Page 34 of Prodigal Son

“Can we finally be done here?” Fox asked in a bored drawl. “We came, we warned this posh asshole, mission accomplished, yes? Yes. Let’s go.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and slouched toward the door like an impatient teenager.

Eden threw Simon one last serious/apologetic look, and followed Fox out, secretly grateful for the chance to leave.

At the door, she tucked her face down into her shoulder, to the place where the mic lay hidden just beneath her jacket collar. She whispered: “Hope you got all that. I’m switching it off now.” And as she stepped out onto the sun-warmed pavement, she reached up the back of her shirt with one smooth motion to the battery pack and switched it off.

Fox waited for her a few meters down, leaned back against the concrete façade of the building, hands still in his pockets, sunglasses perched on his head.

Déjà vu slammed into her. Like walking into the clubhouse yesterday, the past barreled over her, a runaway train. But this was worse, because it wasn’t just a place, but a person. It was Fox, and with the sunlight painting his face, he didn’t look like an annoying specter from her past, but like–

She shut the thought down. Hard. Walked forward with her head held up, and he pushed off the wall and fell into step beside her.

“That went well,” he said.

She scoffed.

“I disagree. You warned your boyfriend–”

“Simon is not, nor has he ever been my boyfriend.”

“–we left some breadcrumbs for Pseudonym,” he continued, unperturbed. “And we’re currently not dead. That counts as a success in my book.”

Okay, she could grant him that.

“What did you tell him about me?”

Okay,that…that, she couldn’t do.

Without breaking stride, she plucked at his sleeve and then pressed her shoulder into his, used her momentum and the element of surprise to whirl him into the next alley. Crowded him up against the wall, faces close, noses almost touching.

He lifted his brows in mild surprise, unimpressed. “You know I let you do that, right?”

Yeah, she did. The total lack of tension in his body was all the evidence she needed to know that he’d expected such a move, and had gone along with it willingly.

By contrast, her hand was shaking where she’d grabbed a fistful of the front of his shirt.

She was affected, and he was not. Hadn’t that always been the case?

She took a deep breath, so deep it made her lungs ache, and let it out slow. “Charlie, we’re not doing this. At all. There’s so much going on, and just” – her breathing hitched, and she hated that – “just no. Okay?”

His gaze narrowed, impossible to read. “He’s still interested in you. You know that, right? I could tell.”

“What did I just say?”

“I don’t care if you have a boyfriend,” he pressed on, the bastard, throwing in a little shrug and a careless tilt of his head. “But how many more civilians are you going to involve in this thing?”

“I don’t–” She made herself stop. Bit her lip. Took a step back and let go of his shirt. She took another useless deep breath and glanced away from him. She was so frustrated she wanted to cry, and that made her feel very young, and foolish, and unprofessional. “You didn’t use to make me this furious.”

He breathed a quiet laugh. “Oh yes I did. But then we’d go shag and it would ease the tension for a little while.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head, and risked a look at him, saw the little smirk that meant he’d known she would be forced to agree with him. “We were pretty toxic, weren’t we?”

“Hm, volatile maybe. But I don’t think toxic.”

She turned back to him, searching his expression, which had gone surprisingly soft.

“You were ambitious,” he said, “and focused, and patriotic. All incredibly sexy – but it meant you needed things from me that I can never give. It’s good you found those things in someone else.”

Ambitious, focused, patriotic. Was she? Is that how he’d always seen her? And did he seriously not see those same qualities in himself?

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