The Other Man(49)

Even so, I found myself trying, more than anything, to just make peace with his leaving.

I was good at making peace with things I couldn’t control or change.  I always had been.  It was what made me a great photographer, and hell, even a good dental patient.  I could hold still, without complaint, as long as it took until the job was done.

I had a bit of a temper, but it usually burned out fast, and in its wake, I always found peace.  Heath had been right.  I was an inherently peaceful woman.

The peaceful stage didn’t last long, but then, it had help in its exit as it was forcibly removed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was ten p.m. when my doorbell rang.

Of course I assumed it was Heath.  I wasn’t expecting anyone else, and though he’d said he wouldn’t be back, it was a strange hour for a random drop in from someone who was not my mysterious lover.

I guess it was excitement that had me not so much as glancing in the peephole or bothering to put on more than the thin tank and tiny panties I’d been about to wear to bed.

I’d had what felt like endless hours after to regret the things I hadn’t said to him, hadn’t tried to get him to say to me, and so even if this was just another goodbye from him, I wanted it, if only to get a few things off my chest.

I flung my front door open without a thought toward caution.

I was just so sure it was him.

It was not.

It was a woman, a stranger.  She was very young and staring at me with wintry eyes and a bitter twist to her mouth.

I was about to learn that that bitter was contagious.

She had short, dark hair, and a lean muscular build that was apparent under her tight navy shirt and tighter jeans.

She was very pretty, but I doubted she was called that often.  There were too many other things about her that stood out.  The pretty was far from one of her dominant features.

She looked hard.  Not in an unflattering way.  Not hard as in brittle, but hard as in carved stone.  Soft just wasn’t an option for this woman.  I knew that at once.

“Hello, Lourdes,” she said.  She had a husky voice, the kind of raspy tone men talked about.

Sexy.  Another word she’d be called long before you ever got to pretty.

“I work with Heath,” she added when I just kept staring at her.  “May I come in?  I’d like to speak to you.  It won’t take a minute.”

The way she spoke had me reassessing her age, because I’d had her pegged as very young, but with a few words I was guessing closer to twenty-five than, say, eighteen.

“Um, sure, okay,” I said, stepping back.

She came inside briskly, and I noted with surprise that she was actually shorter than I was when she swept by.  She wasn’t short, more like average height, but something about her had made me assume, at first impression, that she was tall.

She struck me as a badass, I decided, and in my head badasses were just always tall.

“Let me go put on a robe,” I said, feeling awkward in just my minuscule top and lacy panties.

She’d been headed into my living room, but at that she stopped and snapped around.  Her eyes raked me, top to bottom.  “Whatever you prefer, but don’t cover up on my account.  I’ve seen it all.”

It felt like a dare, or an insult, an insinuation that if I did cover up, it was because I was self-conscious or maybe even ashamed of my body.

I was not, and by now I could tell this woman was not here for a friendly visit, so I stayed how I was.

Let her see that I was proud of my body.  I was forty-one, a mother of two grown men, but my skin was smooth and flawless and not one thing on me sagged.  I was toned, but still shapely in all the right places.  Due to countless hours of hard work, my body was as killer as it’d ever been, and this seemed like a situation where it suited me to use it.

She pursed her lips and strode into my living room.  She didn’t sit, but faced me, arms crossed over her chest, eyes level on my face.

There was another quiet spell while we just studied each other.

She was very attractive, in a tough girl kind of way, a way that women perhaps appreciated more than a lot of men.  Girl crush material would have been a good way to describe it, if she’d been more pleasant.

“I’m not sure what Heath has shared with you,” she began.  “But he and I are close.  We’re partners, but I see he didn’t tell you about me.  No matter.  Doesn’t change why I came here.  I have some things to share with you, about Heath that I think you need to hear.  He and I are very similar, so I can give you some good insight into why he acted the way he did with you.  He shouldn’t have left you hanging like that, and I’m here to correct it.”

I did not like the sound of that.  Not at all.

She continued, “Our backgrounds are nearly identical.  We were both recruited for a very small unit in the CIA before either of us were old enough to vote.”

Wow.  And she was still young.  So young.  God, how did the government recruit these kids so young?  I kept thinking; my mind stuck on that.

It seemed wrong and sad.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Why what?”

“Why did they recruit you so young?”

She smiled unpleasantly.  “It wasn’t random.  There’s only one reason for the choices of recruits in our particular program.  They found something, a talent, a skill, a specialization in each of us that made us valuable to them.”  The way she spoke was inherently sharp, every word very pointed, shaped to cut, though I didn’t understand why.