The In Death Collection Books 16-20 - J. D. Robb [749]
Summerset put her in the car, secured her himself, brushed those bony fingers gently over her cheek. As they drove away, Roarke got in beside Eve.
“All right?”
She shook her head. “Need another minute.”
“Take all you need.”
“She’ll be okay. She’s got guts, and heart. Scared ten years off me when she came running in, but she’s got guts.”
“She loves you.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“You found her, you protected her, you saved her. She’ll love you more for it as her life heals. You were right to let her see his face.”
“I hope, because I wasn’t thinking clear yet. The fall down the stairs—” She broke off, hissed. “Not just the fall. The blood, the knife, the pain. I heard her neck snap, and it was like an echo in my head. When I came out and saw you, there was this dull relief. Distant, in another part of me.”
She drew a long breath. “You’d have let me do it. You’d have stood back and let me put that knife in him.”
“Yes. I’d have stood back and let you do what you needed to do.”
“Even cold-blooded murder.”
“Nothing cold-blooded about it. Eve.” He touched her face, turned it to his. His eyes weren’t wild and blue now, she thought, but calm and deep and sure. “You couldn’t have done it.”
“I nearly did, I could feel the way it punched through his body.”
“Nearly did. And if something had snapped that clean inside of you, we’d have dealt with it. But what’s inside of you, what you are down to the bone, wouldn’t have allowed it. You needed to kneel there with that knife in your hand, and to know that.”
“Guess I did.”
“Tomorrow, you’ll face him, both of them, in Interview. What you do will be worse to him than a knife in the heart. You beat him, you stopped him, you caged him.”
“Cage him, and another crawls out from under the next rock.” She pressed her shoulder, gave her arm a testing turn. “So I guess I’d better get back in shape, so I can go after the next one.”
“I love you, madly.”
“Yeah, you do.” She smiled and, praying nobody was watching, touched her lips to his burned shoulder. “Let’s go clean up, and get back to work.”
She flicked a glance in the rearview as they drove away. Just a house, she thought. They’d clean up the blood, sweep out the death. Another family would move in.
She hoped they had a nice life.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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