Secrets in Death (In Death #45)(84)

“You’re not so pure, Lieutenant. Three dead men at your feet, and two of them are yours. I kept secrets—for a price, but I kept them. Not everybody can, not everybody will. Think about that. Secrets have a way of crawling their way out no matter how deep you bury them.

“I’m not going to die in this stinking alley even in your stupid dream. The dead don’t always rest,” Larinda said as she walked back into the shadows. “I can promise you that.”

As she spoke Patrick Roarke’s eyes blinked, fixed on Eve’s. Richard Troy turned his head, grinned at her. Big Rod’s fingers crawled over the littered ground toward her ankle.

Dread crawled into her heart.

“Call a cop,” Eve said coolly, drawing her weapon.

“That’s enough now,” Roarke murmured as he held her close and the cat bumped his head between her shoulder blades. “Enough.”

“I’m all right.” She pressed her face into Roarke’s shoulder as the dream broke. “I’m okay.”

At the sound of her voice, Galahad climbed onto her hip, stared at her until she stroked a hand over him. “I’m okay,” she repeated. “It wasn’t a nightmare. Just … a lot of weird.”

Roarke tipped her face up toward his, studied her as the cat had done. “Tell me.”

Couldn’t, she thought. Just couldn’t. So she hedged instead. “A conversation with Larinda Mars. She’s a little pissed off at me.” On a sigh, Eve closed her eyes. “I can live with that. Arguing with a dead woman’s annoying and useless. Sorry it woke you up.”

Not a lie, Eve decided as Roarke rubbed her back and the cat settled down again. Just not a full disclosure.

She shoved it away, willfully shoved it all away, and concentrated on Roarke’s scent, Galahad’s breathing, the simmer of the bedroom fire.

And, willfully, pushed herself into dreamless sleep.

Roarke lay awake even after he felt her slip off. Lay with his arm around her and his thoughts circling.

Not a lie, he thought in nearly a mirror of her own. But not altogether the truth.

And why was that?

Considering the whys, he backtracked over the evening as he would over a negotiation before its next round. Picking at details, tones, body language.

As possibilities came and went, he slept little. And rose early, as always.

He showered and dressed, handled a ’link conference, a holo meeting before dawn. His work energized him as much as sleep, as did his need to involve himself in the details, small and large, of all the arms of all the reaches of what he’d built.

Through wile and guile, through brains and sweat. Through a fierce and focused determination since childhood.

Once money had mattered utmost, because money equaled survival. Then power had joined that ambition, because power brought respect. And with both, a man could adjust his life as he pleased, toss off—at least in appearances—the ragged and violent beginnings.

Then came the building, and the wonder of it, the all but shocking realization that he could truly create. With that, the revelation of simple satisfaction.

Buy, sell, build, own, innovate, expand. Risk and reward. Take what was neglected, make it shine again. Create where a vaccum had once existed. Risk and reward—and yes, even when survival had been assured, some of that risk had involved snaking over and under and across the line of the law.

Habits, particularly enjoyable ones, are hard to break, after all.

But then Eve. Just Eve. Only Eve. Difficult, cynical, troubled, and fascinating Eve had changed him, saved him, completed him. And habits had been as easily broken as a dry twig under a boot.

Even then he’d never seen himself as now. As a man who could and would shuffle his own work, check on hers, contribute to hers. Never imagined that satisfaction.

He read through the results of the auto-search he’d run for her—his cop—considered those results from both sides of the line he straddled now.

The criminal past, the Eve present.

As dawn approached, he continued his habit—checked on her through house security, saw she slept yet, and the cat felt confident enough in her comfort to have left her.

He rose and, diverging from habit, went downstairs.

As he approached the kitchen, he heard Summerset’s voice, the murmur of some early media show under it.

Talking to the cat, Roarke realized. The conversational tone amused him—as he often found himself doing the same, as if expecting the cat to talk back.

“I expect you’ll behave while I’m gone, and keep an eye on the children.”

Roarke paused to take in the scene. Summerset, a baker’s apron over shirtsleeves, was kneading dough while Galahad sat on a counter stool and watched, apparently listening as well.

“I’m leaving it to you,” Summerset continued, his long, thin hands working methodically and with what looked like an easy enjoyment. “You’ll have to see they get a decent meal in them.”

“He’s generally more worried about his own meals.”

Summerset glanced over, eyebrows lifting. “He’ll keep his clever eyes on you nonetheless. Is all well?”

Roarke made a sound of affirmation, wandered in. He rarely came to the kitchen. It, like the rooms beyond, were Summerset’s domain—an arrangement that suited them both.

“You’re about ready to be off, I’d think.”