Memory in Death (In Death #22)(97)

"Easy for you to say." She'd stolen his breath in more ways than one. To pay her back he rolled her

over. With lips and fingers he tickled her into shrieks, aroused her into gasps.

She was riding on foolishness and passion, a giddy combination with the wine flowing through her.

When he was inside her, still laughing breathlessly, she chained her arms around his neck.

"Merry Christmas," she managed. "Oh, God." She came on a gasping laugh, then dragged him with her.

"Merry Christmas," he said and shot her over, one last time.

She lay, all but cross-eyed, staring up at the tree. "Jesus, talk about putting a bow on it."

Later, at his insistence, she opened her first gift. So she'd be comfortable, he'd said. It was hard to be otherwise in the long cashmere robe of forest green.

They ate by the fire, washing down Summerset's simple lobster with champagne. When he asked about the case, she shook her head. She wouldn't bring it into this. She was—they were—entitled to one night where blood and death stayed locked outside their world. A world where they sat like children, cross-legged under a tree, ripping at colored paper.

"The Universe According to Roarke?" He read the label on a cased disc.

"Feeney helped me put it together. Okay, Feeney mostly put it together, but I came up with the concept. It'll go for holo or comp."

She reached up for another cookie. She was making herself half-sick with sugar, but what was Christmas for? "Personalized game, and what you do is start out at the bottom. Pretty much wits only. Then you can earn money, arms, land. Build stuff, fight wars. You can pull in other people—we're all in there.

And take on famous foes and stuff. You can cheat, steal, barter, and bloody. But there are a lot of traps, so you can end up broke, destitute, in a cage or tortured by your enemies. Or you can end up ruling the known universe. The graphics are very chilly."

"You're in here?"

"Yeah."

"How can I lose?"

"It's tough. Feeney's had it up and running for a couple weeks and said he couldn't get by level twelve. It's pissing him off. Anyway, I figured since you don't get to steal in real life anymore, you'd get a kick out of virtual."

"The best present is having a woman who knows me." He leaned over to kiss her, tasted wine and sugar cookies. "Thanks. Your turn."

"I've already opened a million." Which, she thought, ran the gamut from the sparkly to the silly, the sumptuous to the sexy.

"Nearly done. This one."

She tugged the ribbon from the box he gave her, and though he winced, draped it around his neck.

Inside was a magnifying glass with a silver handle.

"It's old," he told her. "I thought, 'What's a detective without a magnifying glass?'"

"It's great." She held up her hand, studied it through the glass, then grinning, shifted closer to Roarke, peered at him through it. "Jeez. You're even prettier." Then she turned it on the snoring cat. "You're not. Thanks."

When he tapped a finger to his lips, she pretended to sigh before she leaned over to kiss him.

"Here, do this one, it sort of fits." She pushed a box at him while she played with the glass. "If I'd had one of these when I was a kid, I'd've driven people crazy."

"Rather the point of toys and tools." He glanced up, found himself being inspected again. He tossed a bow at her. "Here, see what you make of that."

He opened the box, gently took out the pocket watch inside. "Eve, this is wonderful."

"It's old, too. I know how you rev on old stuff. And I figured you could put it on a shelf somewhere with all the other old stuff. It was already engraved," she added when he opened it. "But I thought..."

" 'Time stops.'" He said it quietly, then just looked at her with those stunning blue eyes.

"I thought, yeah, it does." She reached for his hand. "It does."

He gathered her in, pressing his lips to her throat, her cheek, just holding on. "It's a treasure. So are you."

"This is good," she murmured. Not the things, she thought, and knew he understood. But the sharing of them. The being. "I love you. I'm really getting the hang of it."

He laughed, kissed her again, then drew away. "You've one more."

It had to be more jewelry, she noted from the size of the box. The man just loved draping her in sparkles. Her first thought when she opened the box was that they not only sparkled, they could blind you like the sun.

The earrings were diamond drops—three perfect round stones in graduated sizes that dripped from a cluster of more diamonds that formed the petals of a brilliant flower.

"Wowzer," she said. When he only smiled, it hit her. "Big Jack's diamonds, from the Forty-seventh Street heist. The ones we recovered."

"After they'd stayed hidden away nearly half a century."

"These were impounded."

"I didn't steal them." He laughed, held up his game disc. "Remember? Only virtually these days. I negotiated, and acquired them through completely legal means. They deserve the light. They deserve you. Without you, they might still be shut up in a child's toy. Without you, Lieutenant, Chad Dix wouldn't be celebrating Christmas right now."