DAGGER
Ipicked up the pillow she’d thrown at me and tossed it at her. She caught it one-handed, laid it down the middle of the bed, and smoothed it flat like a border between two countries with a complicated history.
“Is that meant to stop you or me?” I asked.
“It is meant to remove all doubt about whose side is whose.”
“There was never any doubt. You’ll take the window side.” When her head cocked, I nodded at the room’s only way out. “Sight lines. You sleep facing the door.”
She stood for a moment with her hand on the pillow. I’d guessed right, and she hated that I had. God help me, I loved it.
“First crack at the loo?” I asked. “I’ll change while you’re out.”
She gathered her things and left without speaking.
While she was gone, I surveyed the space.
It was a girl’s room with a woman’s luggage in it.
Framed photographs stood on the bookshelf—Maelle at six or seven with her front teeth missing, at nine or ten on a fat gray pony, at twelve in fencing whites.
Another shelf held French paperbacks with cracked spines.
Yesterday, I knew her dossier. Tonight, I knew the books she’d read when she was a teenager.
The truth was that the last twenty-four hours had been among the best of my life.
Our reason for being in France was ugly and likely to get uglier, and still, the way Maelle had been with me since we left Onteora, laughing at what I said instead of at me, kissing my cheek, calling me mon chevalier, was what I’d wanted for a year but never believed possible.
If I’d said any of that out loud, she’d have heard one thing: he thinks we’re having sex.
That wasn’t it at all.
I’d made myself a set of rules when we decided on this course of action. I could kiss her forehead, cheek, and her hand—every chance I got, as often as the cover allowed. I’d touch her in front of her family, and I’d keep my hands off her when we were alone. I’d run longer ops on worse odds.
Out of habit, I noted the exits—the door, the window, and the drop to the garden below it. Then I made myself stop and change into a T-shirt and bottoms. I was folding my jeans over the arm of the sofa when the door opened.
Maelle came in, wearing a pink silk chemise, and I nearly swallowed my tongue.
It wasn’t the sort of thing designed to seduce a man.
It fell to mid-thigh and covered more of her than half the dresses I’d seen women wear to dinner.
That was the trouble with it. How could one garment be that sexy and that innocently beautiful at the same time?
There ought to be a law against it. Knowing the French, there probably was, and she was breaking it in her childhood bedroom.
“Stop,” she said, climbing into the bed on the window side.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You’re thinking loudly.”
“You knew what you were doing when you packed that.”
“I didn’t pack it. It was here.”
“You’re telling me that a piece of silk has sat in a drawer since you left at the age of eighteen?”
Her cheeks flushed, and I knew there was more to the story.
“It’s what I’m sleeping in. It’s nothing that should concern you.”
She got in and tugged the duvet to her chin, daring me to say another word about it. “I’ll think quieter.” I got in on my side, stayed on it, and laced my fingers on top of the covers like a monk. “Anything else?”
“Good night, Dagger.”
She switched off the lamp.
The house was quiet except for a shutter somewhere that needed oiling. She was as awake as I was. No one could hold themselves that still when asleep.
“The medal above the desk,” I said into the dark. “Fencing?”
“épée. The départemental championship. I was thirteen.”
“Were you any good?”
“I was fast. Too angry to be precise. My ma?tre said I fenced like I was settling a score.”
“Were you?”
She was quiet long enough that I thought she wouldn’t answer. “Probably.”
“With whom?”
“There was a large list to pick from. I was thirteen.”
I laughed.
The outline of the room was becoming clear as my eyes adjusted. “Your mother kept all of this. It’s exactly as you left it, I’d wager.”
“To the centimeter. For years, I believed she kept it this way so I would feel more comfortable when I visited. Now, I think she kept it because it’s the one room in the house my father never enters.”
“Why doesn’t he?”
“There is nothing of interest to him in it.”
I added that statement to what I was mentally compiling about Bertrand Valais.
She was quiet for a while, but I heard the smile in her voice when she asked, “What did you want to do before you joined the service? There must have been something.”
“Engines,” I said. “There was a man two streets over from us who rebuilt motorbikes in his garden shed. I spent every Saturday of my childhood handing him spanners.”
“Spanners?”
“Wrenches. I was going to have a shop of my own. Killian Curran, Motorcycles Bought, Sold, and Restored.”
“Like the bike you had in Switzerland.”
“Yes. It was very difficult to leave it behind. I spent years restoring it.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I turned eighteen, and the recruiting office had better posters.”
“You would have been bored within the year.”
“Likely. Though I’d never have known it, would I? Somewhere, there’s a version of me with grease under his nails who thinks a dangerous night is running out of milk.”
“Do you envy him?”
“Not tonight.”
She let that go by, and I didn’t push it. I rolled my head toward her in the dark. “Now you. What did you want?”
“Away.” She didn’t hesitate. “That was the entire ambition. Anywhere that was not here.”
“And once you were gone?”
The pause was longer this time. “To matter somewhere I had chosen. Instead of not mattering somewhere I was born.”
A hundred replies came to mind, and every one of them would’ve made her regret telling me, so I said none of them.
For a while, neither of us spoke, and it wasn’t uncomfortable, which was new. I’d spent a lifetime filling silences with charm because it was the tool that fit every job. With her, in the dark, I didn’t need or want to.
She was the one who broke it.
“Your sister,” she said. “You told me she’s in the business. Is she why you are?”
“Other way around. Alena’s a year younger than me.
Whatever I did, she did harder, out of spite.
” Her smile showed in the dim light, and I continued.
“When our parents died, we only had each other, and we made a mess of it. She grieved by working. I grieved by working somewhere else. Two people in the same trade can go years without a real conversation, and we managed it. Birthdays. The odd voicemail. I told myself that was what she wanted.”
“What changed?”
“Dubai,” I blurted. “Two years ago. An op went wrong, and I got a call that my sister had been shot and I should come now. I was on the ground before she was out of the first surgery. The bullet caught her under the arm and did its worst on the way through. Her spine. They operated three times. There was a stretch where the surgeons stopped saying when she’d walk again and started saying if she ever did. ”
Maelle’s only response was to put her hand on my arm, so I kept talking.
“I stayed two months. Through the surgeries, the first steps, all of it. Somewhere in the middle, she stopped being someone I was connected to by blood and became my sister again. Nearly losing her brought us closer together. I don’t recommend the method.”
“Does she walk?”
“With a limp.” I stared up at the ceiling. “You should hear how she talks about it. Like it’s a battle on the ground she won single-handedly.”
Before Maelle, I’d never told a woman about Alena: not her name, not what she did, not Dubai, not one word of it. Tonight, I’d wanted to badly enough that I couldn’t have stopped myself.
Every instinct I had said to toss the ridiculous pillow to the floor, gather her in my arms, and kiss her. I kept my hands where they were.
This wasn’t about tonight. For the first time in my life, I wanted a woman for good—next year, ten years on, the whole of it—and that idea didn’t send me looking for the door.
What scared me was the other part. What if it wore off?
What if I did the work, earned her trust, then I hurt her?
It wouldn’t only be us I’d wrecked. She’d never trust another man for as long as she lived.
So I stayed on my side of the pillow.
“Killian?” Her voice was soft, and she sounded half asleep already.
“Yes?”
“Your sister is lucky to have you. To have someone who doesn’t give up.”
I lay awake a long while after that.
I jolted awake when Maelle’s body jerked, and she grabbed her right thigh and swore.
I shoved the pillow off the bed and moved the duvet. I pressed her knee flat with one hand and drove the heel of the other into the muscle above it.
“It’s only a cramp. I can manage it.”
“You can’t.”
Her chemise had ridden up past her hip, exposing knickers that were cut high and made of the same pink silk. Once I saw them, I couldn’t look away.
She swore again when I pushed harder. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“It’s okay. It won’t hurt any less if you’re quiet.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“What I’m enjoying has nothing to do with your cramp.”
She followed my line of sight, flushed, then gritted her teeth.
I held her knee down and worked upward. The muscle was rigid under my hand and hardest near the top of the scar from her surgery.
She stared at the ceiling and remained silent as I continued pressing until the muscle finally let go.
I lifted my hand off her knee but left the opposite one on her thigh.
When she moved my hand between her legs, God help me, I couldn’t stop myself from sliding my fingers under the silk. I groaned when her wetness coated them.
“Killian, please.”
“Tell me what you want, mon feu.”
She leaned up to kiss me, but I put my mouth on her throat instead.
“Killian—”
“Tell me. Use your words.”
“Make me come.”
It was barely above a whisper, but it was enough.
I slid two fingers into her tight heat. “Christ, you’re soaked,” I groaned, working them slowly, all the way in and all the way out, so she’d feel every bit of it.
“Please.”