“How’d you get through airport security with that steel pike up your ass?” Ordering herself not to stagger, she bent to pick up the cat who was busy threading himself between her legs. She stroked Galahad’s head. “Look, it’s back. Didn’t I tell you to change the security code?”
“The disgrace you call a vehicle does not belong in front of the house, nor,” he added, picking up her jacket with two thin fingers, “is this the proper place for articles of clothing.”
She started up the stairs, stifling a yawn. “Bite me.”
He watched her go, smiled thinly at her back. It was good to be home.
She went straight to the bedroom, managed to make it up to the platform, where she dumped the cat on the bed seconds before she fell facedown onto it herself.
She was asleep before Galahad padded his way over and curled up on her butt.
Roarke found her there, as he’d expected from the brief report from Summerset. “Finally hit the wall, have you?” he murmured, noting she hadn’t removed her weapon harness or boots. He gave the cat an absent scratch between the ears, then settled down in the sitting area to work while she slept.
She didn’t dream, not at first, but simply lay at the bottom of a dark pool of exhaustion. Only when she began to surface did the dreams come, in vague shapes and muffled sounds. A hospital bed, with a pale figure on it.
Marlene Cox, then herself as a child. Both battered, both helpless. Then the darker shapes that swirled around the bed. The cop she was, staring down at the child she’d been.
There were questions to be answered. You have to wake up and answer the questions or he’ll do it again, to someone else. There’s always another victim.
But the figure in the bed didn’t stir. The face changed: from her own to Marlene’s, to Jacie Wooton’s, to Lois Gregg’s, then back to her own.
Something began to rise up inside her that was both anger and fear. You’re not dead, not like the others. You have to wake up. Damn it, wake up and stop him.
One of those swirling shapes coalesced, stood on the opposite side of the bed. The man who’d battered the child, and haunted the woman.
It’s never really over. His eyes were bright with humor in his bloody face. It never ends. There’s always going to be another, no matter what you do. You might as well sleep, little girl. Better to sleep than to keep walking with the dead. Keep walking, and you’ll be one of them.
He reached over, pressed his hand over the child’s mouth. Her eyes opened, full of pain, full of fear. Eve could only stare, unable to move, to protect, to defend. Only stare into her own eyes as they glazed over, and died.
She woke with a strangled gasp, and in Roarke’s arms.
“Ssh. You’re just dreaming.” His lips pressed against her temple. “I’m right here. Hold on to me. Only a dream.”
“I’m okay.” But she kept her face buried against his shoulder until she got her breath back. “I’m okay.”
“Hold on to me anyway.” For he wasn’t, never really was, when she wandered through nightmares.
“No problem.” She could already feel her pulse begin to level off and the ugly smear of terror over her mind fade. She could smell him—soap and skin, and there was the lovely brush of his hair against her cheek.
Her world steadied.
“What time is it? How long was I out?”
“It doesn’t matter. You needed to sleep. Now you need food, and more sleep.”
She wasn’t going to argue. She was starving. More, she recognized that tone in his voice, and it meant he’d find a way to pour a soother down her throat if she gave him the smallest opening.
“I could use a meal. But I could use something else first.”
“What?”
“You know how sometimes you get in a mood when you touch me, when you love me, and it’s all tender. Like you know I’m feeling raw inside.”
“I do.”
She tipped her head back, touched his cheek. “Show me.”
“Here now.” He feathered his lips over her brow, her cheeks, her mouth as he released her weapon harness. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”