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FISH STARED AT LEXI. She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. Was he supposed to talk about his feelings? “I get it. No problem.”
“So you’re not mad at me?” she asked.
How could anyone be mad, stay mad, when she looked at you with those bright green eyes?
“Of course not. First times are always awkward.”
“Maybe that’s it. I’ve known you so long, I didn’t think of it as a first time.”
Did that mean there might be a second time?
“Don’t worry. We’re cool,” he said.
Her green eyes didn’t leave his. The brightness had dimmed. Dammit, he was supposed to tell her how he felt. Which would be hard enough to do even if he could have verbalized his feelings, but he honestly didn’t know how he felt.
“It’s confusing, I guess.” Lame, lame, lame. “I mean ... I think ... hell, Lexi, I don’t know what I think. I like you. I respect you. I thought what we did this afternoon was more than the kind of sex that comes with someone you’ve met at a bar, or a no-strings hookup.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve had a lot of experience along those lines?”
“A lot? No. But I’m a man, not a saint. You can’t tell me you’ve been celibate since your husband died.”
Please, don’t let her have been celibate for the last three years.
“No, there were a couple of those no-strings hookups. Which is why sex with you shook me so much. It wasn’t the same.”
A couple? As in two? In three years?
“The second time might be better.” Shit. Had he said that out loud?
Apparently so, because Lexi’s lips flattened.
Instead of trying to fix things, he figured he’d do better by keeping his mouth shut. He hid behind his coffee mug, sipping slowly, although the brew was lukewarm.
Lexi rose. “I’m going to put in some treadmill time.”
“So soon after dinner?”
“It’s not like swimming,” she said. “I’ll take it slow, and if I cramp up, I’ll stop.”
Fish sighed. “I’ll change and meet you out here.”
“You don’t have to come,” she said.
“Actually, I do. If there’s cheesecake for dessert, I should probably do some preemptive calorie burning myself.”
Fish put on workout clothes and waited for Lexi. He understood her as a cop, a partner, a friend, but was having trouble with this man-woman thing.
When she appeared, she was wearing a man’s button-down shirt, the top three buttons undone. Had she made a trip to the wardrobe room, because he didn’t carry dress shirts in his go bag.
Her hair cascaded around her shoulders. Her feet were bare, unless you counted sparkly pink toenails as wearing something. Why hadn’t he noticed before?
Because he’d been too preoccupied with her other body parts.
She ducked her head. “I changed my mind about the treadmill.”
He stepped to her side. Took her hand. “Your place or mine?” he whispered.
Ended up being both. Sated and boneless, Fish lay on his side with Lexi spooned into him. His elbow rested on her hip, his hand nestled between her breasts. He listened to her breathing, slow and even, his arm rising and falling with each breath.
He dozed, content.
He awoke later, disoriented. A familiar fear coursed through him. Lexi faced him, running her hands through his hair, stroking his jaw. He snapped alert.
“Were you dreaming?” she asked.
He moved her hands. “Don’t remember.”
“You were tossing and turning.”
“Sorry if I woke you. Go back to sleep.”
She padded to the bathroom—they were in his bedroom, he noted—and came back, crawled onto the bed and leaned against the headboard.
“Ready to tell me how you got your nickname?” She dovetailed her fingers through his. “Or are you going to make me guess?”
He sighed. This was Lexi, and she’d no doubt put the pieces together already.
“I told you, Blackthorne teams give you handles. Sometimes they make sense, like Adam being Dapper Dan. Sometimes they come from the warped senses of humor of your teammates or the instructors, like Scrooge for Cashman or Rambler for Nash.”
“And T-Bone for Travis the vegetarian. I remember. Tell me about yours.”
“It was a training mission.” If he left out the part where he’d been led to believe it was an actual op, he wouldn’t be revealing Blackthorne’s secret. “We were supposed to rescue a hostage, female, mid-twenties. I wasn’t thrilled to find out she was being kept in a cabin by a river, but I was determined to prove I could handle anything.”
“They didn’t know you ... didn’t like ... the water?”
“You can say it. Scared shitless. They knew. You work for Blackthorne, you can’t refuse an assignment because you don’t like the venue. Besides, we’d had plenty of water training drills, and I thought I was cool with it.”
“What happened?”
“Cheese—the helo pilot—dropped us off in a clearing a click upstream. The terrain was rugged, so Manny, who was team leader for the op, determined the water route was the most efficient. Four of us—me, Manny, Adam, and Hotshot, the team medic—piled into an inflatable.”
“Shades of your summer camp adventure,” she said.
“It was like they knew what buttons to push.” Which they obviously had, but no need to mention that to Lexi.
“I took my place in the raft. It was half the size of the one from that summer. Things were crowded, which was good. Having other bodies nearby helped keep my focus off the churning water.”
In truth, that’s how Blackthorne teams dealt with everyone’s fears and phobias. Distraction. Support, both physical and mental.
“We made it to the cabin and extracted our hostage. The deal was, Cheese would meet us at the extraction point two clicks downriver, where there was a suitable landing place. Everything was going well.” He snorted a laugh. “Which should have been a signal. Nothing ever goes as planned.”
“I take it there were problems?”
“You could say that. I was in charge of the hostage, which meant sticking to her. Protecting her. I was sitting next to her in the raft. Without warning, she makes a break for it by jumping out of the raft. I grabbed for her, but it was right as we hit the rapids. The raft was going every which way, and I could barely keep my own seat, much less latch onto a woman who didn’t want to be rescued. Since she was in my care, Adam yells at me to get her.” Fish’s heart thumped, his mouth went dry as a Passover matzo.
Lexi patted his palm. “And you did, so that’s why they call you Fish, right?”
Fish turned his head away. “No. I panicked. Totally. Froze. Could. Not. Move.”
***
LEXI SAT, STUNNED, as Marv stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom. Water ran in the shower, and she debated going in after him. No, he was upset. Embarrassed. The fact that he’d told her the story was enough to prove he cared. Trusted her.
Or he thought she’d leave? Not want to associate with him simply because he had one bad moment?
She lay in the dark, staring toward the ceiling.
The bathroom door opened, revealing Marv, backlit, a towel around his hips, drying his hair with another.
“You’re still here?” he said.
“Of course, I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged, dropped both towels, and turned off the light. “I don’t know. Because I admitted I was a failure?”
“You’re hardly a failure ... Fish. Maybe you failed one part of one exercise. You’re still working for Blackthorne, and not in the kind of behind-the-scenes, ride-a-desk support capacity you were trying to convince me would be my best bet if I applied for a job. How can you call yourself a failure?”
“I still hate the water.”
“I figured that out when you overreacted to my suggestion we go swimming. Now that I know the reason, it’s understandable, but why on earth would you think it would make me like you any less?”
He flopped onto the bed. “The woman in the exercise was acting out Blackthorne’s scenario. No matter what I’d done, she would have hit the water. But when you’re in the moment, adrenaline pumping, trying to remember tiny but critical details, you forget it’s training. You don’t have time to think. You react.”
“You have a team backing you up, right? If they knew you were afraid of the water and were looking for how you dealt with the scenario they set up for you, one of them would have been ready to dive in after her. Someone did dive in after her, didn’t they?”
Marv hung his head.
“No, they were busy with their own assignments. By the time I unfroze, I couldn’t find her. If it had been a real mission, she’d have died.”
“If it wasn’t training, if the woman was truly in danger, someone would have saved her.”
“And there’s the source of my nightmare. What if it were a real mission, and I’d failed? What if nobody else on the team had seen her go over until it was too late? They were counting on me to do my job, which was to keep her under control.”
“Do you trust them now?” she asked. “I repeat, they didn’t fire you, or demote you, or make you ride a desk.”
A thought slammed into her. Like the little light bulb that turns on over your head, but this time it was a billion-watt spotlight. “Are you trying to tell me that your assignment—to protect me—is a way Blackthorne is letting you know you’re not ready to be on the more ... for lack of a better term ... dangerous side of this operation?”
Marv shook his head. “No. I had more water training, plus I paid my dues working the public side of things.”
Lexi understood Marv’s reliving the assignment where he’d failed. It was always the people you couldn’t save, the times things went south that stuck with you. The successes, for whatever reason, seemed to fade into the background.
“Do you think we strive too hard for perfection?” she asked. “That’s why we can’t let go of the failures, or the cases that didn’t go quite right?”
Marv inhaled and exhaled several long, shaky breaths. “Maybe you’re right.”
She smiled. “Women like to hear that. Without the maybe, of course.”
“Duly noted.”
At five-thirty the next morning, Lexi was awake. She longed for another hour of sleep, but her brain was in overdrive. She tiptoed out of bed and went to her own room to shower and dress. Without bothering to dry her hair, she started a cup of coffee. While it brewed, she went to the command center. Surely the system allowed internet access.
She woke up the system, but without a password, she couldn’t get in. It wasn’t worth waking Marv. Instead, she turned on the news in the living room, keeping the volume low.
Sports, politics, and ... wait. She raised the volume a couple of notches.
A news story about Burnside? Tiny, little Burnside?