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SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, THE SAME NIGHT

Gwen lay in Dan’s bed, swathed in a thick duvet, the warmth from Dan’s body heating her right side, suffusing her whole body. She had spent five of the past six nights with him. Being with him, having sex with him in her own home with a listening device capturing it all, was unthinkable. And she did feel safer here with him. That made her annoyed, made her feel like the feeble female she had resolved never to be, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot she could do about it. Or wanted to.

Beside her, Dan slept. He had made love to her, they had walked on the lawn before the sea, wrapped in dressing gowns. Then they had come back in, and he had fallen asleep. She looked at him, his profile lit by a shaft of moonlight cutting through the gap between the curtains. It was getting harder to keep her feelings in check, to deny what she had felt from the first time they had been together.

Finally, she fell asleep, dreaming of waves, of huge monsters screaming in, breaking on her, holding her down, keeping her down. Those dreams segued into visions of storms, or rivers running through the skies, of a Ferrari speeding through the Carmel Valley, scything down all in its path.

She woke at four thirty, shivering, alone, the duvet on the floor. She pulled on one of Dan’s shirts, padded through the dark house. He could, she had noticed, navigate very well in the dark. Before they went to bed, he turned off almost everything electrical save the recording stack.

Gwen found him sitting before it now, in his study, his back to her, headphones clamped to his ears. He turned before she got close, his own internal alert system warning him as it always seemed to do. He smiled up at her, flicked a switch, and removed the headphones.

Gwen leaned over him, kissed his mouth. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

“I like waking early, as you’re getting to know. I like the dark.”

Gwen nodded. He did seem to love darkness, like some kind of a nocturnal animal. He loved sunshine and blue skies and blue seas too, but he was, unusually, equally at home at night. One of his favorite things was to run late at night, after the streetlamps had dimmed. She’d gone with him a couple of times. It had spooked her, but Dan came alive. There was still inside him, for all her brave demands, a side that was utterly unreachable. It made her all the more determined to probe it, even though she felt subconsciously that it was better left alone. She still got the feeling that she had never seen Dan completely lose control. She did when she was with him, when he was deep inside her, almost torturing her with a pleasure so intense she felt it would brand her. But he never did.

“What news from the bug?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Still nothing incriminating. A bit of business, a bit of pleasure. Nothing that paints him as a killer. No mention of the elusive Haas or Hans.”

Gwen nodded. “I don’t suppose he’d ring a friend and rehash the details.”

“Exactly. I’m just looking for an aberration, a phone call or a meet with someone out of his pattern, any conversation that’s just a bit opaque, a kind of coded speech.”

“And?”

“And still nothing.”

“At what stage do we go to the cops?” Gwen wondered.

“We’d get laughed out of town with what we’ve got now. We need proof. It’s all just hearsay this far. We’d blow our chances of getting the real proof if we’re premature.”

“Are we looking in the wrong place, d’you think?” asked Gwen.

“You mean with him, or geographically?”

“Either? Both?”

“Give it more time. It’s not even been one week. Get digging in the office. I can always plant a device in Falcon if we don’t make any progress in the next few weeks.”

Gwen raised an eyebrow. “With all that security?”

Dan looked at her, a level gaze, and gave the slightest of shrugs. He said nothing, didn’t need to. That he could get in if he wanted to was evident.

“It’s been weird in the office this week. Seems to have gone quiet.”

“How so?” asked Dan. His editor’s voice echoed in his head. Get the dirt on Falcon.…

“Oh, Atalanta’s quit bitching at me, she’s become a bit of a buddy, Barclay’s keeping his bruised head down, Peter Weiss has been working like a fiend, whistling away to himself, stuck in his own little world, getting paler by the day, Messenger is as quietly driven as always. Mandy came back to work on Wednesday claiming to have given up the booze.” Gwen shrugged. “No backgammon tournaments, no hissy fits. All’s quiet.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not the quiet before the storm,” mused Dan.

In Dan’s thin cotton shirt, Gwen gave an involuntary shiver.

“That is exactly what I think it is.”

Dan got up, stood before her. “Come on, Boudy, let’s go back to bed, shall we? We’ve still got a few hours before dawn.”

Gwen saw the intensity in his eyes. One thing she did know, he wanted her just as much as she did him. It was still a craving that never went away for either of them for more than a few hours. And for the next few hours, they would revel in it.