Page 72 of Passions in Death
And the next day, a bright summer day, she’d married Roarke under an arbor of flowers. She’d carried petunias and made those promises to him. He’d made those promises to her.
They’d kept them for three years and counting.
“It’s nice, isn’t it, being married?”
She glanced over at Erin. “Most of the time, yeah. It’s nice. And when it’s not, you know it’ll get back there.”
“You trusted the bad cop, maybe not a hundred percent, but enough to be in there with him. But you knew how to fight. Me? I know how to paint, how to make art. I know how to tend bar and serve tables, how to clean an apartment. I don’t know how to fight.”
“You didn’t have a chance to fight. And it wasn’t personal with Casto. It was… business.”
She saw Erin on the floor now, in her party dress stained with blood that had flowed from the necklace of blood around her throat.
“You never had a chance.”
“I trusted the wrong person. So did Shauna. But I’m dead, and she still trusts the wrong person, right? She doesn’t know she trusts the person who killed me.”
“No,” Eve said as the music and laughter banged her awake. “She doesn’t.”
When she woke, the man she’d married while she’d sported a black eye—mostly disguised with makeup—sat on the sofa, tablet in hand, cat across his lap.
The wall screen ran the stock report on mute as he sat in his sleek black suit with its gray pinstripes.
She smelled coffee, and wished someone would just pour some in her before she had to move.
The dream hadn’t answered any questions, but it clarified, if it mattered, just how much the investigation brought back the incidents on the eve of her own wedding.
And what it meant to her to wake like this, on so many mornings, and see him there, sitting across the room.
“It shouldn’t be possible,” Roarke said without looking up, “but I can actually hear your brain waking up.”
“It can get noisy in there.”
“And often does.” He looked over now, and the easy smile faded. “Did you dream?”
“Yeah. Not a nightmare, just a dream.”
“That troubles you.” Rising, he went to the AutoChef, programmed coffee. When he brought it to her, she sat up.
Instead of taking the coffee, she framed his face with her hands and kissed him. “It shows how smart I was and am to marry a man who’d know how much I need coffee and get me some.”
“And how smart I was and am to have lured you with real coffee in the first place.”
“Yeah, that was pretty smart.” She took it now, drank. “Like that first bite of New York pizza, my first taste of real coffee was a revelation.”
“And the dream? A revelation?”
“Not really. Maybe on a personal level a little. It blurred the murder party with the one at the D&D the night before we got married.”
And because he remembered, very well, the bruises on her face, he stroked her cheek.
“That’s hardly a wonder, considering.”
“No, and it’s stuck with me through this. The whole girl pre-wedding thing, the D&D, the same goddamn room. I got lucky; she didn’t.”
“It’s never only luck with you, Eve. You have the training, the skills, the reflexes the victim couldn’t have.”
“I didn’t trust Casto all the way. Enough to give him that shot at me, but not all the way. And…” She had to admit it. “I didn’t like the way he was with Peabody. It bugged me the way he moved in on her. But she’d been my aide like five minutes, so I didn’t push on that.”
