Page 162 of Fearless

After, she hardly had the strength to dismount, managed to slump down beside him on the bed, bleary-eyed and dizzy. She didn’t know if that was the effect of the orgasm, or the Scotch.

Mercy put the bottle back into her hand and she took a grateful sip. He’d been right; the taste wasn’t so bad now.

In the moonlight-slatted dark of their bed, Maggie told her husband about Jackie’s strange mood that afternoon. Maybe that was betrayal to her sister in arms, but her husband’s wellbeing mattered more to her than any friendship.

“I don’t know why she brought it up,” she murmured, curling her fingers through his chest hair as she studied the blue bars of light at the window.

She felt his shoulders shrug. “Women like to gossip.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence for the gender,” she said with a snort. “But I meant, it was out of character for her. And there we were going in to talk to Ramona, and she blurts that out. It was random. It was…I dunno.”

His finger thumping at her arm was silent encouragement.

“It was like she was trying to distract me. Or mention it to me while I was distracted. It was just weird.”

Another shrug. “Maybe Collier’s running his mouth at home. He’s not right in the head since Andre bit the big one.”

“Probably,” she said, not convinced. Then: “But while we’re talking about it…what about Aidan? Is he upset?”

Ghost sighed. “Aidan’s too busy chasing tail to know who’s in which chair. When he gets his head out of his ass, then we’ll talk officer spots. Until then, he can fall in line.”

Maggie bit back what she wanted to say:Maybe, if you did more encouraging and less dismissing, he’d be better suited to follow in your footsteps.

He cupped her hip in his hand and dragged her up higher against his shoulder. “Why are we talking about him? You’re supposed to be distracting me from how pissed I am.”

“Right.” She smiled and kissed his jaw.

“How was school?”

She grinned; she was drunk at this point. Just a little; not puking drunk, but happy drunk. “Amazing. Just…I mean, can you imagine that they’re letting me study writing? How is that possible? Why haven’t the fun police showed up yet?”

She was still lying down – the room was giving a slow twirl – but Mercy was sitting; he’d pulled her feet into his lap and was massaging the arches with a touch too light to have possibly come from his big hands. God bless the French, she thought, for their sensitivity in all things.

He snorted. “I’m pretty sure writing papers counts as torture for most people.”

“Most people aren’t me,” she declared, and then laughed.

Oh, yeah, she was drunk.

“Good point.”

“I have this one prof – Pitts – who teaches Themes in Contemporary Literature, who is obsessed with that whole postmodern downfall of mankind thing.”

“Uh-huh,” Mercy said.

“And that class is going to be a pain, because I don’t like writing that kind of crap, but he, get this, loves crime novels told from the criminal perspective.” She laughed again. “So I should haveplentyof material for that class.”

She lifted her head and propped her elbows up behind her. “Hey, maybe I can take you for show and tell.”

His brows lifted in mild amusement. He raised her left foot, tapped the top of it with his thumb. “Speaking of show and tell, what’s this?”

Her tattoo. “That’s my gator.” She wiggled her toes. “I got it right after I lost the…” All the breath went out of her as she went staggering back into Memoryland. “Well, I got it a while back.”

“Five years back?” he guessed, his expression softening, saddening.

“Yeah.”

He lowered back down to the bed, stretched out beside her, laid his hand over her belly, down low, where the baby would have been. He was a little bit drunk, too, she saw, as she turned her head to meet his gaze; his eyes were too-wide, too-dark, not sharp like they should have been.

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