Her hands fit his waist naturally. Anxiously. “You won’t go off half-cocked?” she asked.
Gabriel grinned in spite of himself. “No, I promise,” he assured her. “When I go off I’ll be fully cocked.”
“That’s fine then.” Alice nodded and patted his chest, then took two steps toward the door, eyeing him over her shoulder as she went. “You understand,” she said slyly, “that when you do go off, I’ll at least want to watch?”
Laughter caught him by surprise. “That’s bad.” He made a grab for her that she eluded. “What was that supposed to be? Sexual innuendo?”
“No.” Alice shook her head and rounded the dining room doorway. “It was merely a suggestion. Like, um, take a witness and, um, cover your assets.”
Shoulders shaking, Gabriel stared after her, laughing until his chest ached and his eyes teared. Ah, hell, what a rollercoaster ride, huh?, he thought. One second around her he felt
gutted, the next full, the one after that slammed back into his seat taking the full force of the wind in his face. She was only mixed up about her own emotions, her own needs, and desires.
His
she handled like a pro. Whatever he needed, there she was, pulling him back from the brink of... Of what?, he wondered, damnation? Whatever brink she drew him back from, it was incredible how easily she did it, extraordinary how badly he wanted her to. But maybe where
emotions were concerned she understood what he didn’t. Maybe the true trick to balance and survival was not resolution, but compensation, offsetting bad with good, sin with penance. An old friend’s betrayal with someone new to trust.
Laughter sighed away on the thought. For an instant he simply stood, drained, contemplating the possibilities. Then he rolled his shoulders and flexed his legs, trying to alleviate the angry tension left in the muscles Alice’s laughter hadn’t touched. What he needed was a workout, an exhausting physical release of energy that would allow him the latitude he required to put the past few days in perspective. To build a case that would pull everything together so it made sense: Markum-Alice-Scully-Alice… The story in the paper, the lies...
Alice.
He shut his eyes against the instant buildup of tension thinking about her inspired and headed for the side door, the approaching twilight, the only place around here he could think of where he could get a workout on short notice—the kids’ jungle gym and swings.
*
Exercise numbed, sweat cleansed.
Again and again Gabriel pulled himself up to the bar that held the swings, doing chin-ups the hard way, like the marines. He felt nothing but the flex and strain of muscle on muscle, the drag and weight of his body pulling against him. He couldn’t get away from his thoughts. They intruded no matter what he did. Markum-Scully-Alice-Nicky-Markum-Scully-Alice...
Don’t think, he ordered himself. Concentrate: up, down, tug, release…breathe. Markum, he thought. Not Scully. It had to be Markum. Scully was too far removed from all of this, and putting the uniform on the dead Nicky was too subtle a message. Scully was more direct than that. If he’d thought Gabriel and Nicky were getting too close to him, he’d simply have met them someplace and pulled the trigger himself. One thing about Scully was you always knew where you stood.
Markum was something else. Markum could lie with his heart in his eyes. Gabriel had watched him do that more than once. Markum also liked games. He played them well, he played to win, and he wrote the rules as he went along. Dressing Nicky in uniform was Markum’s means of sending a message to Gabriel that
this
was the way it would go down. He and Nicky had been assigned the kind of deep cover that forced them to abandon the protection of their official identities and adopt new ones as criminals—in this instance to become corrupt cops, instead of remaining special agents. Markum had set them up to take the fall for him. He’d leak their adopted identities little by little to the press:
Cop
on the take killed by
cop
on the take. He’d destroy Nicky’s credibility and his family, then do the same to Gabriel’s. Without credibility in the press, even if Gabriel stayed alive it would be hard to get a jury to believe him about Markum.
Gabriel shut his eyes and forced himself to do ten fast pull-ups in succession, making his arms shake.
Scully must have suspected Markum’s duplicity from the start, must have seen what Gabriel had been blinded to by friendship. And trust. Scully should have leveled with him before tossing him face first into the frying pan, Gabriel thought bitterly, given his undercover a sporting chance.
But even as he thought it, Gabriel knew why Jack had remained silent. Because he would have defended Markum, then confronted him with Scully’s suspicions—and Si would have had time to deny everything and cover his tracks.
Gabriel squeezed the swing bar in his fists until his knuckles ached from the strain. What a jerk he’d been.
Sometimes, he knew, you trusted the wrong people. It was that simple. Sometimes it just got away from you. Sometimes, in attempting to defend what was right, you became what was wrong. Intellectually he could see how that happened: you spent so much time portraying sleaze in this work that sometimes you forgot who you were and became sleaze. When had that happened to Markum?
Exhausted physically and emotionally, Gabriel went up and down on the bar, hearing and feeling nothing.
The tail end of the sunset hanging in the sky bronzed him, glowing in the perspiration that coated his bare torso. Coming around the side of the house a short time later to find him, Alice paused and drew a shallow breath, startled by the picture of raw power and vulnerability he presented, the sudden realization of the emotional investment she was making in him by coming out here after him. Had already made when Aunt Kate had thrown the paper in his face. She
was no longer out to help him because she was inherently a Samaritan. She was out here to be with
him
because he was Gabriel and she felt for him. And because she wanted to offer him something to hold on to, wanted to hold him.
She set the closed pizza box she’d used as a tray to carry out a
small cooler with a
variety of cold drinks on the bottom floor of the play structure and watched him for a moment. He was not a tame man, she realized not for the first time, but one who could be infinitely dangerous to both her body and her heart. If he chose to be, that is. And if she let him. Ian, the rebel without
a
cause she’d fallen for in high school before she’d wound up with Matt had been like that. Sort of. He’d been her first true crush. Without touching her he’d made her sheltered Catholic inexperienced body and heart feel everything she’d never felt before. She’d really been one of his groupies rather than anything else. But she’d have done anything for him, literally anything, and that’s what had scared her about him: the way she’d wanted to let him swallow her up, think for her, tell her what to do.
The memory made her shudder. She supposed everyone had a past that was blemished to one degree or another, but that didn’t make hers any easier to look at sometimes. Ian had also had a reputation for violent antisocial behavior that she’d believed was merely rebel-biker hype. Except, as she’d discovered almost too late, it wasn’t.
But where teenage Ian had been controllingly, manipulatively dangerous, Gabriel was different. Older, more mature—in charge of himself, angry for a reason. Concerned for her, instead of immersed solely in himself. And, as one human being to another, she cared very much about him. Or maybe more than that.
No sense in doing anything halfway,
she reminded herself dryly, and swallowed. For all her
other flaws, committing herself less than wholeheartedly to anything was not something she had to worry about—not even when she should. A sense of impending decision lodged her heart in her throat. She gathered her emotions about her and crossed to him.
“Gabriel.”
She touched his back where he hung from the bar of the swing, and he recoiled, startled, then dropped to the ground and swung on her defensively. Prepared for this response, she slipped past his fists and framed his face between her hands, drawing his mouth to hers, pressing herself into his arms. “It’s me, Gabriel,” she murmured. “Don’t worry, it’s only me.”
“Alice?”
His face was half in shadow, half in fading sun, reminding her again of the two sides of him, one the professional liar, the other very, very real. She stroked his face with her fingers, brushed her lips over his again. “Yes, Gabriel, I’m here.”
He pulled his face up but not away, holding himself rigid, reaching for the frame of the swing, not sure whether he should trust his numbed senses or not. Not sure if she was real. “Why?”
She stood her ground, not afraid of his distrust, his apparent rejection, only dipping her chin slightly to kiss his chest below the hollow of his throat. Then she looked up at him again, eyes steady, lips bowed. “I didn’t think you should be alone. I didn’t want to leave you alone. I wanted to be with you.” Again she pressed toward him, slid her hands down the sides of his neck. “Hold me, Gabriel,” she whispered. “Hold onto me.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” His voice was strained, his arms were folding around her. “Do you know what you’re asking?”
“Yes.” She fitted herself to him, feeling the possessive rightness, naturalness, between two bodies that somehow belonged to one another. “I’m asking you to let me be with you. I’m asking you to share what hurts you and what makes you feel good with me. I’m asking you to touch me, Gabriel, and to let me touch you.”
His arms tightened around her. “I don’t want you to think you’re rescuing me from anything, Alice. I don’t want this kind of charity from you.”
“So help me, Gabriel,” she whispered fiercely, “I’m not capable of this kind of charity. Believe me.”
“I want to, Alice.” His arms were beneath her shoulders. His hands pressed around them, then up, into her hair. “God, I want to.”
“Then do,” she urged. She struggled to get closer to him; he held her away.
“Be sure.” The warning was filled with passion. “God, Alice, please, be sure.”
“I am, Gabriel. Trust me. I feel like you belong here. I belong here. I don’t know what else there is, but for now...” Her hands moved restlessly through his hair. “Come to me, damn you, Gabriel. Please.”
“Alice.” Her name was a hoarse sound in his throat. “Allie...” He held her away an instant longer, searching her face for any hesitation, then crushed her to him.
There was no gentleness in his kiss. His mouth bruised, plundered, demanded, and then quite suddenly gave, gentling, caressing—worshiping—moving from her mouth over her face and throat, along her neck, into her hair, then came to rest at her ear. His heart pounded. His breathing was ragged. She felt the rhythm of both against her breast, felt the staccato tremble of her own heart and lungs matching his. He dragged his lips, parted, warm, moist, over her ear. Around them the twilight deepened, closed them in the dark and intimate shadows cast by the maple trees and the play structure. Gabriel slid his hands down Alice’s back, up her sides. He stroked the curve of her breasts with his thumbs.
“We can’t do this here,” he muttered. “I want to make love with you, but not in front of the whole neighborhood.”
“What about the top of the play structure,” Alice whispered. “It’s enclosed, private—”
“Cramped,” Gabriel murmured. “Hard.”
Alice pressed her forehead to his chest and slid her hands boldly down his back, settling her hips against his. “That’s not the only thing that’s—”
Gabriel made a sound low in his throat and sought her mouth, silencing her. “Quiet, woman,” he mumbled. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s impolite to speak to people about afflictions they can’t do anything about.”
“Afflictions they can’t do anything about, yes.” Alice nodded and leaned back into a play structure upright, wantonly dragging him to her. “But not about things we could find a solution for.”