Witness in Death (In Death #10)(57)

He wanted time away with her, away from work. His and hers. Not just one of the quick forty-eight-hour jaunts he managed to push her into, but real time, intimate time.

As he pushed away from his in-home control center, he rotated his shoulder. It was nearly healed and didn't trouble him overmuch. But now and again, a faint twinge reminded him of how close both of them had come to dying. Only weeks before, he'd looked at death, then into Eve's eyes.

They'd both faced bloody and violent ends before. But there was more at stake now. That moment of connection, the sheer will in her eyes, the grip of her hand on his, had pulled him back.

They needed each other.

Two lost souls, he thought, taking a moment to walk to the tall windows that looked out on part of the world he'd built for himself out of will, desire, sweat, and dubiously accumulated funds. Two lost souls whose miserable beginnings had forged them into what appeared to be polar opposites.

Love had narrowed the distance, then had all but eradicated it.

She'd saved him. The night his life had hung in her furious and unbreakable grip. She'd saved him, he mused, the first moment he'd locked eyes with her. As impossible as it should have been, she was his answer. He was hers.

He had a need to give her things. The tangible things wealth could command. Though he knew the gifts most often puzzled and flustered her. Maybe because they did, he corrected with a grin. But underlying that overt giving was the fierce foundation to give her comfort, security, trust, love. All the things they'd both lived without most of their lives.

He wondered that a woman who was so skilled in observation, in studying the human condition, couldn't see that what he felt for her was often as baffling and as frightening to him as it was to her.

Nothing had been the same for him since she'd walked into his life wearing an ugly suit and cool-eyed suspicion. He thanked God for it.

Feeling sentimental, he realized. He supposed it was the Irish that popped out of him at unexpected moments. More, he kept replaying the nightmare she'd suffered through a few nights before.

They came more rarely now, but still they came, torturing her sleep, sucking her back into a past she couldn't quite remember. He wanted to erase them from her mind, eradicate them. And knew he never would. Never could.

For months, he'd been tempted to do a full search and scan, to dig out the data on that tragic child found broken and battered in a Dallas alley. He had the skill, and he had the technology to find everything there was to find: details the social workers, the police, the child authorities couldn't.

He could fill in the blanks for her, and, he admitted, for himself.

But it wasn't the way. He understood her well enough to know that if he took on the task, gave her the answers to questions she wasn't ready to ask, it would hurt more than heal.

Wasn't it the same for him? When he'd returned to Dublin after so many years, he'd needed to study some of the shattered pieces of his childhood. Alone. Even then, he'd only glanced at the surface of them. What was left of them were buried. At least for now, he intended to leave them buried.

The now was what required his attention, he reminded himself. And brooding over the past -- there was the Irish again -- solved nothing. Whether the past was his or Eve's, it solved nothing.

He gathered up the discs and hard copies he'd need for his afternoon meetings. Then hesitated. He wanted another look at her before he left for the day.

But when he opened the connecting doors, he saw only McNab, stuffing what appeared to be an entire burger in his mouth while the computer droned through a background search.

"Solo today, Ian?"

McNab jerked from a lounging to a sitting position, swallowed too fast, choked. Amused, Roarke strolled over and slapped him smartly on the back.

"It helps to chew first."

"Yeah. Thanks. Ah... I didn't have much breakfast, so I thought it'd be okay if I..."

"My AutoChef is your AutoChef. The lieutenant's in the field, I take it."

"Yeah. She hauled Peabody out about an hour ago. Feeney headed into Central to tie up some threads. I'm working here." He smiled then, a quick flash of strong white teeth. "I got the best gig."

"Lucky you." Roarke managed to find a French fry on McNab's plate that hadn't been drowned in ketchup. He sampled it while he studied the screen. "Running backgrounds? Again?"

"Yeah, well." McNab rolled his eyes, shifting so his silver ear loops clanged cheerfully together. "Dallas has some wild hair about there might be some way-back connection, some business between Draco and one of the players that simmered all these years. Me, I figure we already scanned all the data and found zippo, but she wants another run, below the surface. I'm here to serve. Especially when real cow meat's on the menu."

"Well now, if there is some bit of business, you're unlikely to find it this way, aren't you?"

"I'm not?"

"Something old and simmering, you say." Considering the possibility, Roarke hooked another fry. "If I wanted to find something long buried, so to speak, I'd figure on getting a bit of dirt under my nails."

"I don't follow you."

"Sealed records."

"I don't have the authority to open sealeds. You gotta have probable cause, and a warrant, and all that happy shit." When Roarke merely smiled, McNab straightened, glanced at the entrance door. "Of course, if there was a way around all that off the record -- "