The In Death Collection Books 26-29 - J.D. Robb [239]
She snorted, but went with his selection. When he didn’t move, but stood in her way, she frowned and said, “What?” again.
This time he cupped her face in his hands, and kissed her mouth, very gently. “I love you.”
Her heart went gooey, instantly. “I got that.”
He turned, crossed to the AutoChef, and got more coffee for both of them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“Nothing. Not really. Miserable morning out there.” But that wasn’t it, he thought as he stood, staring out through the dreary curtain of rain. That wasn’t it at all. “I had a dream.”
She changed her plans, and instead of going downstairs walked over to the sofa, sat. “Bad?”
“No. Well, disturbing and odd, I suppose. Very lucid, which is more your style than mine.”
He turned, saw that she’d sat down, that she waited. And that was more comforting than any fire in the hearth. He went to her, handed off her coffee. And sitting beside her, rubbed a hand gently on her leg in a gesture that was both gratitude and connection.
“It might be all the talk about the old days, childhood friends, and so on kicked my subconscious.”
“It bothered you. Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“When I woke it was over, wasn’t it, and I didn’t see the point. And then, just now . . . Well, in any case, I was back in Dublin, a boy again, running the streets, picking pockets. That part, at least, wasn’t disturbing. It was rather entertaining.”
“Good times.”
He laughed a little. “Some of them were. I could smell it—the crowds on Grafton Street. Good pickings there, if you were quick enough. And the buskers playing the old tunes to draw the tourists in. There were those among them, if you gave them a cut, they’d keep the crowd pulled in for you. We’d work a snatch, pass, drop on Grafton. I’d lift the wallet or purse, pass it on to Jenny, and she to Mick, and Brian would drop it at our hidey-hole in an alley.
“Couldn’t work there often, no more than a couple hits a month, lest the locals caught wind to it. But when we did, we’d pull in hundreds in the day. If I was careful enough with my share, even with what the old man kicked out of me, I’d eat well for a month—with some to spare for my investment fund.”
“Investment fund? Even then?”
“Oh aye, I didn’t intend to live a street rat the whole of my life.” His eyes kindled, but unlike the mellow fire in the hearth, dark and danger flashed there. “He suspected, of course, but he never found my cache. I’d sooner he beat me to death than give it over.”
“You dreamed about him? Your father?”
“No. It wasn’t him at all. A bright summer day, so clear I could hear the voices, the music, smell the fat frying for the chips we always treated ourselves to. A day on Grafton Street was prime, you see. Full pockets and full bellies. But in dreaming it, it went wrong.”
“How?”
“Jenny’d wear her best dress on Grafton day, and her hair would be shining with a ribbon in it. Who’d look at a pretty young girl like that and see a thief, was the thought behind it. I passed to her, clean and smooth, and moved on. You have to keep moving. I set my next mark, and the fiddler was playing ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ I heard it clear, each note, lively, quick. I had the wallet—and the mark never flinched. But Jenny . . . she wasn’t there for the pass. Couldn’t take the pass because she was hanging by her hair ribbon. Hanging and dead, as she’d been the last I saw her. When I was too late to save her.
“I was too late.”
Roarke shook his head. “She died because she was mine, part of my past. And I ran to try to get her down, across Grafton, with the buskers playing, still lively and quick, while she hung there. But there was Mick. Blood spreading over his shirt. The kill blood. He was mine, too. He took the knife for me. The fiddler kept playing, all the while. I could see Brian, far off. Too far to reach, so I was there with dead friends. Still children in the dream, you know? Still so young. Even in the dream I thought, wondered, if they were, in some way, dead even that long ago. And me and Bri, all that’s left of us.
“Then I walked away. I walked away from Grafton Street,