Banshee Hunt (20 page)

She didn't mean a word of it though and all of them knew that. Brucknell was once more starting to look remarkably ill.

“Anyway it was lovely to meet you, and I do hope that we can be of service.” She reached out a hand and the aide took it. He even managed to shake it. And James' hand in turn.

“Come on Honey.” Formalities apparently over with, Yasmin looped her arm through James' once more. “I really do want to get some shopping in before dinner.”

With that she dragged him out of the office and then out along the corridor, all while James wondered if they'd actually achieved what they'd set out to do. They had upset an aide profoundly but they still didn't have a name. And he still didn't know how she'd done it. Belatedly he tried to explain that to her as they once more walked the halls of power.

Yasmin's answer caught him by surprise as she spun him around suddenly, pushed him against a wall and kissed him on the cheek, leaving James reeling – presumably as she wanted.

“You really are slow aren't you?” She slapped him lightly on the cheek as if checking for signs of activity, but also whispered quietly in his ear.

“He was spelled. Recently and powerfully. I saw a little of the magic with Sza. But this, it's even more powerful. As if she was spelling him every day. I could see it on him the instant we walked in the room. And while I couldn't remove the effect, I could transform it a little. From creating a sense of greed and ambition in him, to one of complete terror. In short I just reversed it.”

“Reversed it?” He hadn't known she could do that.

“Like the Chinese say, fear and desire are two sides of the same knife. The banshee spent ages transforming a normally, impossibly cautious man, into someone who had so much ambition and desire in him that he would do anything to get ahead. But it was all still always poised on a knife edge. All I had to do was turn the magic a tiny little bit to make him think that his gamble had failed, and his own nature did the rest.”

“From now until the magic wears off, he's going to be living in complete panic. Absolutely terrified that all the risks he's taken have come undone. And that'll make him do anything we want. By now Brucknell's pacing the floor, screaming incoherently at the walls, probably living with visions of the electric chair in his head. It's only going to get worse.”

“We've just done two things. First the plan ends. There won't be a casino after this which means the banshees just went out of business, at least in the US. And second we scared that aide utterly senseless. He'll be sending us everything he has within a few hours, thinking we have most of it anyway and desperately hoping we can save him from twenty thousand years in the slammer. More fool him!”

“Ah?” James couldn't think of anything to say as she held him so close her lips in his face.

“Go on, you can say it!”

“Say what?”

“You married up!” She laughed demurely, obviously happy with what she'd achieved.

Suddenly James was finding it hard to think about anything except how gorgeous she was. Especially this close to him. She was warm and soft and she smelled good too. Which was why it came as such a shock when she backed away and then started once more leading him arm in arm down the corridor.

To anyone looking he supposed it would have looked as though a couple had just shared a private moment. And in a place like this the natural response would have been to look away. Certainly no one said anything as they passed the reception. Nor as they left the building and started walking down the stone steps to the concourse. Yasmin was still holding his arm tightly as they descended, maintaining her fiction of their marriage.

“Oh and you can also say one other thing. That it was a brilliant plan. Better than trying to force it all out of him at gun point.”

“I wasn't going to do that!” James defended himself. Why did everyone keep thinking he was some sort of gun toting thug?

“Oh really? Was this going to be one of those ones where you broke his nose instead? Because I have to say I don't think that would have gone down well here.” She mocked James a little.

“I wasn't going to do that either!” James protested.

“Then what were you going to do? Those seem to be your only two moves lately.” She laughed gaily at him.

That was too much and something in James snapped. But instead of yelling at Yasmin as he should he grabbed her up in his arms and kissed her firmly on the mouth. And then he kept kissing her despite being almost certain that it was a terrible mistake. She didn't resist though he noticed. In fact she even seemed to melt a little into his embrace. God did she feel good in his arms!

Nor did she complain when he finally let her go.

“So the Iceman's got a spark of fire in him after all!” She smiled, her hazel eyes almost glowing in the afternoon sun. “Nice to finally see it.”

“Now you can buy me a drink.”

Chapter Thirteen

Mornings were usually a good time for James. The time when he first opened his eyes and for a second remembered nothing of his former life. Nothing of everything that had gone wrong. It was only when the memories came flooding back that his mood soured.

This morning though was different.

For a start it wasn't his bed he was lying in. His sheets were simple and white. These had patterns of some sort. And the wallpaper was wrong too. His room had vertical stripes of tired brown running down the walls. The room he was in was papered with a diagonal pattern of gold flowers. The wall was further away from him than it should normally be too. The bedroom was much larger than his. And then there was the life sized Barbie doll he was wrapped around. Actually he had his arm around her waist and his face buried in her milk chocolate breasts while her long black hair covered him.

It took a moment for him to make sense of that. To bring back the memories of the previous night. And when he did he knew who the doll was. He just couldn't quite bring himself to believe it.

“Yasmin?” he asked cautiously, not sure he even wanted an answer. But he didn't really need one. He knew her. He knew her mocca coloured skin. And the long contours of her body. He knew the gentle curves of her breasts – though not from quite this close. Never from this close. That was up until the previous night. The somewhat confused memories of their time together suddenly started rushing up at him.

“You're awake then.”

James knew her voice as well, though not the lack of sarcasm in it. “I … um … that is …” He tried to say something intelligent but that was all that came out.

“I know. It happened. It's not the end of the world.”

She sounded calm at least. Not upset about what they'd done. That was good. In fact the entire interlude had been good from what he remembered. Actually at times it had been wild. He remembered clothes being torn off in their eagerness, and multiple encounters. He remembered sweaty bodies and tangled limbs and the sound of her crying out in passion. He remembered crying out himself a few times as well. It had been sex like he had never known. Maybe he had been repressing his natural needs for too long and just maybe she had been too. So when they had come together everything had just exploded.

But Yasmin didn't sound happy about it. Theirs hadn't been a union born of love. Lust definitely. There had been some alcohol involved. A celebratory drink as he recalled which had become two. And then a third. Possibly there had been a few more than that? Actually, judging from the pain in his head there had definitely been a few more than that. There had also been dinner at a restaurant – Chinese as he recalled. And then he had walked her home. Into her home as it turned out. And into her bed as well. After that things became a little blurry. Actually they had been pretty blurry well before that.

“Are you … alright?” He raised his head and craned his neck so he could look up at her. And unexpectedly he discovered that in the morning, bathed in sunlight with her make up off, she looked even more beautiful than usual. Especially with her hair flowing loosely like a cascade of glossy black rapids. But she also looked stern and strangely sad. Maybe that was just the way that the sunlight bounced off the elegant contours of her face but he didn't think so. He suspected she'd been awake for some time, just lying there thinking as she waited for him to wake up. And what she had been thinking wasn't all bread and roses.

“Of course I'm alright. It wasn't terrible. It just wasn’t what I wanted.”

“And what did –?” A sudden thought hit James mid-sentence and stopped him in his tracks.

“Oh God! It wasn't your first time?” He didn't want to think that it might have been and that he'd simply taken her in a booze fuelled orgy of lust. She might have wanted something special. Something to remember. But the truth was that he didn't know. She was twenty seven and stunning. She could have had a hundred guys chasing her around like dogs with their tongues hanging out. But he'd never heard her talking about her boyfriends. Or in fact about any men in her life. Or anything else to do with that sort of thing. He knew about the others in the office, Will's wife and Peters' family. Daniels' string of girlfriends. But he didn't know about Yasmin's love life. Did that mean she didn't have one?

“No. Of course it wasn't my first time. I don't do this often, but it wasn't my first time.” She sounded tired. Quiet. Almost dead inside.

“Then it was too …?” James searched for the right word. “Wild?”

“No. It was fine.”

Fine? He didn't like the sound of “fine”. No man wanted to be thought of as just “fine”. It was like being just “good” or worse “nice”. It was being damned with faint praise as they said. And it had seemed better than that to him, even through the lens of alcohol soaked memories. But maybe that was all it had been for her.

Then a somewhat sadder thought occurred to him. “There's someone else? I've intruded?”

“There's no one else,” she answered him, again sounding quite tired.

“But you're upset?” He knew there was something wrong. Just as he felt something wrong within himself. But he couldn't really identify the wrongness. It was as though they had done something thrilling and naughty, and there had been overwhelming excitement while they'd been doing it. But now that the excitement was over they were left with the remains. And what remained was uncertain, embarrassing and a little bit worrying as they waited to find out what their punishment would be.

“I don't know what I am.” She answered James honestly at least. “Sad maybe. Disappointed. Maybe something else.”

“I'm –.”

“Don't!” Suddenly her hand was right in front of James' face, stopping him from speaking. “Don't you dare say you're sorry! No woman ever wants to hear that. Not after …”

“You're right! I didn't mean it like that. That it wasn't good. Just that you didn't find it was what you wanted.” And that was what was wrong he suddenly realised. It was incomplete. It was an act that was supposed to mean something, and yet neither of them knew if it had meant anything at all. Or if they wanted it to mean something. It had just happened. But he still felt the need to apologise.

“It was just that after Sheryl I never –.”

“Stop!” Her hand was once more in his face. “Dear lord no! Never! No woman ever wants to hear about her lover's previous failures either. Least of all here.”

Silence ruled the bed after that. James didn't know what to say. Neither he was sure, did Yasmin. But in the end she broke it.

“You should go.” She said it flatly, as if it was nothing. But her face told the truth. It wasn't nothing. It was worse than that. It was regret.

“You don't want to –.”

“Talk about it?” She hit James with a sad look. “No. Not today. Maybe not ever. It happened. It shouldn't have. But all I can say is that at the time I was happy. We'd made progress in the case. There was booze. And you were being nice for once. Sweet. No one got hurt. Let’s leave it at that.”

Slowly, wordlessly, James did as she asked. He wanted to say something. He knew he should. But he simply didn't know what to say. What would make this right. And he wanted to do something. To make a manly gesture. Something to tell her that she had no reason to be sad. But at that moment he couldn't think of anything. So instead he slid out of bed and crawled into his clothes, feeling like a coward and a failure.

“I –.”

“No … Please, just no.” She raised her hand once more to stop him. “I don't want to hear it. Besides, we have to go to work, and it's going to be a busy day.”

“Busy day?”

“Because of this –,” she grabbed her phone from the bedside table and started tapping away on it. Then when she was done Yasmin showed James the display and the documents listed on it. It looked like a list of reports, proposals and the financials on a project. Boring stuff really except for one thing. They related to a casino project. Planning had apparently been more advanced than he'd guessed. And no wonder Brucknell had been so terrified. His name was everywhere. On the bottom of every page when she opened up the first document. She had got everything she had said she would.

“That's amazing!”

And it was. In front of them they had the entire case solved, more or less. Because they now had the name of the family involved – Harper Lee. It was one of the names he remembered seeing in the information their Hong Kong office had sent them. But there had been so many names and so few records about them, that going any further than those names had seemed impossible. Now though, they could start digging. From there James guessed they would soon have the name of the banshee that was causing them so much trouble. Her name, photo and details. She wouldn't be at large for long.

“I told you it would work. You need to trust me a little more.”

“You're right and I apologise.” James realised he meant it as he said it, which felt strange. It wasn't that he really doubted other people's abilities. He was just so used to simply knowing what to do and then doing it. It was quicker and simpler. But saying that then and there sounded false. Anything he could say would sound false. So instead he went for the practical.

“That information has to go to Will as soon as possible.”

“I sent it to him last night when it came in. You were asleep.”

“Good! You know you did a really good job with Brucknell. In case you didn't think I noticed. And if I haven't paid you enough respect before, I'm sorry. I should have.”

“Thank you.”

“And as for this.” He gestured at her and the bed and then watched her face harden as he suspected she was about to stop him speaking once more. “No. Please, let me finish.” It was his turn to hold up his hand to stop her.

“You know I'm a mess. Everyone knows I'm a mess. Everyone knows my story. And you have to know I never intended to be with anyone again. That's … hard for me. So I didn't expect this. I didn't plan on it. I've never lost control like that before. And now I'm sort of reeling.”

“But as hard as this is for me, I don't regret it. And I hope you don't either.”

With that he left, feeling like a low life. But he didn't know what else to do, and he knew it was what she wanted. It was the only thing he could do.