Chapter 41
CHAPTER 41
LUKE DECIDED NOT to mention the torture parts to Mack. If she didn’t know, he’d rather avoid upsetting her further. It might not be true, anyway. All he had was second-hand information, and Nick could have misunderstood the situation.
Mack came back a couple of hours later, carrying a bag from Starbucks.
“You’re a genius,” Luke said as she unloaded pastries onto a plate.
“I don’t know about that.” Her cheeks went adorably pink.“I just wanted some food that didn’t taste of cardboard.”
Luke cast his eyes over the selection of cakes and danishes. “You made a good choice.”
“I only eat sugary food when I’m stressed. Normally, I’m quite good.”
“You and me both. I need to diet, but I keep telling myself ‘tomorrow.’ How did the meeting go?”
“Dead end, for the moment.” She stuffed half a maple-pecan twist into her mouth and chewed mechanically. “They’ve said they’ll keep looking, but Syria’s difficult right now.”
Luke reached over and squeezed her hand, trying to show support. She stared at his fingers on hers, but didn’t pull away.
“We’ll keep looking too,” he said.
They carried on through the day, but it was hopeless. Luke found nothing, and each time Mack sighed, he knew her luck wasn’t any better. When his eyes started to ache, he pulled Mack back from her screen.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You’ll end up with eye strain if you don’t take a break. Sometimes a bit of time away from the computer shakes something loose. That’s what I’ve always found.”
“I want to look for Emmy.”
“We’ll just stop long enough for dinner. How about that? We could go out—”
“No time. Ruth will cook us something.”
“Ruth’s the housekeeper?” Luke had heard her vacuuming earlier. Not close. On one of the other floors.
“Yes, the housekeeper.”
Apart from her sugar hit in the morning, Mack had barely eaten all day. Dinner was no different. She picked at the lasagne Ruth cooked for them, shoving it around her plate until it turned into an unrecognisable mush. Even the chocolate cake left out to tempt her had no effect.
Luke tried to keep her mind off things, sticking to safe topics of conversation like movies and computer programming, but it didn’t work, and the subject kept coming back to Emmy. Luke decided he might as well try to find out more about her.
“I got a shock when I found out Emmy was…well…Emmy.”
“I’ll bet. She lived with you for what, two months?”
“About that. But I feel like I barely knew her at all.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve known her for nine years, and I haven’t totally figured her out,” Mack said. “I don’t think anyone ever has. Except for Black, of course.”
“Her husband.”
“Husband, soul mate, best friend. I’m not sure she’ll be the same now he’s gone, even if she does come back.”
“I suppose if he was here now, he’d be having an awful time worrying about her.”
“That’s the irony. He’d be the calmest out of all of us. I can picture him now, sitting in the control room, cool as ice, saying ‘trust her, the brat is indestructible.’”
“He’d call his own wife a brat?”
“And a lot worse besides. But she gave as good as she got. It wasn’t exactly a conventional marriage, but then again, nothing about Emmy or Black could ever be described as conventional. I mean, within a week of their first meeting, Emmy quit London and moved to the other side of the world to live with him.”
Gazing at Mack, the idea of moving to the other side of the world to be with someone didn’t seem that strange to Luke. Because he wanted to get to know her, and as she lived in America, he foresaw a considerable amount of travelling in his future.
Was that crazy? Probably, but the more time he spent with her, the more time he wanted to spend with her. Mack was sweet like candy. Nothing like the new Emmy, a little like the old Emmy, but mostly just Mack. He wanted to unwrap her, layer by layer, and find out what was hidden within.
“Isn’t that romantic rather than unconventional though?” he asked, getting back to the subject of Emmy’s life. “It wouldn’t be the first time a couple fell in love at first sight.”
“I don’t think there was a whole lot of romance involved. The first thing they did when they met was have a fight, then Black insisted she went home with him so he could patch her up.”
“Patch her up?”
“She needed stitches. Black didn’t come off any better, and Nate said that was the reason Black hired her. Not many people could have taken him on and not ended up unconscious.”
“Hired her? So she moved to America to work for him? Not because she was in love?”
“I don’t think she even liked him at first.”
“But that must have changed, right? I mean, they got married.”
“A couple of years later. But that wasn’t out of love. Emmy wanted US citizenship and Black and Nate wanted her to commit to staying at Blackwood. So one night when they were drunk in Vegas, Nate suggested Black and Emmy get married, and they thought they might as well.”
Luke choked out a laugh. “No big white wedding, then?”
“Not a chance. Emmy hates being the centre of attention.”
“What’s she really like? She was quiet when she lived with me, but I’m not sure how much of it was just an act.”
“She’s got so many different faces. You never know what she’s thinking, and she can change her whole demeanour as if someone flicked a switch. One second she’s devastatingly upset, the next absolutely furious, then she turns around and her face is completely blank, no hint of emotion there at all. It’s freaky to watch. If she were in Hollywood, she’d win an Oscar. Black was very similar.” Mack’s expression turned wistful. “They understood each other.”
“That must have been difficult to deal with.”
“Not really. She’s always ranged from quiet and a little detached to snarky as anything. But you couldn’t ask for a more loyal friend. If anyone she cares for gets into trouble, she’ll go above and beyond to get them out of it. Why do you think she went on this job in the first place? I’d never ever want to get on her bad side, though. Life can get very uncomfortable, or just plain short, if you annoy Emmy.”
“That’s just great.” Luke closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “I think I’ve annoyed her quite a bit lately. The last time I spoke to her, well, shouted at her, it was over the phone to chew her out for taking Tia on the lash.”
“Don’t worry about that. She got where you were coming from, and she said as much. She’d never fly off the handle over something so trivial. Besides, since she got back, she’s been different. Less like a robot and more human.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I’m not sure.The old Emmy was cold as a Siberian winter, but I kinda preferred that to miserable Emmy. Who knows what we’ll get if she comes back from Syria?”
Mack’s face crumpled, and Luke took her hand as she struggled to hold herself together.
“If she’s out there, we’ll find her.” He hoped he could keep that promise.
A tear leaked down Mack’s cheek, and he reached out and wiped it away with his thumb.
“It’s us against a whole country. Sometimes, it seems like an impossible task,” she said.
He pulled her into a hug, liking the feel of her slender arms around him far more than he should.
“We can still win.”
In bed that night, Luke tossed and turned. Visions of Emmy lying beside him swam through his mind. He’d push her away, but then her face would morph into Mack’s, and as he tried to pull her back again, she kept slipping away, just out of his grasp.
He got up and stared out the window. The view of the private park across the road looked almost the same as it did all those weeks ago when they were looking for Tia, but now he had a different kind of problem eating away at him.
Mack. He liked Mack. His head and his heart both knew it. Not only was she beautiful, but he could talk to her about his passion for computers, something he’d never been able to do with another woman.
The question was, did she feel the same? And if she did then what, if anything, was he going to do about it?