“Retribution forwhat?” At that moment, Roarke felt he might very well be going mad. “You may have forgotten, but she left me. She betrayed me and left me hanging by the balls.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. I’m glad to know you haven’t either.”
“There’s been enough talk of Magdelana in this house, and I’m not the one who keeps bringing her in.” He strode out, and riding on temper went down to pummel a sparring droid to broken bits.
He wore himself out, but it didn’t help, it didn’t reach the rawness in his gut.
He showered off the sweat, and the blood on his knuckles. He changed and ordered himself up to his office. He’d work, he told himself. He’d just work, and if she wasn’t home in another hour, he’d…
He hadn’t a clue.
And when he saw the light was on in her office, the relief made him so weak it seemed the world tipped and shuddered for a moment before going solid again.
And the weakness refired his temper on all circuits. He stalked in, his mind already flexing its fists for battle.
She was at her desk, comp humming, data scrolling on screen. Her eyes were closed, and the shadows under them etched fatigue against pallor.
It nearly stopped him, perhaps that unhappy weariness would have. But then her eyes flashed open.
“Lieutenant.”
“I’m working.”
“It’ll have to wait. Computer off.”
“Hey.”
“Is this how you handle things? How you punish me for crimes you’ve decided I’ve committed? I’m not even granted an interview?”
“Look, I’m tired. I need-”
“So the bloody hell am I.”
He looked it, she realized, as he so rarely did. “Then go to bed. I’m going to-”
“If you think about walking out on me again,” he said, voice dangerously soft as she started to push out of the chair, “think again. Think carefully.”
She knew the heat-and the more deadly ice-of his wrath when it was fully formed. She felt the blast of it now, and it chilled her to the bone. “I’m going to make coffee.”
“You can wait for it, as I’ve waited half the goddamn night for you.” He stepped toward her, those eyes piercing like sabers. “How am I supposed to know you’re not dead in some alley, and the next time I open the door there’ll be a cop and a grief counselor on the doorstep.”
She hadn’t thought, not for an instant, he’d worry she’d gone down in the line. She hadn’t meant to punish, just to get through the day. So now she only shook her head. “You should trust me to handle myself.”
“Oh, now I should trust you when you’ve shown such undiluted trust for me. You’ve no right and no cause to put me through this.”
“Same goes.”
“Through what?” He braced his hands on her desk, leaned down. “What am I putting you through, what the bleeding hell have I done? Be specific.”
“You looked at her.”
He stared, and for a moment those molten blue eyes were simply astonished. “Well, as I haven’t been struck blind in the last day or two, I’ve looked at any number of women. Castrate me.”
“Don’t diminish my feelings, my instincts, or what Iknow. Don’t you make a joke of this or of me. Youlooked at her, and for a second, the first time you saw her again, you gave her what’s supposed to be mine.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I’mnot! ” She shoved up now so they were eye to eye. “I’m a fucking trained observer, and I know your face, I know your eyes. I know what I saw.”
“And your police training tells you that this look I gave her, for a second you say, is cause for this irrational bout of jealousy?”
“It’s not jealousy. I wish it were. I wish it were that stupid, that shallow, that definitive. But it’s not jealousy. It’s fear.” She dropped down in her chair again as her voice began to crumble. “It’s fear.”
That stopped him, had him straightening again. “Can you really believe this? Believe that I’d regret what we are, what we have? That I’d regret it was you and not her? Haven’t I told you enough, shown you enough, that you’re everything to me?”
She struggled for calm, fought for the words. “She’s not like the others. The connection, it matters. You know it, and I know it. And maybe worse, she knows it. The connection, this history, they show. Show enough that people looked at me with pity today. That I was humiliated walking through my own bull pen to my own office.”
“And what of our connection, Eve, our history?”
Her eyes were swimming. She would never use tears as some did, he knew, and was battling them back even now. Her struggle not to give in to them made it all the worse.
He walked over to her window, stared out at nothing. So they wouldn’t rage at each other until it was burned away, he realized. They would pick their way through it, uncover it. Then they’d see.
“You need to know, is it, what it was, how it was, and how and what it is now?”
“I know-”
“You think you do,” he corrected. “And maybe you’re not altogether wrong, or altogether right. Do you want it?”
“No.” God, no, she thought. “But I need it.”
“Well, then, I’ll tell you. I was, what, three and twenty or thereabouts, doing business as it were in Barcelona. I’d had considerable success in the game, and in business by that time. Always, I’d enjoyed keeping a foot on either side of the line. Light and shadow, you could say. Such an interesting mix.”
He said nothing for a moment, then went on. “And it was there, in Barcelona, she and I crossed paths, with the same job in mind.”
He could see it now, as he looked through the dark window. The noisy club, the colored lights. It had been sultry in September, and the music had been a pulse in the blood.
“She came in where I was watching the mark for a time. Walked in, a red dress, an attitude. She flipped me a look, then moved straight in on my mark. Within minutes he was buying her a drink. She was good. I barely saw her pinch his passkey.”
He turned from the window. “It was rubies-bloody red rubies, you see. The star display of a gallery. Three passkeys required, and I had two of them already. What she did, she pinched his, then slid off to the loo, made a copy, and slipped it right back to him with him none the wiser. Neither of us could get to the damn jewels now, and it pissed me off.”
“Sure.”
“I waited for her to come to me, which she did the next day. We did the job together in the end, and stayed together for a time. She was young and fearless, passionate. We liked living fast, traveling, riding the wave, you could say.”
“Did you love her?”
He crossed over to get them both a glass of wine. “I fancied I did. She was capricious, unpredictable. She kept me on my toes. The legitimate bits I was involved in bored her.” He set a glass of wine on Eve’s desk. “She could never understand why I bothered, why I wanted what I wanted. What she understood was the game, and the thirst for money, for the shine. She didn’t understand what it was to come from nothing, as she’d come from a decent family, a decent home. What she wanted was more, then to move on and pick up more somewhere else.”
“What did you want?”
“Her, of course. I don’t mean that to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I wanted the more, for different reasons, I suppose, but I wanted the more.” He studied the wine before he drank. “I wanted respect and power and the shields and walls and weapons that ensured I’d never be nothing again. You know.”
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t. Couldn’t. That was the crack in the jewel, I imagine.” The flaw, he thought, he’d seen even then. “And still, it was shiny enough that we worked together, played together, stayed together. Until Nice. The mark had an exceptional art collection, with two Renoirs, among others. It was the Renoirs we wanted, had a buyer set for them. We spent weeks on it, with Maggie moving to the inside by seducing the mark.”