to be over very quickly. Instead, I offered him my hand.
“Thanks, Nick,” I said with a warmth I didn’t have to fake. “Good job.”
He grinned at me. Still a big adventure for him, I saw.
Last thing, Parker handed over a scrap of paper. “I’ve set up temporary e-mail addresses for both of us,” he said. “This is yours, and the password. Might be easier sometimes to use that than to phone. Any intel I can dig out for you—on Storax or this O’Loughlin character you mentioned—I’ll send.”
“Parker, you’re a wonder,” I murmured, studying the random series of numbers and letters that made up the e-mail address. “At the moment, it’s a toss-up whether I want to adopt you or have your children.”
He lifted an eyebrow, smiled a little and gave me a firm handshake, the same for Sean. “I’d settle for you straightening this mess out and getting back to work,” he said.
“One more favor,” Sean said. “When Vondie’s crew jumped us, we were on our way back to see Jeremy Lee’s widow, Miranda. We haven’t been able to raise her since. Can you look into it for us? Check she’s okay?”
Parker nodded, climbed into the passenger seat of Nick’s Integra. “I find out anything, I’ll e-mail.” He slammed the door and dropped the window. “Make sure you get receipts for what you spend,” he warned. “The five grand’s for expenses—it’s not a bonus, okay?”
We watched them pull out of the parking area and get back onto the highway before we climbed into the Camry, my parents still in the rear seat and Sean behind the wheel. It was clean and remarkably free from clutter inside. Nick’s sister had a vanilla-scented air freshener hanging in front of one of the vents on the dashboard. I unhooked it and dropped it into the ashtray, which was part full of spare change.
When I checked the glove box, I found the money Parker had promised, in bundles of mixed-denomination used bills, held together with an elastic band. A brand-new-looking road map of America was tucked down the side of my seat. It was nice to work for a man who thought of everything.
Sean started the motor. The V-6 sounded polite rather than powerful. Parker must have filled up not long before he met us because the needle on the fuel gauge canted well to the right. Sean adjusted the driving position and glanced over his shoulder.
“So,” he said. “Now we have clean transport, the question is, where do we go—apart from anywhere the hell away from here?”
“Houston,” my father said, surprising me with the immediacy of his response. “It’s where Storax have their U.S. headquarters and, as they seem to be at the center of this, it’s where I should imagine we’ll find some answers.”
“Do you have any idea of how far it is to Texas?” Sean asked. “Or how long it will take us to get there?”
“No,” my father said, unashamed. “Do you?”
“Roughly two thousand miles,” Sean said without a blink. “That works out to the best part of two days’ solid driving—if we don’t want the luxury of stopping to sleep.”
My father gave him his most arrogant surgeon’s stare. “We’d
We drove southwest, out of Massachusetts, down through Connecticut and slipped across the corner of New York state bypassing the city itself. A few hours later we were passing Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Camry wasn’t exactly the rocket ship Nick had boasted, but it had cruise and air con and allowed us to make competent, inconspicuous progress.
We rolled on, mile after mile of undulating freeway, rocked by mammoth trucks that gained on us with relentless ease in the gathering dark, like supertankers crossing the English Channel.
Just after midnight, we hit Harrisburg and crossed the Susquehanna River. As oncoming headlights raked the interior, I glanced back and found my parents soundly asleep. My father had taken off his jacket and was using it as a blanket for my mother, who had curled up over the center armrest, her lips slightly parted as she slept, face pillowed on her hands like a praying child. My father had draped his arm across her shoulders, his head lolling sideways against the door glass. He was going to wake up with a hell of a stiff neck.
“They okay?” Sean asked, keeping his voice low.
“Out of it. How about you?”
In the dim glow from the instrument panel I saw him smile, little more than a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m okay,” he said. He’d discarded his jacket and rolled back the cuffs of his shirt, revealing the lines of muscle definition in his forearms.
He drove without apparent effort, shoulders relaxed. I’d once driven through the night with Sean from Stuttgart to Berlin and back, at hair-raising speeds of over a hundred and sixty miles an hour for most of the journey. Going a steady sixty-five on an arrow-straight freeway should have been child’s play by comparison, but there was so little stimulation that the hardest part was staying awake.
“Not getting tired?” I persisted. “Let me know as soon as you are and I’ll take over for a while, let you get some shuteye.”
“I’m fine,” he said. He glanced across at me. “You maybe ought to grab some sleep yourself, though, so you can spell me later.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, lifting a wry shoulder. “Still too wired, I suppose.”
“Well, you could always talk to me, Charlie. Keep me awake that way.”
Something in the silky way he said it had my heart rate accelerating. “What about?”
He must have heard the way it slightly changed my voice, because he laughed softly. “Not that,” he said dryly. “Although, if you
“No, I don’t,” I said, aiming for stern but badly let down by the hitch in my breath. “And it was a reasonable question. It’s only your dirty mind that puts any other slant on it.”
“Guilty,” he said cheerfully. A pause. “Actually, I wanted to talk about us. About last night.”
My pulse had begun to slow, but at that it took off again like someone had fed in a squirt of nitrous oxide. I felt the liquid burn under my skin, firing a primitive flight response that translated into such a fierce blush I was glad of the surrounding darkness.
“Wow,” I said, surprisingly sedate. “I thought it was supposed to be the woman who always initiated conversations like that.”
“Don’t hedge, Charlie,” he said, and though his voice was mild, I heard the underlying serrated edge to it. “I promised I wouldn’t hurt you and … I did.”
“No,” I denied quickly. “It—”
“I hurt you,” he repeated, more harshly. “And I’m sorry for it. More than you’ll ever know.” The last part was muttered under his breath, hardly audible.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and saw the frustrated twitch that crossed his features.
“Well, it damn well should,” he said quietly. “In one breath I tell you that I’m not the same as the bastards who raped you, and then, in the next, I’m practically doing the same thing myself. I let my temper get away from me.” His fingers flexed round the steering wheel and I had a flash recall of them braceleting my wrists with the same unforgiving grip. If his hollow tone was anything to go by, he remembered it, too. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”
“Do you honestly believe what you did—what
“I disagree,” he said icily.
I tried to let go of my anger. “Okay, have it your own way—yes, you raped me,” I snapped, still keeping the volume as low as I could manage, feeling the slightest tremble of the car as he controlled his reaction. “I didn’t enjoy it for a second and I faked my orgasms—all of them. Happy now? Hair shirt uncomfortable enough for you?”
For a second Sean’s face had frozen, then all the tension went out of him and he made a spluttering sound that might have been suppressed laughter, but could just as easily have been anguish.
“Oh my God, Charlie,” he said at last, almost a groan, shaking his head. “I’ve always tried so hard not to
