“Still, they must have made you feel unsafe.”
Not unsafe—unclean, unworthy.
“Hey.” She poked him. Not a girly poke, a knuckle between his ribs. He flinched and caught her hand.
“You’re not talking. You’re giving me the bare minimum. I’m trying to understand why you won’t sleep in your own bed.”
He brought her hand to his lips and sucked on her knuckles. Another deflection, but what he had to say wouldn’t make her comfortable, might send her screaming from his arms. She pulled away and flopped down beside him.
He came up on his elbow to watch her face. “The first one was a shock. I had to involve the police. But it was grief, lashing out, the family looking for someone to take responsibility. The second one was motivated by the same thing. The next four, there’s no way to know. I had investigators look into each of them. In each case there was a sudden unexplained death.”
“But unexplained means—” She stopped.
He wasn’t smirking, wasn’t conscious of making any particular expression, but she was reading something from him.
“Ordinary sane people, driven to the extreme, wanted me dead, Foley. Enough to put a threat in writing.” If she’d read them she’d know the threats were graphic, medieval. They wanted him beaten, tortured, shot, hung, poisoned, staked through the heart, beheaded. No one wished him an easy death. “No one thought they’d take action. Same as no one thought your mayor was in real danger.”
She put her hand to his chest, close to his heart. “Why do you punish yourself so hard?”
“This isn’t about changed traffic flow. This is life and death.”
“But we don’t live in Old Testament times. This is not an eye for an eye stuff.”
He took her hand and held it. That’s close to what it was for him. There was no way to make up for the fact he profited obscenely while people died.
“Oh, Drum.” She sat and pushed him back to the pillows and leaned over him. “We have to make you feel better about this. We need to get you back to your life.”
He looked into her eyes and had a moment of pure panic. She would never understand how he felt and he’d broken rules, stolen time, to be here like this with her and he didn’t regret it. How could he regret the honeyed slide of her skin on his, the slick of her mouth, but it was a heart-stopping indictment. He was not forgiven. He was not worthy. The death threats might not have been real, but his culpability was. He couldn’t think this through now. He was tired, so bone-softened and weary he could sleep again.
He put his hand to the back of her head. “Stay with me while I sleep.”
She kissed him with open skies and blue promises, with sweet young hope and spicy red longing and he could almost believe it was possible to be guilt-free.
29: Stung to Numb
Drum was gone when Foley woke and she missed him. With all his sealed sections prised open, with no more awkward secrets, he was more wondrous to her. And what he could do to her body, the way they sp
arked when they came together, that was a kind of neurotic necessity.
And man oh man, that was a worry.
But for now, in this little bubble of unreality they had, she was going to let it be. There’d be time enough to be practical.
She called out and he didn’t answer, but this was a shockingly big house. There was a third storey she’d never been to. She had no idea what time it was but the sun was up. It had to be closer to lunchtime than breakfast, and her watch confirmed that.
He wasn’t downstairs either. She went to the kitchen and checked the fridge. Nothing there they could eat other than a box of house brand cereal and a near empty carton of milk. He’d probably gone out for supplies again.
She took another shower, taking her time, washing her hair, and when he still wasn’t back she sat at the top of the stairs in his gorgeous robe to wait for him. She turned on her phone and it flooded with messages. Gabriella parroting a greeting card, get well soon. Adro with a question about the Festival of the Wind program, which would wait. A polite reminder she’d missed a credit card payment. Gawd. Hugh, grumpy but sweet to demand she rest and drink plenty of fluids. Lastly Nat, three times: Call me. Call me. Bitch, call me.
Still no sign of Drum. If he didn’t have any money, he was likely out there doing an odd job to earn enough to buy lunch. She looked at her feet, tucked under the drape of the robe. How was she supposed to go about convincing him to get professional help?
She dialled Nat.
“Where are you? You’re with him, aren’t you? Foley, shit, I’m worried about you. Did you sleep with him?”
Nat’s agitation wasn’t catching. “I’m with him.” She felt the rightness of saying that.
“And.”