DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (15 page)

I’d foreseen a restless night, but not because of this.

“If there’s anything in your hands,” I said, my voice a sleep-laden growl, “throw it away now or I’ll make you drop it.”

A shadow detached itself from the wall by the three-pace hallway leading to the bathroom and outer door. I felt my right index finger begin to tauten, but a moment later there was a click as the bathroom light flicked on. I flinched from the sudden brightness but saw enough to recognise Sean in the shaft of light.

There was something about the way he stood, the tension in his body, that kept the SIG in my hands and the fear in my throat.

I swallowed, forced my shoulders down as I sat upright, letting the gun relax into my lap, finger resting outside the trigger guard. If Sean noticed that I didn’t lay the weapon aside completely, he didn’t comment.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said softly. “I s’pose it’s stupid to ask if you’re awake.”

“I’m bloody
wide
awake now,” I said, and saw for the first time he was carrying a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt in one hand and a pair of cut-glass tumblers in the other.

“I’m guessing you don’t really want me to throw this away?” he said, lifting the whisky.

I hesitated. I was dog tired, but this was the first time since coming out of the coma that Sean had sought me out. The first time he’d reached out to me. I sensed his need for reassurance and craved my own.

“And I’m guessing you can’t sleep,” I said.

I always wore shorts and a T-shirt to bed when I was working, just in case I had to jump up in the dark. No point in having to take on an unexpected midnight threat wearing nothing but a smile. Besides, ejected brass spits out plenty hot enough to burn unprotected skin.

But for all the protection my clothing seemed to be offering me right now I might as well have been naked.

I sat up, pulling the sheets more tightly around my body and wrapping them under my arms.

“I get the feeling I never used to like drinking alone,” Sean said. “Join me?”

How can I say no to that, Sean? Even if I wanted to . . .

“OK.”

He didn’t move right away, just stayed by the edge of the hallway with the light behind him and his face in shadow. I half turned, reached behind me and switched on the bedside lamp just for my own defence.

He was fully dressed, I saw. Not the ruined suit from earlier but jeans and a plain black T-shirt that sat flat and broad across his chest. My heart kicked like a long-distance runner entering the final bend before the home straight.

“If you’re staying, take a seat,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Glenfiddich always was one of my favourites.”

“I know,” Sean said quietly.

My heart lurched. “Oh?”

“You drank it at the little pub we went to—that first weekend we spent away together. Remember?”

Oh Christ, did I remember . . .

I’d never forgotten a moment of that time-out-of-time. It had seemed somehow surreal back then, as if it wasn’t meant to be and couldn’t last. But it had been perfect, too. Even what came after had failed to eclipse it totally from my mind.

It was an illicit assignation—the first time Sean and I had been away together, the first time we’d slept together. Neither of us got much sleep. Having only a forty-eight-hour pass from camp tends to concentrate the mind. We’d crammed as much sheer experience of each other as we’d been able to into that limited time together.

“
. . . Remember?
”

In one explosive instant I remembered it all. A bombardment of sensation, of touch and feel and sight and smell and taste. I’d absorbed Sean on a cellular level, in every way I could possibly imagine. I’d given him all of myself, poured myself into him. I’d held nothing back.

I’d thought he’d done the same.

A whisper: “I remember . . .”

He moved further into the room with that easy stride, but instead of heading for the armchair near the window he sat on the end of the bed. He set the glasses down on the mattress and unscrewed the cap of the distinctive triangular bottle with those long clever fingers, pouring generous measures for both of us.

I took the glass he offered, careful not to let our hands touch, chinked the rim to his.

“
Sláinte
,” I said, and let the liquid courage run down my throat, light my veins.

“
Na zdoravye
,” Sean replied, took a long swallow of his own.

The silence lay between us, crouched and vibrating gently, almost a shiver. I stretched round to put the SIG back under the towel on the bedside table. When I turned back I found Sean’s eyes on the scar around the base of my neck. He was frowning again, the same way he’d frowned when Gabe Baptiste had pushed him to recall the last time they’d met. I struggled not to put a hand up to the fading line, to cover it from his gaze.

Occasionally I’d claimed the scar was surgical, but anyone with knowledge could see it was from an attack. You don’t have to add the words “near fatal” when somebody tries to cut your throat. Not when they’ve done it before and were looking forward to doing it again.

That scar, a fading four-inch ragged line, served as a permanent visible reminder of what people were prepared to do to me, if I let them.

And triggered the memory of what I was prepared to do in return.

“I should know how you got that, shouldn’t I?” Sean said, almost under his breath. He dropped his nose into the glass again. “I should . . . but I don’t.”

“You weren’t around when it happened,” I said, “if that helps.”

He paused as if considering. “No. No it doesn’t. All I get is a feeling—a feeling that I . . . let you down somehow. Did I?” He shook his head before I could answer. “I mean, was I supposed to have your back and I . . . didn’t, is that what happened?”

I heard the tension in his voice, the intensity. This mattered to him, but I didn’t allow myself to wonder why, or how much.

“No,” I said softly. “That’s not what happened. You weren’t there, Sean. It wasn’t your fault. It was nothing to do with you.”

We sipped again in silence. The room began to buzz. I told myself that was the whisky. I’d been too tired to face dinner, so perhaps the effect of the alcohol was amplified and accelerated by an empty stomach.

Or perhaps the buzzing was just inside my head.

“Was it anything to do with . . . Vic Morton? With what you told me—about . . . you and him? I don’t remember that, either. Nothing. It’s all just one big void—kind of grey-black, like a TV set picking up a dead channel.”

For just a moment a kind of warmth flooded me. Sean admitting he didn’t remember something was so much better than him denying it had ever happened.

Progress, of a sort.

He shifted, leaned his forearms on his knees with the glass cradled in his hands, suddenly fascinated by the way the whisky swirled around inside it. “It’s like, occasionally the picture flickers and just for a second I get an image I can hardly catch, never mind know what it means. Subliminal, you know?”

“I know,” I said. The doctors had told us what to expect. They’d explained it in complicated terms, full of jargon that meant as little as Sean’s disjointed memories.

I’d even swallowed my pride and called upon my father’s medical expertise to cut through the excess terminology and give me the bottom line.

He’d come back with a bagful of maybes.
Maybe
Sean would reforge the neural pathways that connected him to his past, and his past to mine.
Maybe
he would remember fully or even partially what we had.

Or maybe he would never remember “us” at all.

There were only so many times I could rephrase the same question before it finally hit home that I was not going to get an answer I liked. An answer I could live with.

I stopped asking.

“You weren’t there, Sean,” I said again. “There was nothing you could have done.”

“I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse,” he said, rubbing at the side of his temple in that unconscious gesture. It made me want to gather him close, to hold his head to my breast and rock him to the beat of my heart, a strong and steady proof of life beneath his ear. To stroke my own fingers across the scar as if by doing so I could smooth it all away. I took a knuckle-whitening grip on the whisky instead.

“You didn’t come over to my place to discuss old news,” I said, aware of the uptight tone in my own voice but unable to let go. If I did I might never get a hold of myself again. “So, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

Sean took a long pull on his Glenfiddich, watching my face above the rim of the glass as if he knew what I’d really been asking. He had the darkest eyes and right then, in the subdued cross-flow of light from the bedside lamp and the bathroom, they looked totally black from iris to pupil.

The eyes of someone not entirely human.

I suppressed a shudder. There had been a lot of times when Sean had frightened me on an instinctive, visceral level, as if I was trying to domesticate something wild. Every so often I got the feeling I really shouldn’t turn my back to him.

Now was one of those times.

So I waited, glass cradled in my hands, letting my body heat warm the spirit and the spirit warm me in its turn. It took Sean a few moments to answer my question, but I would have taken anything faster as a sign of glib evasion.

“You were good out there today,” he said at last, his tone dispassionate. “Cool, deliberate, focused.”

I shrugged, awkward. Whatever I’d been expecting, that had not been it.

“Yeah, well, I’ve had some good training.”

He watched me for a moment longer. “So that’s your Achilles’ heel,” he murmured. “Throw accusations and insults at you, you come out fighting. Try a compliment and you crumble.”

“Not so,” I denied, my voice dry. “Sometimes I take a swing at people who are nice to me as well.”

“Doesn’t come naturally to you, though, does it, Charlie? Accepting praise, I mean.” He paused, as if uncertain. “Did I never . . . praise you?”

I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, but resisted the urge to gulp down more whisky. That way untold danger lay.

“It has been known,” I said carefully. “But you pushed hard, too.”

He nodded like that made sense to him. “Because I wanted you to be the best,” he said, and it was Sean the training instructor talking, not the close-protection expert.
Not the lover.
“Ever thought that might have been because I didn’t want you to get yourself killed on your first covert op?”

“I never made it into active service with any kind of black ops unit,” I said. “I was out on my ear well before any postings like that were handed out.”

They made sure of it.

I so nearly added, “Your mate Morton knows all about that one. Ask him if you don’t believe me,” but I held my tongue.

“You worked for me as a bodyguard before we came over here to work for Parker,” Sean said, almost to himself. Something about his voice told me he was only repeating what he’d been told. External information rather than internal knowledge.

He looked at me again, gaze switching from my eyes to my mouth. “How could I let you do that kind of work if we were . . .?”

“. . . in a relationship, you mean?” I finished for him.

You think you had that kind of say over what I did with my life?

Perhaps not the most diplomatic of possible answers. Instead, I gave another shrug that had the sheets threatening to desert me. I pulled them more firmly into place. “You pushed me all the harder.” My turn to pause, then a little reproach: “And you trusted me.”

“Yeah, I can believe that,” he said slowly. “Like I said, you were good out there today, Charlie. Bloody good, if you must know. It makes me wonder . . .”

His voice trailed off and I was the one left wondering where he’d been heading with that thought.

Wonder what, Sean? You wonder if Vic Morton’s been filling your head with lies about me? About how I only managed any kind of advancement on my back? About how I used “crying rape” as an excuse because I
wasn’t
good enough to make it and couldn’t face the ignominy of walking away of my own volition? Why don’t you ask that kind of question out loud, Sean? Oh boy,
then
you’ll see me come out fighting . . .

But some battles you know from the outset you can’t win.

He looked up, straight into and through my eyes, into my mind—just like he always could. All I could see in return was my own face reflected back at me.

“It makes me wonder if you were right to call Parker about me. To tell him you didn’t think I was ready,” he said, stark—and so out of left field it came from another field altogether. “After today
I
don’t think I’m ready either.”