"It wouldn't just be money. She liked stocks, bonds, that kind of thing. If you earmarked goodly chunks for the market, you couldn't just sit back and let it ride for almost a decade. Could you?"

"Not if you had a brain cell still working. You'd need to keep an eye on things, shift funds, sell, buy, and so on. Or have someone you trusted to handle it."

"She didn't trust anyone. That tells me she found a way from prison to deal with it personally. That means transmissions, to and from, and they're supposed to be monitored."

"A bribe in the right hand would take care of that. Conservative investments, blue chip and so on, and she wouldn't need much time to supervise her accounts. A few hours a week at most."

"Feeney and I will have to find the hand she greased."

"Do you plan to come home again in this century?" He angled his head. "Looking for a prison guard or inmate who'd be open to bribes shouldn't take more than twenty, thirty years to pin down."

"Have a little faith." She licked pizza sauce from her thumb. "I'll be home by dinnertime."

"Two nights running? I'm going to mark my calendar." When she only continued to frown, he shook his head. "What?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking." She wandered back, pushed at another slice of pizza, decided against it.

Because he knew his woman, Roarke said nothing and waited her out.

"When I was interviewing Shelly Pettibone today, she was talking about her marriage. It came off like she still had a lot of feelings for him, even though he dumped her and married someone half her age, and with big tits. But it was more as if she were talking about a brother than a husband at this point. She said... Anyway, do you think the passion, the sex, the way it is with us is just going to mellow out and fade off after a while?"

"Bite your tongue."

"I mean, people don't end up on the floor of the shower all the time. And when that sort of thing stops happening, will you have anything left that keeps you together? Needing to be together, or do you end up being two people living in the same house?"

"Come here."

"I don't need reassurances, Roarke." And she was already wishing she'd kept her mouth shut. "It just struck me, that's all. It was sort of sad, but understandable."

"Come here anyway." He reached out a hand for hers, and when she took it, drew her into his lap. "I can't imagine not wanting you so that it puts an ache inside me. Seeing you, smelling you, touching you so everything in me needs. But, if when we're a hundred and twenty and that's more memory than reality, I'll still need you, Eve, a thousand ways."

"Okay." She brushed the hair away from his face.

"Wait. Do you remember when first I saw you. In the winter, with death between us?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"I didn't make you for a cop. That disturbed me for some time later as I prided myself for spotting a cop at half a mile in the dark. But when I turned and looked at you, I didn't see cop. I saw a woman. I saw the woman, though I hadn't figured that out. I only knew that I looked, and I saw, and everything shifted. Nothing would be the same for me after that instant."

She remembered how he had turned, looked back over the sea of mourners at a funeral, how his eyes had locked with hers as if they'd been the only ones there. And the power of that look had shaken her to her toes.

"You bothered me," she murmured.

"I meant to. I looked, darling Eve, and saw the woman I would love, and trust, and need as I'd never expected to love or trust or need another living soul. The only woman I wanted to be with, to live with, to sleep and wake with. And a ghra, to grow old with."

"How do you do it?" She lowered her forehead to his. "How do you always manage to say what I need to hear?"

"There are people who live out their lives together, and not just from habit or convenience or a fear of change. But from love. Maybe love has cycles. We haven't been in it long enough to know, have we? But I know one thing utterly. I'll love you till I die."

"I know." Tears brushed her cheek. "I know it because it's the same for me. I felt sorry for that woman today because she'd lost that. She'd lost it, and didn't even know where or when. God." She had to take two long breaths because her throat was tight. "I was thinking about it later, thinking about what she'd said, how she'd said it. It just seemed to me that things were too easy between them, too smooth."

"Well then." He gave her a quick, hard squeeze. "Easy and smooth? Those are marital problems we'll never have to worry about."

CHAPTER SEVEN

With slack jaws and shuffling feet, hundreds of commuters loaded on shuttles. Or were loaded on, Eve thought, like cargo and corpses, by the red uniformed drones and droids of Manhattan Commuter Transport Service.

The terminal was a hive of noise, a great cacophony of sound that had an insectile hum as an undertone. Over it, the incomprehensible voices of flight announcers buzzed, babies wailed, pocket-links pinged.

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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