Part 39 (2/2)
”Admit it,” she teased. ”You're just in this for the thrill of the near-death experiences.”
”Hmm, I hadn't considered that.”
”Maybe we should forget this gig in DC after all. If I eliminate my hunters and life gets all safe and boring, you'll be out the door, won't you?” She sighed theatrically.
She couldn't tell if he was serious or playing along when he answered, ”I was never fond of this plan to begin with. Maybe it is smarter to run.”
”On the other hand, if I do a bad job in DC, it's going to get a lot more dangerous. You'll love that.”
He gave her a bleak stare.
”Was that over the line?” she asked.
”A little too close to home.”
”Sorry.”
He sighed. ”Your theory is incorrect, though, I'm afraid. See, I got over my love of drama early on. It was still exciting, but so is drowning in quicksand, I'd imagine. Exciting is not the same thing as enjoyable.”
”But you didn't leave.”
Daniel stared at his hand-curled tensely around her thigh now-as he answered. ”No. I thought... well, this makes me sound like a first-cla.s.s sucker. I thought I could fix her. She had a lot of issues from her past, and I let those issues be the excuse when she did things to hurt me. I never blamed her; I always blamed her history. Cliff-that's the man she left me for; what a fantastic name to be left for, don't you think?-Cliff wasn't her first fling. I found out about the others later.” He glanced up at her suddenly. ”Was that all in the file?”
”No.”
He stared out the winds.h.i.+eld. ”I knew I should give up. I knew I wasn't holding on to anything real. The Lainey I loved was just a construct in my head. But I was stubborn. Stupidly so. Sometimes you cling to a mistake simply because it took so long to make.”
”It sounds miserable.”
He looked over and smiled at her weakly. ”Yes, it was. But the hardest part was just admitting none of it had ever been real. It's humiliating, you know, to be duped. So my pride was hurt worse than anything else.”
”I'm sorry.”
”And I'm sorry, too. My stories are so much less entertaining than yours. Tell me about another boyfriend.”
”I have a question first.”
He stiffened a little bit. ”Go ahead.”
”That story you told the hooker, Kate, what was that about?”
”Huh?” His eyebrows pulled together in confusion.
”The one who was supposed to plant your tracker. Kevin said you told her your divorce wasn't final. But he also said this conversation happened two years after you split. You didn't contest the divorce, it went through in months. So why did you say that?”
Daniel laughed. ”Thank you, seriously, from the very bottom of my heart, for not voicing that question in front of Kevin.”
”You're welcome.”
”Yes, the divorce was ancient history by then. But this girl... girls like that did not wander into the dive bar where I used to hang out. And if one happened to, I would not have been the guy she approached.”
”What was she like?”
”If memory serves, she was stunning. And predatory. And oddly... frightening. I never believed for an instant that she was really attracted to me. I could sense there was an agenda, and I didn't want to fall for it. I was a little sensitive, at that point, to the idea of being duped again. But of course I didn't want to be rude, so I went with the politest refusal I could think of.”
Alex chuckled. ”You're right. Never, ever tell Kevin that you were afraid of the stunning hooker.”
”Can you imagine?” He laughed with her. ”Your turn. Another boyfriend.”
”I'm running out... Let's see, I dated a guy named Felix for a couple of weeks in undergrad.”
”And what extinguished the flames of your pa.s.sion?”
”You have to understand, the only place I ever met boys was in a lab.”
”Go on.”
”Well, Felix worked with animals. Rats, mostly. He kept a lot of them in his apartment. There was a... smell problem.”
Daniel threw his head back and howled with laughter. The sound of it was infectious. She couldn't help chortling along with him. It was not as out of control as that first afternoon in Kevin's secret lair, but it was close. All the stress seemed to drain out of her body, and she felt more relaxed than she would have thought possible in light of where she was headed.
Eventually, Daniel fell asleep, midsentence, as he described his fifth-grade crush. He'd been fighting his droopy eyelids for a while, and she suspected again that he'd been trying to keep her mind off the negatives.
It was relaxing to have him sleeping peacefully next to her. Einstein was snoring on the backseat, a nice counterpoint to the even sound of Daniel's breathing. She knew she should be thinking of a variety of plans, ways to get to Carston without exposing herself too greatly, but she just wanted to enjoy the moment. Peace was going to be a limited commodity in her near future. If this was the last moment that she got to be entirely content, then she wanted to experience it fully.
She was in a rare state of calm when she woke Daniel a few hours later, as they were entering the outskirts of DC. The last time she'd pulled into this city, she'd been furious and terrified. She probably had even more reason to feel that way today, but she was still enjoying the time she had left alone with Daniel, and she wasn't going to let that go before she had to.
Daniel read the directions to her as she got closer to their target. As she'd originally thought, this was a nice neighborhood, and it was only getting nicer. Wasn't that like Kevin, to hide somewhere so incongruous? She circled the building with the matching address twice, doubting whether this could be the place.
”I'd better call him.”
Daniel handed her the phone. She hit Redial, and it rang once.
”You're late,” Kevin answered. ”What's wrong now?”
”Traffic. Nothing. I think we're outside, but... this place doesn't look right.”
”Why?”
”We're hiding out in a fancy art deco high-rise?”
”Yeah. A friend of mine is letting us crash. There's parking under the building. Go to the fourth level down, I'll meet you.” He disconnected.
She handed the phone back to Daniel. ”Just once, I want to hang up on him first.”
”You did the very first time he called, remember? Fairly spectacularly.”
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