door handle, something strange happened. He just... stopped.
He had no choice. The control tower in his head had been taken over in a surprise coup. An unfamiliar command team was running everything. Strange thoughts took form in his mind, bewildering him. Just because he could pick her locks didn't mean necessarily that he should. After today, the least he could do was guard her house, ensure her one night of genuine safety. He even felt too inhibited to just flick on the receiver, power up the X-Ray Specs program and watch her, the way he'd been watching her for weeks. It felt all wrong tonight She'd given him everything she had to give, and he'd taken it all and paid her back with... oh, shit. Whatever. He felt bad, he was sorry. Enough already.
It was stupid. A pointless tribute that she would never appreciate. She would never know what it cost him to leave his magic tricks in the bag and just sit there in the dark, helpless and inert.
It was bizarre. He had never been chivalrous in his entire life. That was Jesse's department.
Even a fleeting thought of his young brother was a mistake. He was helpless to push away unwanted thoughts tonight They raced through his mind, tumbling over each other, maddened by their unaccustomed liberty.
Memory triggered memory. Even minor ones made his gut cramp. Jesse's dirt-colored hair that stuck straight up in a case of perpetual bed head. His green eyes, shining like the headlights of a car. His hundred-mile-an-hour intelligence, his zingy one-liners. His extravagant affection for the whole world, even when it kicked him in the teeth.
Seth's heart had already been heavily armored by the time his mother DeAnne hooked up with one of her ex-boyfriends, Mitch Cahill, and moved the guy into their apartment. Then DeAnne compounded her mistake by getting the bright idea that now that there was a father figure around, she could go collect Seth's little five-year-old half-brother from where he'd been living with her mother in San Diego. Seth had only seen the snot-nosed, motormouth little kid a couple of times since he was born. A couple of times had been more than enough for him.
Seth had hated Mitch on sight, and sullenly resented the bug-eyed, scrawny kid who followed his eleven- year-old brother around, getting in the way of business, and in general annoying the shit out of him. But Jesse was like a fly that kept landing on his nose. He couldn't be chased away. Seth still remembered the horrified alarm he'd felt on the day when he realized that Jesse loved him. Not because he was lovable, because he wasn't; he'd been out-and-out mean to the clueless little geek. Not because he deserved to be loved, because he didn't. Seth went out of his way to be obnoxious to everyone.
No, Jesse had loved him because Jesse desperately needed to love someone. It was just the way he was made. He'd loved DeAnne, too. He'd even loved Mitch, his brutal, worthless, stinking-piece-of-offal excuse for a father. Managing to love Mitch was a fucking miracle.
Jesse had needed to love like he needed to breathe, and Seth had just happened to be in the line of fire. After a while, in spite of himself, he started to feel protective and proprietary about the little guy. He would kick the shit out of anybody who messed with him, shoplift clothes and shoes for him when his stuff wore out, make sure he got something to eat when Mitch and DeAnne were too stoned to feed him. Little things like that, but they took on their own momentum, and before he knew it, Jesse was all his. His headache, his responsibility. Nobody else around the place was sober enough to give a rat's ass about the kid.
His bond with Jesse was not an official one. The liaison between DeAnne Mackey and Mitch Cahill had been a common-law marriage that figured on no public registry.
DeAnne stoutly claimed that Jesse was Mitch's son, and she had nagged until Mitch changed Jesse’s last name to Cahill. Seth remembered those arguments all too clearly.
Hah. As if he had wanted it. Asshole.
After her death, Seth had dodged the help of those public agencies supposedly dedicated to his welfare, but he still hung around the neighborhood, to keep an eye on Jesse and protect him from Mitch.
It hadn't been easy. Jesse had been hard to protect He loved stupidly, indiscriminately. He forgave friends after they'd stabbed him in the back, he lent money to thieves and crackheads, he fell in love and got stomped on more times than Seth could count, but he just kept on flinging his heart into harm's way with a reckless courage that had never failed to stupefy his brother.
He hadn't thought of their bond as love, because in those days, the word
Jesse should never have gone into law enforcement. He was too trusting, too tender-hearted. He should've become a pediatric nurse, a goddamn kindergarten teacher. Seth had tried so hard to protect him from the world, but the world was big and sneaky and treacherous, and Jesse had been dead-set on saving it from the bad guys.
If Jesse were here, he would tell him to stop jerking off and cut the pity party. And seeing him parked in the dark outside a woman's house like a lovesick teenager would have made Jesse laugh his head off. Seth could see him in his mind's eye, cackling and pointing his finger.
Seth's eyes stung, and he scrubbed at them with the back of his hands as he stared up at her bathroom window. He wondered if she were crying again. He'd refrained from watching that part of the show. All twenty-two minutes and twenty-six seconds of it.
Maybe she was taking a bath. He could imagine her stretched out in the tub, her lush curves dripping and gleaming as she sudsed herself up. In a hundred and ten seconds he could be inside with her.
Helping her bathe.
His hand drifted over onto the door handle. He clutched it until his knuckles ached and slowly let it go. The guys up in the control tower in his head were armed, dangerous, and not to be fucked with. It was martial law up there, the moralistic bastards.
He slumped down lower. His head pounded, and his gut gnawed. He should have grabbed something to eat. He'd been too keyed up before the meeting, too sex-crazed while Raine had been in his grasp, too upset afterwards. The coffee and doughnuts he'd eaten that morning were a million years ago for a six foot tall, two- hundred-and ten-pound guy with a raging metabolism.
He should have bought the woman lunch before falling on her like a starving wolf, but he'd been so jacked up and frantic. Afraid she would change her mind and slip away from him somehow. He hauled his laptop out, feeling sullen and chastened. No excuse for not getting some work done while he sat there in the dark. He wondered if a violent attack of conscience was a condition that passed relatively quickly, like heartburn, or whether it was a chronic type of thing. Like acne.
In any case, there were limits to his new scruples. Martial law or no martial law, if Raine walked out that door, she was fair game.
If she walked out that door, she was his.
Chapter 8
Bedroom, stairs, kitchen, dining room, living room. She was wearing a groove in me carpeting. She'd tried a hot bath, yoga, herbal tea, relaxing music, but whenever she stopped moving, her body popped up again as if she were on springs. She could only hope this overdose of adrenaline would see her through another grueling day at work.
Work. Her mind raced around in frantic circles. How could she go back to work? How could she put on her makeup and pantyhose and trot off to the office as if it were a normal day—yes, sir, no sir, anything you say, sir— after this crazy night? How could she stick close to Victor Lazar and cultivate his favor if he really had set her up to be seduced and humiliated?
