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“I assume the city has been cleared of all crime as you’re only an hour late and appear to be unbloodied.”
“Yeah, we’re renaming it Utopia.” She gave Galahad a quick rub as she started upstairs. “Next stage is to get rid of all the assholes. You should get a head start and pack your bags.” She paused briefly. “Did Roarke talk to Sinead?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She went directly to the bedroom. Roarke was probably home, she thought—Summerset would’ve said if he wasn’t. And he was probably in his office, so she should’ve gone there, connected with him.
But she wasn’t ready, just not ready for the connection. That war continued, beefing up now that she’d made it home. Where she knew she was safe, where she knew she could let go, just a little. Home, where she could acknowledge her belly was raw, the back of her neck tight knots of stress.
She laid back, closed her eyes. When she felt the thump beside her, Eve reached out, let her arm curl around the cat.
Stupid, she thought, it was stupid to feel sick, to have to fight against being sick. To feel anything but suspicion and disgust for a woman like Penny Soto.
She didn’t realize Roarke had come into the room until his hand brushed her cheek. He moved so quietly, she thought, barely stirred the air if he didn’t choose. No wonder he’d been such a successful thief.
“What hurts?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Nothing really.” But she turned to him, turned into him when he lay beside her. And pressed her face into his shoulder. “I needed to be home. I needed to be home first. I was right about that. But I thought I needed to be alone, just be alone until I got level. I was wrong. Can we just stay here awhile?”
“My favorite place.”
“Tell me stuff. Stuff you did today. I don’t care if I don’t understand it.”
“I had a ’link conference here shortly after you left this morning regarding some R&D at Euroco, one of my arms in Europe that deals primarily with transportation. We have a very interesting sea-road-air personal sports vehicle coming out early next year. I had meetings in midtown, but Sinead called from Ireland before I left. It was nice to hear from her. They’ve acquired a new puppy and named it Mac, who she claims is more trouble than triplet toddlers. She sounds madly in love with him.”
She listened to his voice, more than the words. Something about a meeting with team leaders on a project called Optimum, and a holoconference dealing with his Olympus Resort, a lunch session with key members of one of his interests in Bejing. A merger, an acquisition, conceptual drawings.
How did he keep it all straight?
“You did all that, and still had time to get petunias?”
His hand trailed up and down her back, up and down. “Did you like them?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I liked them.”
“It’s been nearly two years since we were married.” He kissed the top of her head, then turned his to rest his cheek there. “And with Louise and Charles about to have their wedding
here, it made me think of the petunias. How the simple—a flower, a few minutes to talk to a relation—makes the complicated worthwhile.”
“Is that why we have tulips and daffodils? They are tulips, right?”
“They are. It’s good to be reminded that things come around again, fresh and new. And some things remain, steady and solid. The call from Sinead brought both back to me. Are you ready to tell me what’s the matter?”
“Sometimes things come around again that are old and hard.” She sat up, shoved at her hair. “I brought Penny Soto in for questioning today. Actually, I baited her into taking a pop at me so I could charge her with assault and resisting.”
He took her chin, tracing his thumb in its dent as he turned her face right and left. “You don’t appear to be popped.”
“The assault was mostly technical. She was Lino’s main lay when they were teenagers. Works in the bodega right next to the church, the bodega he frequented, pretty much daily.”
“So they reconnected.”
“She was the one who knew him,” she said, remembering Roarke’s words from the morning. “The one he needed to tell. Yeah, they reconnected, and in the biblical sense—according to her. I buy that. You’d have to buy that. So she knew who he was, and some of what he was up to—maybe all, but I couldn’t get that out of her. Yet.
“She claims he blackmailed some of the people who came in to confess. Plays, but I can’t quite figure it all.”
“Hobby. More,” Roarke continued, “habit. The masquerade didn’t change who and what he was under it, and what was under it would need the hit. The buzz.”
