“Do you want them?”
“God.” She did what she rarely did in company. She took his lips with hers, let the kiss spin out, felt his hand fist on the back of her jacket. “I’m so sorry.”
“No. No. I don’t want you to be sorry.”
“Too bad. You needed to stop, and I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t let either of us take a breath. Routine, procedure, logic. It’s necessary. And it’s all fucked up.” She leaned on him a moment, let herself lean on him. “It’s so fucked up. So, I guess we’ll take a breath now. I’d better use the first one to tell you I love you because there’s going to be others that fuck it up again.”
He murmured to her in Irish, brushed his lips on her brow. “We’re used to that, aren’t we? A ghra, you’re so pale. She’s lost weight, you see,” he said to Mira. “It’s only been a couple of days, but I can see it.”
“He worries. He nags like a”—she nearly said “mother,” caught herself—“wife. He’s a damn good wife.”
“Now you’re just trying to piss me off. But under the circumstances, I’ll let it pass. Why don’t you sit, and I’ll get you a glass of wine?”
“Oh yeah, a really big glass of wine.” She dropped into a chair, let out a long, long breath. “I know I was rude before,” she said to Mira. “And I figure you know a defense mechanism when you see one. Still, sorry about that. I appreciate, a lot, that you came.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ve work to catch up on,” Roarke said as he handed Eve her wine. “I’ll go upstairs, let the two of you talk.”
“Don’t.” Eve took his hand. “You should stay. You’re part of this.”
“All right.”
“I don’t know where to start. How to start. It’s like trying to navigate a maze in the dark, and . . .” Then the cat sprawled weightily over her feet. And that was it, the start. “I miss home. Roarke had you bring the cat, because the cat’s home. I never had anything, didn’t want anything until that cat. I don’t even know why I took him, exactly, but I made him mine.”
She took a long, slow drink of wine. “I missed him. I miss Peabody and her smart mouth and steady ways. I miss Feeney and Mavis and my bullpen. Hell, it’s so bad I even miss Summerset.”
When Roarke made some sound, she turned narrowed eyes on him. “If you ever tell him I said that, I’ll shave you bald in your sleep, dress you in frilly pink panties, and take a vid that I’ll auction and sell for huge amounts of money.”
“So noted,” he said, and thought: There’s Eve. There she is.
“It’s not just being away. Since Roarke, I’ve gone away, from home, from work. It’s here, and it’s working here without my people, my place. And it’s more than that,” she admitted when Mira waited her out. “McQueen’s another beginning for me. Not just the real start of the job for me. When I opened the door in New York where he had all the girls, when I saw them, knew what he’d done to them, I went back, for a minute, to that room in Dallas.
“I’d probably remembered things before, but that was the first time I couldn’t pretend I didn’t. He’d done to them what someone had done to me. I knew it. Even if I didn’t know all of it, I knew that.”
“How did you feel?” Mira asked her.
“Sick, scared, enraged. But I put it away, could put it away for a long time. Maybe little parts would slip out, give me a bad time, but I could shove them back into the shadows again. Then, right before I met Roarke there was an incident. A girl—baby, just a baby really. And I was too late.”
“I remember,” Mira said. “Her father was crazed on Zeus, and murdered her before you could get to her.”
“Cut her to pieces. Right after, I caught the DeBlass case, and Roarke was a suspect. He was so . . . he was Roarke, and while I could eliminate him from my suspect list, I couldn’t shake him. And the case built, and everything turned around inside me.?
?
“How did you feel?” Mira asked again, and Eve managed a smile.
“Sick, scared, enraged. What does he want from me? I mean, look at him. What does he want from me, with me?”
“Should I tell you?”
She looked at him. “You tell me every day. Sometimes I still don’t get it, but I know it. And with everything turned around and opening up and breaking apart, I remembered. My father, what he did to me. It can’t go back in the box anymore.”
“Is that what you want? To shut it away?”
“I did. I did,” Eve repeated in a murmur. “Now? I want to deal with it, accept it, move on. I was, I think. When I remembered the rest. Remembered that night when he came in and he went at me, hurting me, raping me. He broke my arm.” She rubbed it, as if she felt the shock of pain. “And I killed him. I didn’t think I could live with that, get through that memory. I don’t think I would have without Roarke. Without you. But I know more, coming back here again, this time. With McQueen and my father twisting together in my head.”
“Do they?” Mira asked.