Chapter 14 #3
Vanessa. In the book, Holt’s wife was Felicity.
Apart from the hint that he was involved in her death, Alice hadn’t changed anything about her.
Nika had painted them as soulmates who couldn’t have been better suited if they’d been created for each other—gutsy and adventurous with strong personalities.
She must have known she could never hope to fill that gulf, and she’d been twice the woman Alice was.
Not that Alice was interested in going there.
Well, she was interested, sure, but she’d never actually do anything about it.
Alice had spent ages trying to pin down on the page how Holt might feel about losing his wife, drawing heavily on her own experience to the point it became cathartic: At first the grief came in waves, so huge, so violent, so close together you could barely catch your breath.
Then the waves settled into a pattern, coming in the wake of triggers—anniversaries, smells, belongings, memories—smaller and further apart, but for the occasional breaker that threw you under when your back was turned.
It could be a ripple, a swell, or a tsunami, but the only certainty was that the water would never again be still.
And Holt wasn’t the type to go with the current.
He stood his ground as the tide sucked the sand from under his feet and the waves broke over his head.
By the time Alice had finished that scene, she’d felt a yearning in her own belly, though it was less a longing for an absent loved one—that was nothing new—and more a hunger to love that way in the first place.
To be loved like that. These days Alice could hardly bring herself to go on a second date.
Though to be fair, when did she last have a first date?
When the mosquitoes got too fierce, Alice relented and went inside.
Carter had settled himself onto a jute rug on the wooden floor, leaning back against the low bed.
He’d pushed the chairs under the table to accommodate the length of his legs, leaving her with little choice but to step over them and sit cross-legged at the head of the bed.
The heavy silence of the room made it seem even smaller.
“What are you hoping to find on the tape?” she said as he pulled earbuds from his backpack.
“Mostly I want to piece together what she knew about the day and night before we left Russia, when the station chief was killed.” He picked up his phone and started swiping through the ebook.
“First, you’d better tell me what she wrote or told you, and what you made up. Some of it I can guess at but…”
“Up until the body is found, it’s mostly her story, minus a few layers of details. After that, I had to put things together. She set up the mystery, I had to resolve it. We were saving the reveal of what actually happened in the safehouse until last, but by that time…”
“This part was obviously her doing,” he said, pausing at chapter seventeen. The sex scene.
“No incriminating secrets in there, well not of the legal kind.” Alice reached over his shoulder to the phone. “Safe to skip past.”
He pulled the phone out of her reach. “I like this part. There are some good jokes. Yours, I’m guessing.”
“I did edit it. Nika had used some unusual mixed metaphors to describe the … mechanics.”
“The mechanics?”
Alice sat back and hugged her knees, grateful he was facing away. “You know, the functionality. Tab-A to slot-B.”
“What kind of metaphors?”
“I’m so not saying. I was worried the book might end up in those awards for the worst sex scenes in literature. Though more than seventy-three people would have had to have read it before it reached that kind of infamy.”
“Pretty sure more than seventy-three people have read it. Think I’ll get my own fan club? Team Holt? You might need to apologize to my mom, though. Last I heard, all the women in her book club were sharing screenshots of this chapter. Dunno how I’m going to look them in the eye.”
“Screenshots? It’s not like the book is expensive. Why is it people will happily hand over four bucks for a coffee, but steal a four-dollar book? Why would you even give it to your mom?”
“Other way around. She found it and alerted me.”
“How did she find it?”
“Her book club—they’re kinda obsessed with spy thrillers. Mom said her friend got an alert when it dropped on some ebook site. Keyword shit, I dunno. And then I very quickly started to hear about it from my intelligence contacts.”
“Is that how you ended up in the CIA? You grew up with spy thrillers?”
“Something like that,” he said, in the same tone he usually reserved for ‘long story.’ “I’m glad it seems to have been a happy memory for Nika,” he said, swiping through the scene.
“We argued the next morning, like it says. I stormed off to have a shower, and, well, you know what happened after that.”
“I get the sense it was a very happy memory—now that I know it was a memory.”
“I wondered afterward if I’d taken advantage of her. The whole job was about using people, lying to people, but I’d never go that far. I had no idea she was actually…” He frowned.
“In love with you?”
“She told me as much, afterward, and I … I could have handled it better.”
“I can’t believe that scene was real. We used to joke about how we had a crush on our book boyfriend.” She reached over him and flicked ahead in the book. “There’s not much more after that which would be relevant. The hotel raid was the last part she wrote. The rest was me.”
“Back up, back up,” he said, twisting to face Alice. “We had a crush?”
“What? Who did?”
“You said we. We had a crush.”
“I said she did.”
“Then why are you blushing?”
“I’m not! Okay, maybe a little, but it’s because you’re accusing me of…”
“Of…?”
“He was a fictional character. It’s not real.”
“You did have a crush! Do have?” He propped one elbow on the bed beside her legs, his eyes drilling into hers, and she tried her very best to keep her breathing regular.
“Can we please get back to figuring out how to get the FBI and the CIA and the Russians and whoever else off our backs?”
He shrugged, turning back to the book. “We can try. Gonna be hard for me to forget that you have a crush on me.”
“Not you. Holt. And this isn’t you being arrogant…?”
“I don’t need to fish for compliments, remember? They jump right onto my hook.”
“You’re, you’re…”
“The kind of guy you couldn’t get out of your system, once he was in it. Was that the line you were looking for? Or was it: His presence changed the very air in the room—it was heavier, charged with a palpable current.”
She playfully whacked him on the head. Goddamn his photographic memory.
He reflexively grabbed her wrist and pulled her down, laughing.
She unbalanced and tipped over, catching herself with her free arm a split second before they knocked heads.
They stilled with their lips an inch apart.
A moment of doubt crossed his face. She recognized it as the look Nika had narrated, before he kissed her.
I caught a flash of … something … and then he rubbed his lips together, his gaze drifting to her mouth.
“Time to get to work,” Alice said, disentangling herself, “and then you can go back into the pages of the book, where you belong. A genie banished to its bottle.”
He laughed, long and heartily, and there was something gratifying about that, even if she suspected it was mostly at her expense. At least it broke the sexual tension, which was surely all one-sided. Though that look he’d just given her…
“Anderson Holt rarely laughed,” she said, sitting cross-legged.
“He was the strong, silent type and that was his appeal,” she said, raising her volume to compete with his laughter.
“Very unmanly.” She bit back a smile. To be fair, the image she had of him as taciturn was literally fictitious.
As far as she knew, he might be a regular Sesame Street Ernie when he wasn’t running for his life. “Task at hand, Holt. I mean Beck. Ugh.”
He sighed, recovering, and resumed scrolling through the story. “Do you ever get that thing sometimes, when you laugh—properly laugh—and you realize it’s been a mighty long time since you last did that?”
“I do. I really do.”
She had a sudden urge to crawl down the bed behind him, push her palms down his shoulders and onto his chest, and kiss the side of his neck.
She would never, of course, but she got enough of a thrill from simply imagining what his chest and sweater would feel like under her hands, how his skin would taste.
Her mother and sisters would insist she go ahead and do it, with an exasperated group eye roll.
For years they’d told her, as each had faced their mortality, that she needed to live twice as hard on their behalf, but she suspected it was easier to give advice that you should live like there’s no tomorrow when there was no tomorrow.
And hey, no one truly learned from other people’s experiences, right?
The downfall of humankind since forever.
For Alice, the tomorrows would continue on into yesterdays, full of consequences, regrets, rejection, guilt…
She would tiptoe on through life, same as she always had, which she would probably rue the moment she was diagnosed, if that day came.
Maybe that was when the fearlessness would come.
There was nothing like hanging out with international spies—not that she’d known that about Nika at the time—to make you realize how sedate and inconsequential your life was, like the way looking up at a starry sky made you feel tiny.
“You’re staring at me,” Carter said. “I can feel it on the back of my head.”
“You’re right there. It’s hard not to stare at someone in a room this small. It’s you or the wall.”
“I could hear you thinking. About how alluring I am?”
“I really wasn’t.”
“Then what?” The side of his face bunched into a grin. It sounded almost like a challenge. Or … an invitation?
She shook her head, her mouth suddenly dry. “Nothing.”
“No, go on.”
“I just … can’t help thinking that life should be more than a series of days in which you wake up, do some things and go to sleep again without having achieved anything of consequence.”
His smile dropped, and he looked up at her. “That’s where you were?”
“More or less. Sorry to disappoint you. Like I say, I’m very ordinary.”
“Huh. You know, that’s kinda what I was thinking about my life until a few days ago—totally dull, doing nothing of consequence, well, for no one but the cheating spouses and thieving employees I was collecting intel on.
Collecting dirt on—let’s not be grandiose about it.
Of course, that was before you went and pinned a murder on me—two, if you count Vanessa.
You sure know how to liven up a guy’s life. ”
“You’re not going to let that slide, are you?” she said, in faux exasperation.
“Oh, it’s not the only thing I’m not gonna let slide, Ms. Thornton.
Time we made our evening more memorable.
” He reached for her. Shit, it really looked like he was going to make a move—grab her hand, coax her down, thread his fingers through her hair as he swiveled onto his knees before her, cradle her neck while he leaned in to kiss her, push her onto her back on the bed…
But his hand stretched right on past her and grabbed the dictaphone from the bedside table.
“Nine hours of listening to a dead Russian woman talk crazy should do it,” he said, grinning.
Yep, he knew exactly where Alice’s mind had been going.
Hell, he’d led her there, the lowlife. Nika hadn’t been kidding about his allure.
“That’s what we’re here for, after all,” she said. Which was one hundred percent a reminder to herself.