looking at her sister's sad eyes in the photo. "Her, too?"
Seth took a breath. "We don't know yet," he said gently. "But maybe, Ellie."
She nodded. It would be just like Ronny to bring her sister down with him. Destiny was.... The only word Gabrielle could think of was 'weak'. Destiny was weak in that way. She would join Ronny in this form of hell because he was her husband. For love.
Gabrielle sighed.
Seth touched the next image, and Sam scaled it up to fill the screen.
Gabrielle had caught the pair of them arguing. Ronny's fury was almost frightening even in retrospect. His tendons strained at his neck, and his lips were white. His eyes bulged, and his chin jutted forward as he spoke to Destiny. He had a hand flung out, gesturing to something, and Gabrielle was quite sure he was comparing Destiny to someone else, and finding her lacking in some way. It occurred to her that she'd heard him do that a lot, over the years. There was a void in Destiny's face, a stoical acceptance. Waiting it out.
But there was hurt in her eyes. And a nearly empty glass in her hand.
"He doesn't look very happy, does he?"
"Nor does Destiny," Gabrielle murmured.
"Next one," Seth murmured.
Sam flipped the next image up to full screen size immediately. Everyone either gasped, or drew in a breath.
"I can't believe it," Tyler said after a moment. "Are they the same people?"
"Amazing, isn't it?" Gabrielle said, a touch bitterly. "Welcome to Hollywood."
The image staring at them was one she had taken of the family dinner itself. A long elegant table, white cloth, candles, flowers from Saks, Italian crystal, her mother's Bohemian china, and the black teak chairs, and her overpowering family having a wonderful time in their usual push-and-shove way. The photo focused on Destiny and Ronny. Ronny had his arm around Destiny and both of them were laughing right along with the rest of the family, their eyes sparkling. Destiny was reaching out with her hand to help pass a plate. Their faces were glowing.
"Night and day," Sam murmured. "How do they fake that?"
"They're not, exactly," Gabrielle said. "At that moment, they probably were that happy. Just for that moment."
"And the next photo?" Seth asked.
The next one was also greeted with silence. It showed Destiny in the foreground, her back slumped against a wall, a drink in her hand again, lifted to her lips. All signs of happiness had gone. In the background, outlined by the last of the afternoon sun filtering through a window and slightly out of focus by the long lens Gabrielle had used, Ronny was talking on his cell phone. By the tension in his body, the hand clutched to his temple, it was not a pleasant call.
"Next," Seth said.
The next image was taken only a few moments later, after Ronny's call was finished. Destiny and Ronny were arguing again, both standing in the pool of light. Gabrielle had refocused, and now the tension was sharp and delineated in both bodies. Destiny's glass was empty once more.
Gabrielle turned away from the laptop, sadness gripping her. She sat on the sofa, her hands between her knees.
Seth sat on the coffee table in front of her. "I'm sorry, Ellie."
"There's nothing to be sorry for. My family has some issues. I'll get over it."
He nodded. "But you have to know you have an astounding talent with the camera. You must know that. You've been around the best and you know what good means."
"It's a subjective thing, Seth." She tried to smile at him. "The camera was only ever meant to be something fun to pass the time and give me something to talk about with the crew. If I start measuring how good I am, then it's not going to be fun anymore."
His eyes wouldn't let her look away from him. "I think it stopped being fun for you a long time ago," he said, his voice low. "I think it turned into something else. Something that you won't admit to yourself." Then he shrugged, a small movement of his shoulders. "Sometimes, I think you like being lost, Ellie."
She gasped, stung. But before she could respond, he stood up. "Would you mind if I took copies of some of your photos?"
"No, of course not," she said. "But why?"
"Personal use," he said, with a small smile. He moved back to the table, where Sam was packing away her tools and equipment.
Tyler was shrugging into his coat, sliding on his boots.
Gabrielle registered the movements. They were going. Leaving her alone with Seth.
She looked at Seth. He was watching her, the blue of his eyes dark with unspoken emotion. She didn't need words to know what he was feeling. It seemed to fill the room suddenly. To heat her from top to toe.
She cleared her throat. "Sam...thank you. What can I say? You're a marvel. How can I thank you?"
Sam smiled. "No need. I liked the challenge. Thanks for the pizza." She nodded at Seth. "Sir."
Tyler picked up Sam's bags and carried them to the door while she put on her coat and shoes. Seth opened the door for them and stepped out, talking quietly. Orders, Gabrielle assumed. They were all on duty, after all.
She shivered.
Seth stepped back inside, bringing with him a swirl of cold air. He paused in the middle of the floor, studying her.
"Did you learn enough about me, Gabrielle?" His voice was low.
"You knew!" she gasped.
His smile was slow and easy. "Not at first. You're almost as devious as your father, I give you that. Your motives are purer, that's what let me figure it out." He pushed his hands into his pockets. "Although, you realize that it has been a two-way street, Ellie? I have learned—and so have Sam and Tyler—far more about you and your family than you are aware of, than you may even be comforta
ble with us knowing."
She took a breath, reaching for calm, as she considered that idea. "Tyler and Sam are your people. I don't mind."
Seth blinked. "That's twice you've surprised me, Ellie. You have a way of doing that, just when I think I've got you figured out." His voice was husky, thick with some emotion she couldn't name, but the sound of it made her heart thump and her knees weaken. Her flesh seemed to zap with nerve endings suddenly alive and sensitive.
Seth moved closer. "I have a question." His breath fanned her cheek.
"What is it?" It was much too hot in here.
"Could I take you out to dinner again tonight?"
"No."
"No?" His brow lifted.
She reached for his belt buckle and slid the belt undone. His heavy indrawn breath delighted her. She gripped both ends of the belt and looked up at him. "I want you for dinner," she said. "And I want you to stay here tonight. We'll fit food in around the edges somewhere."
Seth's hand curled around her neck. "Who needs food?" he muttered, as his lips came down on hers.
* * * * *
She stripped him bare right there in the living room and when she was done, Seth was ready for her. But Gabrielle couldn't stop running her hands all over his body. She couldn't stop pressing her lips against his flesh.
She reached for his lips and Seth lifted her up, his hands around her waist. Gabrielle wrapped her legs around him and kissed him hard. "Make love to me, Seth," she whispered. "In my bed."
He didn't object to her phrasing. Instead he pulled her tighter against him. He strode through to the bedroom and climbed onto the bed while still holding her. He knelt on the bed and brushed her hair from her face. His blue eyes gazed into hers, probably seeing everything there was to see of her soul.
Gabrielle let him look. She had nothing more to hide, anyway, except her love for him.
"Your lips are so perfect," he said. His voice was rough, thick with the growing passion that would end with him crying her name as he thrust into her. Just the sound of it now made her shudder with the promise of it.
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