Her Last Whisper (36 page)

Idiotically, the sheer unexpectedness of that flustered her.

She summoned up a smile for Tony, who like the true gentleman he was was waiting to make sure she got safely into her room. The uncomfortable memory of how the last time he’d stood like this in the hallway with her had ended made her glad she already had her key in her hand.

“Good night,” she said, and was getting ready to unlock her door and go inside when she remembered that she was still wearing Tony’s jacket. She looked back at him. He was watching her with a rueful expression that softened into a smile as she slid the jacket off and held it out to him.

“Thanks for loaning it to me,” she said as he took it.

“You’re welcome.” He met her gaze, grimaced, and added, “I’m a fine one to preach about fraternization, aren’t I? But—”

Then he slid a hand around the back of her neck, bent his head, and kissed her with just enough heat and tongue to let her know where he wanted that kiss to go, if she was willing. When she didn’t go there, he released her and looked down at her with a kind of grim humor.

“One of these days we’re going to have some time,” he said. “Then we’re going to talk this thing out and you’re going to explain to me exactly why it is you aren’t sleeping with me.”

Charlie looked at him, a little flabbergasted, because, really, what was she going to say to that?

“After the case is over,” Tony added, sounding resigned as he made a gesture toward her door. Charlie took advantage of the out he was giving her to smile at him, say good night again, and retreat into her room.

Where the far larger problem in her life was waiting for her. She flicked on the light to find that Michael had flung himself down on the bed. He lay on his back with his arms folded behind his head and his booted feet crossed at the ankles. She looked at him speculatively: if he was still harboring any dark and brooding thoughts about what had transpired in the bar, she couldn’t tell it from his demeanor. To all outward appearances, he was back to his normal carefree self.

He watched her walk into the room. “So, when are you going to break it to Dudley that the reason you’re not sleeping with him is because you’re sleeping with me?”

The bed—the only one in the room—was a king, and he took up way too much of it. Having him share her bed was starting to feel normal, she realized, which was probably—no, definitely—a bad thing. Charlie sent him a reproving look.

“You were listening.” Opening the closet door, she bent to retrieve her night things from her suitcase, which she hadn’t as yet had a chance to unpack. Her toiletries were already in the bathroom.

“I overheard.”

“Just to be clear, sleeping with you doesn’t preclude sleeping with him.” Charlie smiled sweetly at him as she headed for the bathroom. “There’s no reason on earth I can think of that I can’t sleep with you both. Hey, I can even sleep with you both at the same time. In retrospect, that two-for-one thing you did the other night was kind of hot.”

“Babe, the part that got you hot was all me.”

She laughed. “Keep telling yourself that.”

“What pretty thing are you planning to wear for me tonight?” he yelled after her by way of retaliation as she shut the bathroom door on him.

Charlie glared at the closed door. Since she hadn’t yet had a chance to go shopping at the granny store, all her lingerie was still
in the sexy/feminine category. Tonight’s sleepwear was a satiny lavender slip that fell to mid-thigh. She knew he’d like it, and she also knew that he wasn’t going to see it: she was going to turn off the lights as soon as she emerged from the bathroom. That was the thought that sustained her as she went through her nightly pre-bed ritual at warp speed.

“Looking good, babe,” he said as, after clicking off the light, she returned to the bedroom. That made her lips compress: Vegas at night was as bright in its neon way as most places at high noon, and there was just enough light filtering in around the closed curtains so that she could see him, which meant that he could see her, too. He was still on
her
(
not
their) bed, lying on his side with his head propped up on a hand. What had changed was that he’d taken off his shirt and boots.

Even in shadowy silhouette against the curtains, those broad shoulders and sinewy arms were something to see.

Her pulse, which obviously didn’t have a clue, picked up the pace a little from just looking at him.

“Of course, if you really want to make my night, you could take that sexy nightie off for me. Give me something to think about while I don’t sleep.”

She pulled the covers down on her side of the bed.

“Sad to say, I don’t want to make your night.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the alarm clock on the night table, and set it for 6:15. Then she slid her legs beneath the covers and lay down with her back to him.

“See how we’re different?” He was looming over her, his voice low and husky now as it poured over her like honey. “ ’Cause I’d sure like to make yours. I’d start by kissing you all over. I’d kiss your breasts, and take your nipples in my mouth until they got all hot and wet and hard for me—”

She could suddenly feel the slithery satin of her nightgown rubbing against her nipples, which were disgustingly tight and eager for him to do just what he said.

“—and then I’d kiss my way down your stomach until you were making those sweet little moaning sounds you make—”

The hot throbbing between her legs would have been pure pleasure if she hadn’t been so outdone with herself for letting him turn her on like that.

“—and then you’d spread your legs for me and I’d move on down and kiss your—”

She knew where that was going before he got there, and the blast furnace heat born of the image he conjured up blazed through her and made her body tighten and quake. She
wanted
him to …

In sheer self-defense she rolled onto her back and glared up at him.

“Stop,” she ordered, and hoped he wouldn’t notice that her voice was as husky as his, and her breathing was coming way too fast.

“You know you like that part.” He was still lying on his side with his head propped on his hand. Her eyes slid over the sleek muscularity of his chest and his wide shoulders and her mouth went dry. The hot dark gleam in his eyes made her bones melt. “You come for me every time I—”

“You,” she said with a precision that cost her a lot to summon, “are just trying to avoid a conversation. Don’t think I don’t know that.”

His eyes narrowed. The hot gleam was still there, but there was wariness in them now, too.

“What I’m trying to do, babe, is make you horny. And you can’t tell me I’m not succeeding.”

She frowned at him. “You need to talk about what happened with your friend Sean. It’s obviously been bothering you for a long time. Believe me, talking helps.”

He flung himself onto his back. “Damn it, would you forget about playing shrink? What happened back then don’t matter anymore. It’s over. It’s done. It’s in the past. Leave it there.”

Now it was Charlie who turned on her side, propped her head on her hand, and looked down at him.

His eyes were closed. His face was hard. No matter what he said, what had happened back then obviously still did matter. To him.

“Mr. McGowan said you stayed with his son when he was mortally
wounded, then carried his body out.” She said it very gently. “That had to have been a terrible experience for you.”

His eyes opened to blaze at her. “All right, Doc, you really want to know what my terrible experience that day was? I didn’t just stay with Sean and carry him out. I fucking killed him.”

Charlie almost sucked in air. What saved her was her training. During the course of her internship and residency and the research she had undertaken afterward, she had interviewed so many subjects with so many different manifesting symptoms and syndromes and stories that she was pretty sure she was shockproof.

So instead of betraying any kind of surprise or concern, Charlie looked at Michael steadily, mirrored what he had just told her by repeating in a totally nonjudgmental way, “You killed him,” then added a low-key, encouraging, “Tell me about it.”

He made a sound halfway between a snarl and a growl.

“Hell of a technique, Dr. Stone. Shame it don’t work on me.” His eyes flamed at her. She could sense his anger, his determined resistance.

She looked into his eyes. Obviously, his emotions about what had happened were both deep and conflicted. Part of her wanted to stop, now, and leave him alone. But a larger part of her recognized the circumstances surrounding the death of his friend as a defining moment for him, and a traumatic one. Like a boil, the debilitating memories needed to be lanced if he was ever to be free of them. She still thought he was telling the truth about not being a serial killer;
it was almost an article of faith for her now that he might behave badly but he wasn’t
evil
. And if he
was
telling the truth, then it seemed logical that whatever had happened with Sean played a part in why he had found himself in Spookville. Why Michael thought he deserved Spookville.

“I’m just trying to understand,” she said in her best soothing tone. “Hiding from the pain you feel is the worst thing you can do.”

“Goddamn it.” His voice was savage. His eyes were, too, as they gleamed up at her. One arm was tucked behind his head. The other lay straight down by his side. Charlie watched the powerful muscles in his shoulder and arm ripple as his fist clenched. “I’m not feeling any pain. I got over it a long time ago, believe me. And no, I’m not feeling any goddamned guilt, either.”

“The fact that you can’t talk about it—”

“I shot him. I shot him in the goddamn heart. Point-blank. Pulled the trigger. On purpose. How’s that for talking about it?”

“Michael.” If, right now, he was the emotional equivalent of a ship tossing in storm-whipped seas, it was her job to be the anchor that kept him off the rocks. Her tone was calm, steady. “We both know that’s not the whole story.”

“Who are you, Dr. Pitbull? I told you what happened. Now quit trying to shrink me.”

“You’re telling me that you murdered your friend.” Charlie slowly shook her head, knowing even as she did so that what she was about to say was backed by every ounce of intuition she possessed. “I don’t believe it.”

He stared up at her. It was dark, but she could see his jaw tighten. He looked overwhelmingly big and masculine lying there on the mattress beside her and the aggression that was coming off of him in waves should have made him feel dangerous. He was far larger and stronger than she was, and if he’d been alive, and wanted to, she knew he could have physically overpowered her without breaking a sweat.

“You should believe it.” His voice was very quiet, devoid of any trace of emotion, and all of a sudden Charlie was afraid. Not of him, but of something in the atmosphere around him, some feeling of darkness and latent violence. This wasn’t her gorgeous, tawny-haired,
drawling Michael. This was a man she didn’t know. “Like I told you from the beginning, babe, I’ve done a lot of bad things.”

His eyes had taken on a steely gleam. The set of his beautiful mouth was almost cruel.

She remembered the scary convict she had first met. She remembered the strong wrists linked by chains, and the powerful body in the orange prison jumpsuit, and the deadliness she’d sensed behind those sky blue eyes whenever she’d looked into them.

Then she remembered the man she’d gotten to know in what felt like a lifetime since. She looked at him steadily. “Tell me what happened that day.”

Their eyes held for a moment longer. His went dark and hostile. Hers, she hoped, stayed serene. Then his mouth twisted. “You are a pain in my ass.”

The crackling sense of menace that had swirled around him faded.

“Right back at you, Casper. So talk to me. Please.”

“Fuck. Fine. Whatever it takes to get you off my damned back.” He gave her a hard look. Charlie carefully kept her face impassive. When he started talking, his tone was cool, dispassionate. A defense mechanism, she knew. “We were in Afghanistan. A platoon got wiped out up near the Pakistan border. A couple of surviving soldiers were taken prisoner. We—Sean and Hoop and Cap and me—got the order to go in and get them out. We moved in at night. They were being held in a little village at the bottom of a valley, steep mountains all around, no real cover anywhere. We did what we had to do—that means we killed whoever got in our way, just so we’re clear—and we recovered the soldiers. We were on this narrow trail on our way out of the valley when all hell broke loose. Damned Taliban crouched behind every bush. It was an ambush and we were outnumbered twenty, twenty-five to one. Ain’t no way that’s going to end well.”

He paused, and his face tightened. For a moment she thought he was going to stop there. She didn’t make a sound, just watched him steadily, and finally he continued.

“Sean and I hung back to provide cover fire while Cap and
Hoop got the soldiers out of there. They were coming at us like ants at a picnic, hitting us with everything from AK-47s to rocket-propelled grenades. There was so much ordinance blowing up it looked like Fourth of July. We were hunkered down near this little gnarled tree when Sean took one to the chest.” His eyes flickered, and he glanced away. It was, she knew, a classic sign that what he was talking about was causing him distress. Despite her determination to be a neutral vessel into which he could pour his worst memories, the sight of Michael in distress sent a chill rippling through her. “It was a bad one. He was bleeding like a pig, and when I tried to pack the wound and stop the bleeding I could hear it sucking air.” He grimaced and looked at her again, and she tried to keep any reaction to what he was telling her from showing on her face. “We were taking fire from everywhere, they had us pinned down, and if we stayed put it was just a matter of time until we got overrun. Plus, I was getting low on ammo. So I lobbed my last damned grenade toward what seemed like the biggest nest of them, hoping to create enough of a distraction so I could get us both out of there. Then I threw Sean over my shoulder and ran like a motherfucker. They spotted us, and opened fire, but the only way I was stopping was if they shot off my legs because I knew if I stopped we were dead. That’s when they hit us with a goddamned mortar and knocked us right off the side of the mountain. We fell about eighty feet. I wasn’t hurt enough to make any difference. Sean landed about twenty yards away. The way I found him was, he started screaming.” Michael looked up at the ceiling. A means of distancing, it was an instinctive reaction to a deeply emotional memory, Charlie knew. “When I got to him he was in a bad way. He’d taken another round to the back, and there was this big ol’ branch sticking up right through his gut. He’d landed on it and it had impaled him. When I got there he looked at me and kind of gasped and said,
I’m not going to make it, Mike
. Then he said,
Don’t let ’em take us
, because what they did to captured Americans wasn’t pretty. About a second later he started screaming again. The enemy was coming down the mountain toward us like a damned bunch of goats by that time and we were getting some gunshots flying overhead but it was obvious
they couldn’t see us and didn’t know exactly where we were. I punched Sean in the jaw to knock him out, and I pulled that damned branch out of him because there wasn’t any way he was going anywhere like that. I thought he might bleed out but he didn’t. His gut was laid open, though, and it was bad. I looked for a way out but there wasn’t one. We were on a damned ledge. There was no way off it except straight up the mountain, right through the middle of the damned Taliban. I couldn’t make it on my own, much less hauling Sean. Our only possible chance was to hide. And Sean was in so much pain that the second he woke up he started screaming again.”