She might as well ask the bloody question. ‘Are you going to be disappearing any time soon?’
‘Eh?’ Devlin swivelled towards her. What she could see of his face had a blank why-would-I-do-that? look. Impatient, she tipped his glasses out of the way. ‘Last time we did this, you walked away and never came back.’
It took her a few seconds to decode his expression. Surprise. Followed by something. Uncertainty? Devlin?
He gave her a twitch of the shoulders that wasn’t quite a shrug. ‘I didn’t think
…’ She saw him swallow. ‘Because of me, you’d lost Jamie all over again. I didn’t think that you’d ever want to see me again. Getting the hell out seemed to be the best thing – I guess I called it wrong.’
The soft uncoiling of relief surprised her. She hadn’t realised she’d been holding herself tight in anticipation. She splayed her hand on Devlin’s chest. Warm, firm, strong.
And therefore dangerous.
Oh, what the hell.
‘I never blamed you.’
‘I guess I thought you should.’ He put his hand up to cover hers. ‘You were hurting. I didn’t want to make that worse.’ The puzzled look in his eyes almost made her smile. ‘I didn’t know how to help, so maybe it was easier to go,’ he acknowledged softly. She could see it was a new thought.
‘If you need to leave any time, you just have to tell me.’
She watched him blink. ‘Okay.’
They stood for a moment. Something undecipherable hovered. Devlin’s mouth moved. Was he going to
–?
His eyes shifted. He pointed past her, to the rumbling carousel. ‘That’s your bag.’
It was almost dark. Devlin looked up at the neat, well-kept house. The window boxes had been changed. The flowers now were smaller, pink and white, just coming out. With trailing stuff. Ivy. He knew that much.
‘You’re not coming in.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact.
‘Er. No.’ The pressure in his gut had started to gnaw again during the flight – for once nothing to do with the asshole who might be flying the plane. Now it was building higher. He needed to get somewhere alone and quiet, to look at the papers that Rossi had given him, that were just about setting fire to the bag at his feet. The patterns that were forming
… He had to get it straight in his head, to make calls, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that from Kaz’s house. He wasn’t going to bring all that into her home.
And he needed to think. About
… that thing he’d just discovered. Him and
… her.
‘I’ll get a hotel.’
There were circles under her eyes, but she was smiling. ‘You trying to protect my reputation, Devlin?’
He summoned up an answering smile. ‘Something like that.’
She didn’t push it, just turned her cheek into his chest, head under his chin, hugging. Which made him want to stay. This woman had all the weapons, even when she didn’t know she was using them. No bloody prisoners. Christ, he really had to deal with this, or the thumping of his heart was going to give him away.
She raised her head, smiled, and turned his knees to water. ‘It probably won’t hurt either of us to get some sleep. I do have a business to run.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘My team is absolutely the best, but they’ve had to manage without me much too often these last few weeks.’ She flexed her shoulders, as if shaking off unwelcome memories.
He frowned. ‘You going to call your mom, get her to come over?’
Kaz shook her head. ‘I knew we’d be late. I told her I’d ring her in the morning.’ She tilted her head. ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’ He dropped his lips to her forehead, then let her go. ‘You will.’
Kaz dumped her bag in the hall and wandered through the empty house, leafing through the post and checking on the health of her pot plants. Finally coming to rest in the kitchen, she brewed a mug of cherry-and-cinnamon tea and stood drinking it, eyes on the colourful drawings on the door of the fridge. Someday, soon, it would be time to take them down and store them away, but she wasn’t ready to do it yet.
She turned to stare at her reflection in the glass of the window, sipping tea. Jamie was gone. For the second time. Her daughter would never run through the house laughing, chased by her grandmother in the guise of a wolf. Never kick her shoes across the room in a fit of temper. Never paint any more pictures to join the bright daubs that hung behind her.
Kaz turned, touching the paintings with her fingers. Not daubs, there was real talent there. She swallowed down the tears that threatened. There was a time, however great the pain, when somehow you had to move on. Everything she’d had with Jeff was gone, as if it had never been. Her marriage and her daughter were just memories now. No more possibilities. But she still had years of her life left to live. Years that still might have something good in them. Tonight – she was bone tired, too tired to think, but the thoughts kept coming anyway.
Was she ready to change?
She’d had the strength to let Devlin go, to do whatever it was he needed to do tonight. If he came back
…
She sat down at the kitchen table. She wanted Devlin in her life. Especially in her bed. Even knowing that he’d been things, done things
… things she didn’t want to hear about. Or maybe she did? Was it better to know? He’d said she could ask. If she didn’t ask would there be imaginings or would she be able to pretend none of it existed? What they
had
was powerful sexual attraction. Powerful sex. To hell with being a nice girl,
that
mattered.
Devlin was possibly the most complicated human being she’d ever come across – except maybe her father.
No, that’s wrong. Oliver likes to think he’s complex, but he’s only writing his own hype and believing it.
Now where had that one come from? Kaz tilted her head.
Dangerous ground here, kiddo, thinking about your father and your lover in the same sentence.
She smiled. One thing Devlin
wasn’t
was a father figure. There was so much more to him than he gave out. She sensed that he was struggling with that himself. He cared about that child – Sally Ann. And he’d kept looking for stuff about Jamie, even after he’d left.
So what was that about?
Kaz drifted a finger down the mug. She trusted Devlin. The thought made her hesitate, but she faced up to it. She did trust him, but could she
accept
him? She’d have to take Devlin as he was, baggage and all, and accept that he would come and go in her life. That he might not always be there.
Is that what you want?
She had to be able to trust herself, too. To take whatever Devlin was offering, and not expect anything more.
Kaz yawned. It was too late, and she was exhausted, which was probably why all this was oozing up now. She wasn’t going to resolve anything, sitting here.
She crossed to the sink, rinsed her cup and left it on the draining board. At the door, with her hand on the light switch, she turned, for one last look at the pictures on the fridge. She would take them down. Soon. But now
–
Heart cracking, she raised her hand to blow a kiss. ‘Night-night, sweetheart.’
Devlin stared down at the bank statement. The columns of figures blurred and danced. He wasn’t taking in any of it. Promises.
Shit.
They were starting to come much too easily when he was around Kaz. To her. To himself. He stared morosely at the cheap print hung over the bed, a mess of lines and circles. They called
that
art. He blotted it out by shutting his eyes.
He shouldn’t have left. Maybe she was in danger. Maybe he should go back.
He all but clambered off the bed.
Hold it! You want to go because you want to be with her, you jerk. No pressure, just like breathing.
The room had suddenly got very hot. He yanked impatiently at his collar. That little epiphany in another hotel room, a few hours ago –
shit
.
What he was thinking had to be wrong. The smell of her, the touch of her, the feel of her – the woman was a great lay. The best. Absolutely. Why couldn’t his body just leave it at that? Why did there have to be all this extra, in his head and his
heart
? He didn’t know what the fuck love
was
for Christ’s sake, so how could he tell if this was the real deal? How could it be
… oh Christ
… how could he be
thinking
a word like love?
It had to be just some overstretched hormone thing. Oh yeah, hormones that made him want to rip down the moon, and every last star, and hang them around her neck. Or get some magic, voodoo or something, that would give her her kid back.
Christ, some hormones
. Oh yeah, and while they were at it maybe they’d rip his own tongue out too, before he burdened her with all this.
The woman had enough going on, without him dumping this on her.
‘So, hey babe, I’m the guy with no past – I’m not offering anything – except a CV that’s full of all the natural talents you could ever hope to avoid in your worst nightmares, but I’d be proud if you’d take my name – it’s not mine, by the way – I stopped using my real name a long time back.’
Name. Marriage. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He gritted his teeth. The old values that his grandmother had hammered into him really were crawling out of the woodwork now. Love, fidelity, marriage. He scrambled off the bed, as if the coverlet was on fire.
He needed alcohol.
Three of the whisky miniatures from the mini bar lay in the glass, like so much poison. He put it down after one sip. His gut was squirming and there was an evil little voice in the back of his head telling him how much he
wanted
to feel like this. That the churning, aching, unsatisfied
need
, that had nothing to do with lust, was something he
wanted
to be happening to him. Like how bloody twisted was that? Could you really
enjoy
tormenting yourself like this? Well yeah, you could. Like poking a half-healed wound, knowing it was going to hurt, but not being able to help yourself.
He looked frantically round the room. If he still had his gun, he could put it to his head and just pull the trigger and that would be that.
No.
Abruptly the freewheeling stopped.
Never that
.
Life was too damned precious, too easily thrown away. Sobered, he looked again at the whisky. He took a mouthful, then another, then set it to rest on the night stand. He would keep all this to himself. He would do for Kaz whatever needed doing, using whatever of his miserable talents that were required. God help him. To the extent of his worthless life, if it came to that.
With the precision of long practice, he took the bundle of emotions he had let ride him, rolled them up and stuffed them into the back of his brain. With ruthless control, he forced himself to look at the heap of papers dumped on the pillow. Those from the package Rossi had given him and a few of his own, new stuff that he’d shoved in the bottom of his bag when he’d left Chicago for Dublin. About half-a-century ago. He hauled in a breath. Dublin. In the morning he had to track Bobby down and fix that. Right now
…
Starting the familiar rhythm, the professional machine took over as he sorted and sifted the papers into piles across the bed.
Bank statements, phone accounts. If Elmore had come into serious money, where had it come from? Was all of it from an insurance payment? Was any of it? There were phone calls, three in particular, that caught Devlin’s interest. One was to a number that Devlin recognised. One, when he checked with the service provider, was to a defunct cell phone. And then there was the last one, on the morning that Jeff had died.
Devlin looked down at the neat bundles. So many deaths. A young woman and a child on an empty road, a mother and her son in an apartment in Florence, Jeff Elmore. And Jamie Elmore? Devlin’s hand hovered over the first pile of paper, one of the ones he’d added. It was mainly press cuttings. The death of Detective Inspector Philip Saint. Shot dead, in broad daylight, in a central London park. There was nothing to connect the death of Kaz’s uncle to the rest – except that one phone call.
Listening to his gut, Devlin pushed that pile in with the rest. A traffic accident, an execution, a suicide, a double murder. Death on two continents, strung together by fear, and lubricated by money. Big money. If he was right, then this thing was bigger, deeper and darker than he’d ever imagined, with roots that maybe went back years. Maybe almost a lifetime.
Devlin yawned suddenly, and stretched. It was twenty-to-two. He scraped his hands over his chin, finding stubble. He could shave, shower, sleep, but the papers pulled him. There were two people lurking here, amongst the debris on the bed. Two shadows. The executive – shooter, executioner, murderer – and behind him – The reason for all this. The Paymaster.
Devlin stacked the papers. Mothers and children. But what about fathers
…