“Okay. Okay,” she murmured, giving him a long stroke down the back. She closed her eyes, and holding

the fat, purring cat, tried to find her center again.

“I’m sorry,” Roarke said downstairs. “I didn’t tell her you’d be waiting for us. I knew she’d stall otherwise, and we’d end up . . . I thought it would be harder. I’m going to get us that wine.”

He chose a bottle at random from the rack in the bar area. While he uncorked it, Mira walked over.

“You look very tired. You rarely do.”

“I’m not particularly. Frustrated, I suppose. This should breathe a bit, but bugger that.” He poured two glasses.

“Frustrated with Eve?”

“No. Yes.” He swallowed wine. “No. Not really. She has enough to deal with, more than anyone should. With myself. I don’t know what to do for her, what to say to her. I dislike not knowing what to do for or say to the person who means everything to me.

“I’m sorry, please, sit down. Have some wine.”

“Thank you.” She sat, and in her quiet way sipped and waited while he roamed the room as a wolf might a cage.

“What do you think you should do, or say?” she asked him.

“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t bloody know. Does she need me to just let her work herself into exhaustion? That can’t be right. Yet I know very well she needs the work, the routine of it, the structure to get through the rest.”

He shoved a hand in his pocket, found the gray button, turned it over and over in his fingers. “But it’s not routine this time, is it? It’s not simply another case, another investigation.”

“It’s difficult, coming here. Being here.”

“Bad enough if it were only that, with all the memories it shoves down her throat. The nightmares, they’d eased off, until we came here. Now she’s had one worse than anything I know of since we’ve been together. She’s made of courage, you know? And for her to be so terrified, so absolutely defenseless . . .”

“Makes you feel the same.”

He stopped, and the anguish lived in his eyes, on his face, in the set of his body. “I couldn’t get her back. For . . . it seemed forever, I couldn’t pull her out. And this was before her mother. This was just being here, being here, tracking a man who makes her think of her father.”

“You understood it would be difficult for her, physically, emotionally. Did you try to stop her from coming?”

“As if I could.”

“Roarke.” She waited until he again stopped his restless movements, looked at her. “You know you could have. You’re the only one who could have stopped her from coming to Dallas. Why didn’t you?”

He stood for a moment, and when the storm in his eyes faded, sat across from her. “How could I? If she hadn’t come, hadn’t done whatever she could and McQueen had hurt, worse, killed Melinda Jones, Eve would never have forgiven herself. It would have cut something out of her. Neither of us could have lived with that.”

“Now Melinda and the girl McQueen abducted are safe.”

“But it’s not done, and not just because he’s still out there. She stood over her mother’s body today. God.” He rubbed at his temple. “Could it only be today? There’s been no time, you see, to deal with it, to understand it. To cope. She won’t take it. Do I force her to? Pour a tranq into her so she gets some rest? Let her run until she drops? Do I just watch her suffer, and continue to do nothing?”

“You feel you’ve done nothing?”

“Tracking financials and making her eat a goddamn sandwich?” The brittle, brutal frustration snapped out of him. “Anyone could do the same, so it’s next to nothing. She needs more from me than that, and I don’t know what it is.”

“You brought me the cat.”

Eve stood on the stairs, Galahad at her feet. Roarke stood as she crossed the room.

“Who else would think—would know—I needed the stupid cat? Who else would do that for me?”

“Maybe I did it for myself.”

She shook her head, laid her hands on his face, and watched everything—the sorrow, the fatigue, the love, swirl into his eyes. “You brought Mira and Galahad. Why didn’t you toss in Peabody and Feeney, add Mavis for comic relief?”

Tags: J.D. Robb In Death Mystery
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