To all those who’ve bought, read, and

supported my fiction in so many ways.

You’ve given me the precious and

exciting opportunity to share it.

 

 

 

Monday 05:30

 

 

I WATCHED the five people stumbling up my path with bags and boxes, but I didn’t go to help them at first. In fact, I didn’t move from the doorway of my trailer at all. I just leaned against the open aluminum door, cultivating the nonchalant look. The nonchalant “I never asked you here in the first place” look.

Didn’t work, of course.

It was so early in the morning that the sun had that pale white shine. The air was sharp and a little damp. There was no one else around except a wheeling bird high above us.

I couldn’t mistake the twist of misery on Simon Wagner’s face. He was genuinely distressed. His soft blond hair looked like he’d run his hands through it a million times this morning, and there were dark shadows sketched in under his baby-blue eyes. His whole expression said, “I’m confused. I’m pissed. I’m out of my depth here.” It hit me as strongly as if I felt it myself. I had, of course, in other circumstances. He was a guy who’d always found a way under my defenses, and—just for that moment—my hostility wavered.

Judith Harrington was beside him. Her expression was less easy to read. Nothing new there, then. Even when I’d worked for her, I’d never dared assume I knew what she was really thinking. When she darted one of her glares at me, I stirred myself down the couple of rickety steps and sauntered along the path to take my share of the baggage. I lifted a couple of boxes off of Simon and his assistant, and I helped Judith balance her briefcase on the top of some packaged books. Then I also took two clothes bags off her assistant, Cissy, slinging them over my shoulder. But I refused to help the fifth visitor. I reckoned he was tough enough to take the whole damned lot himself.

We all tottered through the narrow doorway into the trailer, one by one, and piled the stuff in the corner of what I laughingly called my living room. I had to wedge everything between my shaky, tubular steel-framed couch and the standard lamp that only worked, as far as I could tell, at its own whim. That was the only free space available. Our huffing and heaving brought down a couple of the pictures I’d tacked up on the wall behind the couch, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. They were only cut out of magazines, after all.

Instead, I stared at the baggage invasion. Boxes of books and papers and maps, a couple of kit bags of presumably more personal things, a modest pile of clothing protected by thin plastic covers. A cardboard lid flapped shut suddenly, expelling a small puff of dust. A small enough collection of belongings, I guessed, for a single person. The sum total of a life, of twenty-three years. I could tell it had all been packed pretty hurriedly. Some of the boxes were charred slightly at the corners, and there was water damage on the book covers.

Looked pretty pathetic. I swallowed down a comment to that effect.

No one was talking, apart from breathing more heavily from the slight effort. Judith sank on to the couch with a tsking sound, which was probably her only concession to admitting pain. She had a weak ankle, and this removal business wouldn’t have helped it. She fell once on a mission, when she’d hurtled down two full floors from an outside fire escape. But as I heard it, she struggled on to the end, supporting a wounded teammate out of the building with her and only then admitting she’d fractured a bone in her ankle. Tough cookie.

She made some small gesture with her hand to Cissy and Greg—Simon’s assistant—and they backed off outside again to stand near the foot of the steps. They pulled the door closed behind them, but not completely. I breathed a little more steadily; it had been getting a tad crowded indoors. Just the four of us left, now. Someone cleared a dry throat.

Simon spoke first. He never could stand awkward silences. “It’s not for long, Tanner, or so we hope. But there’s nowhere else we could find, and no one else we dared ask. You know that, don’t you?”

I caught Judith’s look out of the corner of my eye and shrugged. “Things must be really bad. I’m not exactly Employee of the Month, am I?”

Simon scowled. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. He’s in danger. We all are. However, the Department insists we involve as few people as possible outside of the core team. You’re one of the very few that has adequate clearance.” His voice was thick with repressed emotion. “One of the few that we can trust, dammit!”

I bit at my lip. “Tea, anyone? Beer?” Then I remembered there was no beer. I gave it up a while back. I found all sorts of maudlin feelings crept in when I allowed it around me. No one answered my question, at first, but neither did it stir them into any other action. The mutual glances being thrown around excluded me by their very existence. It reminded me of when I’d last been part of that clique. When I’d been a damned critical part.

And how I no longer was.

Simon sighed. “There’s a hell of a lot to be done before any of us can rest again. Oh, and tea…? Yes please, for me and Judith. I’ll give you a hand with it. Then we can talk everything through together. That okay with you, Tanner?”

“Yeah,” I answered slowly, making sure my gaze stayed on him. “Sure it’s okay.”

 

 

SIMON MADE his way out to the kitchen area ahead of me, lifting aside the bead curtain with barely a glance. I kind of liked it, though purple and black wouldn’t have been my first color choice if I’d decorated the place myself. I pushed after him, needing to get in there before he discovered just how few creature comforts I actually had. I reckoned I could remember where there were a few more tea bags left in a cracked pot; perhaps a couple of washed mugs apart from the large blue one I used daily. It’s not like I’d wanted to entertain, right? Didn’t say that to the blond guy with the tortured eyes, though.

“You haven’t called Brad or me for a while,” he said. His voice was low, and it didn’t sound like he put his whole heart into the rebuke. Even so, I felt like a major asshole.

“Not a lot of news to share.”

He raised a cynical eyebrow. “Just so we know you’re okay. We don’t need a full news report for that.”

I nodded and shrugged. “Okay. Of course I’m okay. But that’s fair enough.” I flipped on the kettle, knowing we had a couple of minutes before Judith got impatient for us to return, and the noise of the bubbling water would hide our voices. “So let’s have the truth here, Simon. I’ve been out of it for almost three months now. What the hell is this all about? Far as I know, there’s been nothing much going on in the Department since Mission Dove wrapped up.”

“Far as you know?” His eyebrow rose again.

“Right.” I sighed. “So I’m not on the circulation list nowadays. But I can find out what’s going on if I want to, you know?”

“Yes, I imagine you can.” His eyes sparkled briefly with amusement. “You always did find access to all kinds of places. But you’re right. The Project Team hasn’t been called up for any more work on that scale. All we’ve been working on are minor investigations, some local security issues. Housekeeping tasks for the Department, you might say.”

“So….” The kettle shrieked and rattled to a boiling halt. The condensation dripped with familiar glee down my wall cupboard. “So what’s this sudden crisis?”

It was obvious that it took him an effort to appear calm. “I guess it’s important to get you up to speed. We’ve all been unwinding after Dove, and maybe we’ve been too complacent. But most of us were just looking forward to taking a break. We were all exhausted, still pretty tensed up from it. As you know.” He glanced at me, and I knew what he was referring to.

Not now, Simon. Leave it.

Mission Dove had been the last major exercise I’d been involved in, before I… left the Project Team. It had been the most important to date, not that the Team could take any specific credit, working as it did behind the scenes. “Anonymous” was our group’s directive. We were agents of a confidential cell within the Department, kept under the radar of its governmental bosses. But we all knew that one of the most significant peace talks of the last forty years had been concluded without serious incident, and that our small but highly specialized team had been a contributor to that success. None of us had specific job titles; flexibility was the name of our game. But our brief had included sweeping the conference sites for trouble before and after the events, monitoring communication systems that’d shame the flight deck of a jet, and tracking any potential hostility, whether from or toward the participants. We’d added our covert protection to the delegates in just as significant a way as the official security forces. It had been a damned fine time, the best work we’d ever done. Though I say so myself.

But like Simon said, we’d all suffered from the tension and weariness it brought. And some of us had let it take hold. I knew that better than all of them here today.

“Tanner?” He was staring at me. “Work with me on this, will you? You were with us on that mission. You’ve been with us all the way since the beginning of the Team. Look, I don’t know exactly what happened when you left. But it’s important to talk about that time and fully trust each other.”

“Sure.” My gaze met his, steady as before, and he turned back to the matter at hand.

“Well, like I said, things were calm. Then just a month ago, the attacks started. We were alerted of random sabotage at locations where the Team had been working during Dove, although obviously we’d tried to keep the whole mission under the strictest cover.”

“Any idea why?”

He shook his head. “None at all. No warnings, no formal threat, no obvious connection with any other current political or military event. The strikes have all been amateurish, but dangerous nonetheless.”

“How dangerous?”

“A couple of small explosive devices. A sabotaged vehicle. There’s been damage to telecommunications and computer networks.”

“Weird. Someone with a grievance against the talks?”

He shrugged. “There have been no further political demands since it all ended, no overt protests. But yes, at first we assumed it was part of a fresh reprisal against the event and the official mission.”

I frowned. “But why did they choose those locations?” Simon had said they were where the Project Team had been working. I’d always been impressed at the way our cell was kept in the shadows of the Department. Some people used to say that even the HR section didn’t know we existed, and Judith handled all our remuneration issues herself. One of those urban myths, I reckoned. “How could anyone know for certain where we’d been?”

Simon put his hand on a mug as if he were concentrating on making the tea. Both of us knew he wasn’t. He was suddenly very still.

“You mean there was a leak from the Department?” No further response. “Dammit, Simon, from the Project Team itself?” A traitor sounded way too melodramatic, but wasn’t that what he was implying? After all, who else would have had access to all the information?

“No! I mean… we don’t know that for certain.” He rolled a teaspoon back and forth between his fingers. I reckoned he’d spooned six heaps of sugar into his mug already, and I hadn’t even poured the tea yet. “No one knows enough about it yet to make any assessment. Brad….” His voice faltered, but he went on, the words tumbling out more quickly. “Brad was—is—following the trail right now. He’s been monitoring every communication in or out of the Team since Mission Dove was concluded. He’s been checking recent logs and reissuing access protocols. If there’s ever been any breach of security, he’ll find it. But it takes time.” Tendrils of panic flickered in his eyes; anger too. “There must be another explanation, Tanner. We’re such a small team. We all know each other so well.”

Or not, as the case may be. I felt a nasty little chill raising the hairs at the base of my neck. “And so you’re here to check me out? Thinking it might be me?”

“Dammit, no!” He looked genuinely affronted. “Why the hell would you think that?”

I shrugged, hiding my relief. “I guess it’s common knowledge I have issues with the Team. I didn’t exactly get a gold watch when I left.”

“You didn’t give anyone enough time, one way or another.” His tone was terse.

“Whatever. But I know about you all, about the missions.” I wasn’t sure why I was pursuing this. “I know enough about sabotage…”

“In theory, maybe.” Simon was trying not to smile, although his eyes were still worried. “Remember that time you nearly blew your fingers off, helping Joe’s training class?”

“Amateurish, you said. The attempts.” I sounded stubborn.

“To hell with it, Tanner! We’re not here to place blame. We’re here to work out what to do! No one thinks it’s you. I said we came here because we can trust you, didn’t I?”

“Okay, okay.” I’d rarely heard him so upset. “And… thanks.”

He frowned and shook his head, but his expression softened.

“So tell me more. You said ‘at first’ you thought it was to do with Dove. There’s been more since then, hasn’t there?”

“Yes, there has.” Simon tensed up. “Over the last couple of weeks the attacks have… changed direction. There’s no mistaking the focus. They’re targeting the Project operatives themselves.”

“The Team members?”

“And their support staff, yes. Some of our suppliers, too, and our contacts in other governmental departments. More random attacks on property, computer viruses… some aggressive but untraceable telephone threats. All personal, all very specific.”

“Those people and places are only in our files. No one else knows where we work, how we work.”

Simon glared at me, his expression fierce. Like I was the one giving him this grief. “For God’s sake, Tanner, don’t you think we know that? But there’s been barely any time to investigate how this attacker gained such information. We’re too busy trying to protect ourselves!”

I held out a hand to calm him. “But that amateurish approach….”

He shook his head again. “The effect is no less devastating. And to be honest, that makes it more difficult to cope with. There’s no reason to the attacks—no coherent plan we can anticipate.”

“We always knew the job had risks.”

“But in the course of the mission!” His expression was half anger, half distress. “This is against us personally. Something very different. And we can’t assume they won’t get more effective. It’s all just… shocking.”

Catching us unawares. The chill this time felt ugly. “And Brad?”

Simon paled. I’d obviously struck a nerve. “He’s okay… I think. I mean, he’s not been attacked personally so far. But he’s been working twenty-four seven on the communication trail to and from the Department, and he’s out in the field now.”

Huh? Simon wasn’t telling me everything. It was rare for Brad Richards, our communications expert and resident geek, to work out of the Department at all. “So where is he now?”

“I don’t know.” The note of desolation in Simon’s voice was horrible. “I need to get back and try to track him down. He hasn’t called in for over eight hours. He left just before the attack last night on the Westbridge building.” He glanced at me. “Judith told you what happened? Why we’re here?”

“She told me the basics on the phone,” I said. “Niall’s apartment building blew up.”

Simon flinched, and suddenly I felt the wave of emotion from him as clearly as I might see a sudden jag in a sound wave pattern. “That’s an exaggeration, Tanner. The whole building didn’t blow up. But it’s the most significant offensive so far.” His eyes narrowed with anger. “Both Niall and Joe were hurt. It would have been even worse, but luckily they were on their way out. It also seemed that some of the explosives didn’t go off. Even so, Niall’s apartment was all but destroyed.”

And if he’d been in it….

Simon’s spoon clattered noisily back on to the counter. “So now we’re all on the danger list, Brad the same as I am. Joe’s in the hospital under armed guard, with severe injuries to his leg. They’ll only let Judith in there at the moment. And Niall’s here….”

“Why?” I didn’t know how else to say it, except bluntly. “Why us?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said. “But we’ll find out.”

I was shaken, despite my pathetic attempt at not caring. “And so why contact me? I’ve not been a part of it since Dove. I doubt I need protection or anything. There’s been no threat against me.”

“Whatever Judith may have said on the phone to persuade you to do this, she meant it, Tanner. About us needing you. You’re the only one in such a unique position. No media exposure, very little public record, and the skill and training to vanish if you want to. Hell, you’ve proved it already. It took me four days and all the resources of the Department—unofficially—to track you here.” He saw my startled expression, deteriorating swiftly toward anger. “Take that look off your face. I had my orders. When the attacks first started, Judith wanted every Team member located, including you. Just in case.”

It wasn’t worth getting upset about, and I guess I was kind of disappointed it hadn’t taken longer.

“I respect your need to get away, Tanner, but we need you now. You’re the only one who can understand what’s at stake, what’s required. We just don’t have anywhere that we’re sure is totally secure any more. This place—your place—has never been anywhere near the Department’s records. It just doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned. You’re the only one at the moment with a genuinely safe house.”

“Trailer,” I said, being pedantic.

He looked confused, then smiled. “Sure.” His eyes ranged over the lemon-painted walls; the slightly bulging window frames. He tensed up. I don’t think he’d registered much of my unusual décor before now. “Trailer. It’s good, I’m sure.” He sighed. “Tanner, look. I know you and Niall have… issues.”

I carefully bit back the growl in my throat.

“You won’t talk about it, either of you. That’s your prerogative, I guess. But I have to force this on you, regardless. Even Judith has been targeted in the last week or so—”

“What the fuck?” I ignored Simon’s wince. “How serious?”

He waved his hand, dismissing it. “It’s okay. Just a suspicious package delivered to the Department. It never got past the front desk, let alone to hers. But it was clearly addressed to her.”

“Shit.”

“She won’t tell you about it, I suspect, and she’s unharmed, you can see that yourself. But we’re suddenly all in danger, with no idea as to why, whether it’s an organized campaign or random acts of revenge of some kind. We have to consolidate what we know and support each other. Find and isolate the threat. Then deal with it.”

There was a moment of silence. I poured water from the kettle onto the tea bags with exaggerated care. “The Department is involved to the highest level, right?”

Simon was still pale. “This situation has been escalated. Of course it has. But there can’t be any official recognition. The Project Team was set up as a separate and secret division and that’s the way we have to stay. We have to clean up our own mess, without knowing what it really is. And we need you with us, don’t you understand? If this is a chance to bring you back on board….” He looked very earnest, very concerned, and I bit back an overwhelming desire to offer him whatever he needed. Simon had that effect on people; I knew why Judith relied on him so much.

“It’s not going to happen,” I said. I cleared my throat, just for extra emphasis.

“Why are you hiding out here, Tanner? You should have stayed. It could all have been sorted out, I’m sure. I never wanted you off the Team, you know that, don’t you?”

“Sure. It’s a given.” I didn’t meet his eyes. It hadn’t been Simon’s choice, whatever the circumstances. I knew exactly who to blame for my exile, self-imposed or not. “Take Judith’s tea in for her, will you?”

He picked up the two mugs, looking at the random spring flowers on one and a leering kitten—mercifully faded—on the other. I could see his mental count. “What about Niall?”

“Didn’t ask for anything.”

“You’ll want to talk to him about all this, of course—”

“I won’t,” I said.

His eyes blinked, rather too quickly. “It’s not much to ask, Tanner. You’ve always been a tolerant person.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse. “That’s where your Team speech fails, Simon. Because just now and then, I’m fucking not. I’m doing this for reasons that stick in my throat, although I’ll stand by my word. But I don’t have to be tolerant at all. And don’t you forget it.” I ignored the splash of brown liquid on the counter and the burning mug handle against my thumb. I pushed through the bead curtain and emerged back into the bubble of tension that was hovering in my meager living room.

Which was now uncomfortably full of people I’d thought I’d left behind.

 

 

IT WAS like one of those Mexican stand-offs. I stood, leaning against the wall nearest the kitchen, paying about as much attention to my tea as I would to weather reports on the moon. Simon sat awkwardly beside Judith on the couch, which was never the most comfortable of seats at the best of times. The fourth inhabitant of the trailer stood beside them.

Niall. Niall Sutherland, alongside the boxes he’d delivered to my home in a strange, bitter little plea for protection. His hands hung at his sides, and he didn’t meet my gaze. He looked like he was frowning, but I was pretty sure that was just the way his face had settled. His mind would be busy on other things.

Simon stared at the two of us with something ominously close to despair. “We weren’t followed here. We’re pretty sure no one knows about this place except for us. But you must inform us at once of any strangers on the site.”

I snorted. I wasn’t working at the moment, so I saw most people as they came and went, but barely twenty percent of the population stayed on the park more than three months in a row. That was the nature of this place, didn’t he know?

He continued, regardless. “Niall will need communication with us. I’ll leave you with a cell phone for that exclusive use. It’s linked to the emergency numbers for the Team we all know—and only we know.”

“The numbers we never expected to use?” It had been a bit of a joke during initial training. We’d thought it was way too James Bond.

Simon ignored my sarcasm. “Niall mustn’t have any other external interaction. He mustn’t be seen, mustn’t leave here until we give clearance.”

“You want me to sit through the briefings on security again?” I thought my voice was steady enough, but Simon frowned.

“No, of course not. Don’t be so damned sensitive. I know you know your job. I just wanted to stress some specific things.” He wriggled on the couch and glanced over at the unnaturally still man standing beside him.

So did I. Tall, a little slimmer than I remembered, dark hair looking pretty unkempt. The shadow of a cut under his chin. My gut shuddered a little. I didn’t think it was because I’d missed a couple of meals this week.

Simon glanced back and caught sight of my scowl. “Cut me some slack here, Tanner. We’re all very disturbed by this. Like I said, we need to support each other.” His voice was just the right side of pleading, just the right side of appealing to my better nature. He negotiated well, but of course he’d met his match in me. My better nature was snoozing in a corner, wrapped in a blanket, hibernating for the season and dreaming of Florida beaches. I think Simon could see that in my eyes. “Perhaps none of us are thinking as clearly as we should. You’ll need to discuss your own arrangements with Niall, work out your own timetable. And you’ll need twenty-four seven contact between the pair of you, of course, to monitor this.”

That’s when Niall’s head jerked up, when his eyes met mine at last. His frown was reflected in the depths of his eyes.

My mouth went dry. “Twenty-four seven contact,” I echoed. “I rather think that’s the last thing I need. And though I’m the one you might expect to be kind of prickly, I’m guessing your colleague feels much the same way.”

Simon stood, rather abruptly. He looked from me to Niall, and then back at me. His shoulders tensed. Guess he recognized the daggers drawn in two sets of dark pupils. I think I saw Judith’s hand stretch out slightly, as if to hold him back. I did notice that he hadn’t drunk a whole lot of his tea.

His next words were bitter. “Okay, so maybe I wanted this to work just a little too much. But look at the pair of you! What the hell made me think that it would?”

I turned my head away, losing eye contact with all of them, trying to tune him out. He made me feel ashamed, I admit it. A brat. But I was in no mood today for Simon Wagner, the Project Team’s man who “got things done.” Couldn’t he see that?

But he didn’t let up. “Dear God, you’re glaring like gladiators at each other. As if there’s a danger you’ll kill each other before any enemy has the time to track you down!”

And then Judith Harrington herself pitched in. The slender, elegantly attractive, dark blonde woman who currently sat on my couch and sipped at a stale tea, more bitter than my shriveled emotions. A woman with a black belt in martial arts, which no one would ever guess from her quiet, controlled attitude unless perhaps they were on the receiving end. The keenest brain that had ever thrashed me at chess, and the woman I’d listened to—been directed by—for a long and very interesting time. The woman I’d been surprised to see here today, in person. Guess that’s what made me realize this whole damned farce was real.

Her voice was sharp, and the reproof was aimed at me. “Tanner MacKay, I don’t want to have to pull rank, but I will if I have to. This is for the good of the Team, not individuals, do you hear me? I’ve worked damned hard to get what support I can, and I won’t let something like this close us down. This directive has been unofficially sanctioned by certain sympathetic channels in the Department, and if you want any chance of ever working in the field again—in any capacity—you’ll do your very best to cooperate and keep Niall Sutherland safe. Do you understand?”

There was a sudden, awkward pause. You could’ve heard the last drop of condensation drip down in the kitchen on to the linoleum.

“Okay,” I said, slowly. “No problem. I understand all too well. I’m not aware that you—of all people—ever had any problems with plain speaking.” We both knew the insouciance was a ploy of mine, to play for time, to retain my dignity. I was actually quite shaken by her vehemence. Judith’s management of us had always been calm and reasonably voiced. “But you are asking me to put my home on the line, right? To come out of my quiet, anonymous little world—to offer it back to your organization, with all the risk that currently seems to attract.”

“You’re still officially an employee of the Project Team,” she snapped.

“And still on suspension, right?” I fired back. “Still on much-reduced pay and benefits, right?”

Her eyes grew darker and she flushed. “It was your choice, MacKay. We could’ve discussed the financial implications. But as far as I remember, you told me to shove the benefits up my ass and twist them hard. Next I knew, your address was ‘gone away’. And yes, you’re still on suspension, though that’s open to final review in a couple of weeks’ time.” She caught my angry gaze and held it fearlessly for a moment. Then gradually, her expression softened. “If you’d given me a chance, Tanner, I would have told you to stay and see it out. You just weren’t listening to me at the time.”

I didn’t want her pity. I had my own, right? But Judith had always been a damned good friend to me.

“Tanner, I know it was tough for you back then, but this is what we have to do, now. And we need you to help. We can look at this as a partial return to active duty, if that’s what you want, and we’ll review the salary issue. If you can work with us here….”

“You’re not the one I’m sharing my personal space with, here,” I grunted.

Simon laid a hand on my arm. It was a shock, being touched like that. He’d always enjoyed the friendship in the Team, the banter. The comradeship. Maybe I’d missed that, the past few months. But I didn’t think I was in any mood to debate it either way.

“Tanner, it’s obvious this is difficult for you. But like Judith says, we need your help! We can’t trust any other Departmental locations at the moment. Joe’s in hospital and Brad is isolated, out in the field with no support. Judith has junior staff with very justifiable fear of stepping outside their front doors and the Department watching our every move from the safety of their plush governmental offices, wondering and waiting to see if this brings us down. We must stop this, and fast. All the good work we’ve done in the Project Team so far—we must protect that, as well as ourselves.” I could hear the urgency in his voice. “Niall has nothing left and nowhere to go! He needs you, Tanner.”

He’s going to love that summary of his situation, of his life. The pressure from Simon’s warm hand was very unnerving. Once upon a long time ago, I’d been as committed to the job as he had. You hear that, Niall? Apparently you have nothing left! Except this….

Except me.

And so I turned back to face my new houseguest. Niall Sutherland. Man with the boxes, man with the need for my address.

Niall. The man I’d crossed the state to avoid, whose proximity promised nothing now except contempt, the man I once said I didn’t want to see again until hell proverbially froze over, let alone offer a mug of tea.

And he was staying in my home.

Monday 06:30

 

 

THE TRAILER park was still quiet in the early morning. Well, quiet in that the only background noise was a mixture of barking dog, the occasional raised voice over breakfast coffee, muffled through the walls of adjacent trailers, and the melancholic turning over of a dying car battery. The usual. No one got up around here to rush to work in the city.

The guys from the Team left with the same care and secrecy that they’d used to arrive. Cissy came over quickly, directing them back to the company car—a dull-colored vehicle with its plates artfully obscured. It had been parked around the back of the gravel heap. I’d forgotten to warn her that was where some of the residents drew their scrap, utilizing a random collection of vehicles that were abandoned or just carelessly parked. Anything left unattended for more than a few hours vanished or became unrecognizable by morning. I surreptitiously checked it still had all four wheels.

Greg was beside a nearby trailer and came running over to help shield Judith and Simon, presumably watching out for any sudden threat in this decidedly unregulated area. I laughed aloud when a large Rottweiler poked its head around the trailer after him, snapping aggressively. The kid staggered back in surprise, but it certainly put a spring in his step.

Simon was the last to leave me, but also the most eager. His pale color had deteriorated to something closer to parchment. He was worrying about Brad, I knew it. We all knew it. Brad would feel the same, if the situation were reversed. It had been a bit of a joke when I first joined the Team, the way that the two of them seemed joined at the hip. Not physically, you understand, but in the way that they understood each other without a load of chat, in the way that they cared for each other. They didn’t make much of an issue of it, keeping anything they shared outside work pretty discreet. But they weren’t making excuses, either. When I got to know what genuine guys they were, and after I had some experience of my own… well, it wasn’t such a joke then, was it? I envied them, to tell you the truth.

And so off went almost all of my visiting delegation, rolling quietly through the back streets, returning to the Department with their Mission Nursemaid—or whatever they called it in memos that were probably never officially acknowledged—well and truly accomplished.

When I turned back from seeing them off, I found Niall hadn’t moved from the corner of my room. A narrow shaft of morning light sneaked through the broken blind, dissecting the shadow of his body. For a few long, silent moments, we both stared at some disturbed particles of dust that glittered within it. When they settled at last on the cushions of the couch, I cleared my throat. This was my place, after all.

“No one’s going to steal any of your stuff. You can leave it there and sit down at least. You make the place look untidier than it already is.” My voice sounded very brittle in the suddenly empty room. My gut was churning. I’d abandoned my tea a long time ago, it seemed, and I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten anything since last night’s supper. The phone call had come from Judith less than two hours ago. It felt like weeks.

And—dammit!—I was still wondering where she’d found my cell number when I’d changed providers twice in the last three months, and both times under different names.

Niall’s sigh sounded like it was dragged out of him. He shifted on one foot, then the other, but he still didn’t sit down. “I feel the same way you do, if that’s any consolation to you,” he said at last, his voice thick with exhaustion and something more like anger. “I tried to find someone else, tried to convince them I’d be okay somewhere else. You know what Judith’s like, though.”

I didn’t answer that one. It was unnerving enough, having to listen to him. The voice was just as I remembered. Just the same as my late-night dreams, the nightmare’s mockery, snagging at my nerve endings. Fuck. For the first time, I wished the others would come back. At least I could be distracted by other, less disturbing sounds. I wondered why basic training had never covered this particular scenario.

Niall looked like he was struggling with the conversation. I felt the wave of frustration from him as clearly as I read the clench of his fist. “Tanner, we have to cope with this, right? Just for the bare minimum of time. You have to keep a low profile too. We’ll have to sort out some compromise.”

Obviously “fuck off and leave me alone” wasn’t an option. Then I despised my sudden, childish aggression. My social skills were obviously lapsing. Perhaps I was becoming the loud-mouthed boor that many accused me of being in the past.

Perhaps—just at that moment—I couldn’t care less.

 

 

NIALL SAT down at last because even his cast-iron will couldn’t keep him up indefinitely. I drew the stool out from under the kitchen counter and dragged it into the living room, sitting down on it somewhat gracelessly, while he settled himself down on to the couch. He moved gingerly.

I felt a familiar buzz inside me as I watched his movements. Partly because my job had been to pay attention to the people around me at all times, and partly for other, more intimate reasons. He was nursing an injury to his left leg, probably the hamstring, and it looked like he had some hearing restriction in his left ear. That was apart from the external cuts and bruises. My appraisal of his condition was swift and instinctive, even as I hated myself for bothering.

“So how bad was it?”

He looked up quizzically, and for a moment my breath caught in my throat. It was the way that his broad chin thrust up, in a familiar, defiant move; the way that his dark brown eyes widened as they met my focus. He didn’t ask me what I was talking about because he knew, of course. Damned smart, as always. “You want to know?”

“Asked, didn’t I?” Christ, was this how it was going to be?

His voice dropped to a low monotone. I knew it was his way of controlling his emotions, but it still grated. “It was bad. It happened yesterday, early evening, about 19:25. It was pure luck that we were on our way to get some takeout and had just left the apartment, taking the stairs. Otherwise we’d have been caught in the full blast….” He paused, swallowing heavily.

We? “You and Joe, that is.”

He tensed. “Yes. We’d spent the early evening checking out some toxin reports from the Department.”

I nodded. Didn’t trust myself to speak, which was lucky because Niall continued, regardless. “The whole rear of the building was damaged, though my kitchen took the worst of it. It blew a hole in the wall, demolished the room and knocked the impact through to all the other rooms. The explosives must have been set in the back yard, probably attached to the fire escape that leads up to my floor. There was no evidence of anyone there, so it was obviously on a timer. I’d guess a series of connected detonators around a central charge, small but heavy-duty explosives, staggered for maximum effect. It’s a style that some terrorists and saboteurs use.” I wondered if he was cataloguing the materials used; considering the likely suppliers. Weaponry was his specialty, after all.

“Joe got the brunt of it?”

“Yes. The apartment door blew out on to the corridor and hit him. He fell down a couple of flights.”

“Anyone else hurt?”

He shook his head. “It was entirely localized. The police are giving out the message it was some kind of gas explosion. They don’t want anyone thinking it’s terrorism. But it was directed specifically at us, no doubt of that. The charges were camouflaged into the brickwork, so it had been placed over a period of days. There’d obviously been detailed surveillance of the site. Whoever set it had seen enough comings and goings to be able to establish who was at home and who wasn’t. I haven’t been officially deployed for the last few months, of course, so I was in a more familiar routine.” It was as if he were giving his official statement all over again. “My… the apartment is mostly rubble. It’ll be months before it’s safe to go back, let alone anyone live there.”

My pain was startlingly keen; that was the only excuse I had for my puerile response. “I forgot to return your spare key. Guess it won’t be such an issue now.”

“Cheap shot,” he said, in a very tight voice.

“Cheap? That’s me all over.” Comeback was automatic. “As you were so fucking eager to tell me, last time we were together.”

“As far as I remember, that was the only damned thing you wanted to hear, MacKay!”

A-ha! There was spirit left in him after all. I bit my lip, knowing I could take him on, knowing I could escalate an argument beyond belief in short, stunning seconds.

But I looked at the dark weariness in his eyes, and I didn’t do it. I dragged my control back from the brink, teasing nonchalance back into my voice. “Well, you’re out of there now, and more or less in one piece. The Department will get you another place, I expect.”

His eyes narrowed. With anger? Suspicion at my sudden change of mood? “Sure they will.” His voice had calmed, though I could see his fists clench again, as if with the effort. “Judith has put in the request already. They’ve authorized her to evaluate a couple of other potential properties, from the point of view of security. Then I can move on. I mean, the apartment was fairly small, in a quiet area, no striking features. There are plenty of others on the market that are similar. It was only a place to live, right?”

I stared at him. “Right.”

He made a sudden, jerky movement that startled me, and his leg knocked against my small card table. Judith’s abandoned tea mug rattled, the reflections from the overhead strip lighting shivering in the surface of the liquid. Niall righted the mug with exaggerated care, but the scrape of the china on the plastic tabletop was still too sharp for my ears.

It seemed to affect him just as badly. He lifted his hands as if to bury his head in them, but then he paused and let them fall back to his lap. His voice hitched up a couple of notches on the volume control. “But it wasn’t just a place to live, Tanner. It was my home. So maybe I’ve had to move around in the past few years. I’ve learned to be ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice, never let my roots go very deep. But that place….”

“Don’t.” I knew he’d know what I meant. I knew he’d ignore me, too.

“Not just where I lived,” he persisted. “It was more than that.” His voice faded and stopped. Despite his darker coloring, he looked damned pale. I suspected he was still in some kind of shock.

I sighed. This was my living room, right? But it seemed an alien place right then, miles away and perching at the wrong end of a telescope. There wasn’t much to distract me except the ratty furniture; I’d never been one to collect trinkets of any kind. Even the pictures had only been sheets of advertising color that had just caught my eye. There was nothing and no one but Niall to draw my attention. It had been a while since I’d heard him raise his voice like that. And for once, I agreed with everything he said.

I gentled my voice. “It was indeed, Niall. Much more than that. I liked it. Good place.”

He looked up at me then, the anger fading as quickly as it had come. Maybe he recognized something in my expression. There was too much we could both have said, but not enough to ease the moment.

“What about you? Were you badly hurt?”

He shrugged. His limbs looked sapped of strength. “I doubt you need to ask. You can assess me as well as I can myself.”

I grimaced. We’d been through the same training, after all. “Tell me how you think you are.”

“Just shock I think. Some bruises.”

I nodded, knowing he was in pain, and knowing he knew I knew he was in pain, and that I knew… well, whatever the hell any of that mattered. “So what do you want to do now? You want to sleep?” The moment of truth had come at last. I’d submitted to the Department’s demands and was resigned to offering what sparse hospitality I could. Hurrah for me. I braced myself for Niall’s scorn, for the inevitable resistance and resumption of hostilities.

None of it came.

“Yes,” he said quietly, and rare though it was, he surprised me. Guess he was definitely in shock. Or maybe I’d never seen him before in such a vulnerable position. “I just want to lie down here and crash out for a few hours. If you’ve got a blanket, fine, but I’m not cold or anything. If you need to work here or something, just say. If I’m in the way, I can sleep somewhere else.”

I was listening to his words, but not hearing. I was just watching his mouth, trying to read his body language. He was fucking unhappy, I could tell. And tired beyond exhaustion.

“Hell of a time, eh, Sutherland?”

His laugh was short and bitter. “You can say that again.”

We stared at each other then, for a few long, painful seconds. His eyes were full of residual shock and horror, plus sadness and anger. Maybe mine looked a bit like that too. In the end, I turned away from his gaze. It was all just a little bit too uncomfortable.

“I’ll get a blanket.” I slid off my stool with a wince of discomfort. “Damned couch is more like the back of a drunken camel, but that’s all there is on offer in a mansion like this. You’re welcome to it.”

Monday 22:45

 

 

IN THE end, he slept right through the day and on into the night. Flatbed trucks screeched over the gravel paths as guys came back from a day’s work; the dogs barked and howled some more and so did the emerging trailer kids, engrossed in the usual homicidal superhero game. Life at the trailer park made no concessions to Niall. I mean, I was used to it by then. But he must either have been extraordinarily tired or medicated, because he didn’t stir.

I got on with my usual stuff, which consisted of clearing up and reading the newspapers and puttering about on some projects I’d been dabbling in. The details weren’t important to anyone but me. There hadn’t been much else in my life for the last couple of months, not that I was complaining. Well, okay, maybe I was, sometimes. But it wasn’t like there was anything I was prepared to do about it. Not at the moment.

I walked around Niall a couple of hundred times. Sometimes I stopped to watch him sleep, his body stretched out as best he could on my couch. Head cushioned on his arm, dark hair caught up against his cheek, legs folded and hips shifting occasionally as he sought a more comfortable position. But after a while, I tried my hardest to resist that entertainment. It didn’t exactly give me any peace. I napped for an hour or so myself, though thanks to Judith and Simon’s visit, I was a little less relaxed than I might have been. When it grew dark outside the trailer and things were quieter again, I ate a cheese sandwich or two, drank some coffee, and decided to spend my time in working out what the hell was going on.

When Judith set up the Project Team, we all knew it was risky. She’d never kept entirely within the rules of the Department as it was, but she believed there was a need for a small, specialist intelligence team to use on the more sensitive missions—and she pushed for management of it. Amazingly, they agreed. She chose her own guys and ran it her own way. A very fair boss, with an unusually compassionate care for her staff—for all of them, right down to her devoted assistant Cissy, the drivers, the clerical team, and anyone else who supported her.

A couple of early successes and she was cautiously settled in place. We identified an assassination threat on a Presidential candidate days before his own Secret Service personnel even started to suspect. We exposed the tax frauds of an evangelical TV preacher. And we also helped find the hiding place of a runaway child of one of our own Department’s senior management before they came to any harm. We reported it all to the relevant powers that be, quietly and effectively, and without the glare of publicity.

How did we do it? Judith had been right, in that a small group of anonymous agents could infiltrate where official personnel were blocked. We weren’t beholden to any other boss, any other timetable. Sometimes, one man could go where a whole department couldn’t—or where they had to keep within more regulated lines. Our faces weren’t on file, our fingerprints never taken. We could concentrate entirely—and swiftly—on the areas of most risk. And we utilized a unique balance of skills.

I was on infiltration; I had been told to expect everything from surveillance of a suspect to donning the old false beard and trying to sell Bibles on the doorstep to unsuspecting crooks. I’d had a fairly varied life, and it qualified me to blend into all kinds of background. I could convince a target that Tanner MacKay was nothing but a loud, vulgar extrovert, and then I’d merge into their particular crowd for a couple of hours and wait to see if they noticed me. They rarely did. I’d be the nondescript guy who sold them their groceries or the guy who was fixing the elevator on their floor. Or the man who briefly took their wife’s elbow at a cocktail party and left her with the memory of an expensive cologne, the sip of an overly dry martini, and a smiling, flirtatious insolence. But hardly anything about his individual features.

I’d been described as a chameleon, and I didn’t dislike the comparison. I liked surprising people, whether I was anonymous or acting larger than life. A character that’s “in-your-face” can use as much sleight of hand as a mouse of a man, right?

There weren’t many of us in the core Team, but the others had similar, unique resumes.

Brad Richards worked all our computer and communication systems. He came from an army background, or so they said. He never spoke about it—well, not specifically to me—and he never pulled rank. Once, Brad and I delivered a report to the Department when it was being visited by senior military personnel. There was a classic moment when the general in charge saw Brad, did a double take, and then looked deeply confused, like he was seeing someone familiar but out of context. Not just that, but I saw him snatch back an instinctive salute, hoping none of us had noticed the faux pas. I never found the right time to ask Brad any more about it.

Simon… well, the earnest, efficient Simon Wagner had used his organizational skills for slightly less legal purposes in his past life. He came to us from a minor correctional facility where he was serving a short-term sentence for a rather sophisticated financial fraud. They’d been sorry to let him go—not because they didn’t want him to go “straight,” or because they were worried about issues of national security, but because he was the only one who’d proved up to the task of redeveloping their transport logistics. He’d also motivated the whole damned place into a new workflow pattern that increased efficiency by twenty-five percent, and his revolutionary new training plan to reduce the rate of re-offending had just been passed by the prison board. And now? Now he was a changed man, and Judith’s right hand manager.

Joe Lam was the other main player. Of Chinese extraction, he was built as solidly as a brick wall but with considerably better muscle definition and steely self-discipline. No fighting style had been invented that he hadn’t heard of, and probably mastered. Judith had poached him from the Department itself, and he still trained their recruits. He was the only guy allowed to straddle the two worlds like that. He’d taught me a few new moves, and I’d hated him passionately for every damned second of it. Joe was a walking block of relentlessness, never flinching from criticizing me for all the things I apparently persisted in doing wrong. It astounded me that all his other pupils were devoted to him, willing to follow him over the top like lemmings.

And then there was Niall Sutherland, of course.

He was the original quiet man, appearing from some unremarkable background, yet with knowledge of both hand-to-hand weaponry and tools of semi-mass destruction like I couldn’t imagine outside of a sci-fi film. I always assumed he’d been some kind of mercenary, though he described it as nothing more than time spent as a soldier. He rarely talked about the past, except to admit to no family, and few roots. He didn’t seem to consider himself as anything out of the ordinary. But sometimes he looked like a walking ball of tension; a coiled spring of predatory violence, just waiting to be let loose. He was always amazingly focused, and when he was in “mission mode,” everything he did was tightly controlled and shockingly effective. Did I think he’d killed people in his military or intelligence career? You bet I did. I also assumed it’d been when he had no other choice. Of course, I may have been a little naïve there.

Rumor had it he’d been moved on from more than one department as too much for them to handle. I often wondered who’d had the balls to try. I recalled how, during Mission Dove, there’d been a thirteenth-hour challenge to the peace talks. A non-violent opposition group was hijacked by a more militant faction, and it quickly threatened to develop into a full-scale physical riot. Judith mobilized Niall and a couple of choice acolytes within the hour. They moved swiftly and secretly in amongst the ringleaders. The protestors’ weapons were removed and “lost,” and their principals persuaded to take their provocation elsewhere. The danger had passed, and several hours before the security services got around to clearing the legalities of investigation. So maybe some of the methods used weren’t above board, but they were tightly controlled and shockingly effective. Like I said.

Yeah. We were a strangely mismatched bunch of guys, it might seem, but somehow the core Team had worked. All of us together, friends and complements.

Until, of course, I broke it all up.

 

 

ELEVEN P.M. came and went with nothing more than some off-tune singing outside my trailer as someone lurched back to his own place, full of tonight’s home brew. Lights around the park flickered off, and the view from my window morphed into a small, indigo-black square. I was stretched out rather awkwardly on the floor, lying on top of some cushions and flicking through a catalog of various “might be useful if I ever get back to active duty” goods. God knows what my neighbors thought I was up to when they saw me rummaging in the waste site beside the park, collecting up a wide selection of discarded, dog-eared publications. “Stage Makeup and Costumes for Halloween”; “Be Seen in the Scene—this season’s ladies’ fashions”; “How to Build Scale Models”; “Amateur Film-Making Techniques”; “Calligraphy for Beginners”; “When Sports Stars Misbehave”—you name it, it was likely to have use for me at some stage.

Niall expelled a breath, shifting awkwardly on the couch. I assumed he’d sleep through until morning now. I wondered what I had to offer for breakfast, but then he never ate much in the morning, I knew. A flare of anger stabbed through me. Damned Department, still hounding me, landing this particular bombshell on my front steps….

I thumped a cushion and settled myself again.

So was this threat to the Team really to do with Mission Dove? There were always a few people who didn’t want success, who didn’t want peace, for whatever warped reason they personally thought justifiable. I thought we’d weeded most of those out, one way or another. Guess a couple may have escaped our clutches. I’d left the tidying up at the end of the mission to Judith.

Judith Harrington had been the favored daughter of a famous political family; an independently rich family too. She’d been expected to marry a high profile governor, or a disgustingly rich industrialist, or perhaps even a member of a minor royal family. Instead, she’d shown the lot of them the virtual finger and gone out to get a job. Used her family’s influence to get accepted into the Department, then cut a swathe through it on her own merits so that she was in a senior position after eighteen months. I wasn’t there then, but the stories still rattled around the water cooler of how her innovative budgeting changed the whole approach to a mission’s resources; of how her arbitration skills saved more than a couple of Departmental expeditions from disaster. Oh, and she kicked ass, too, had I mentioned that? People still talked in whispers about the disgraced Director who made a pass at her, and how he still found it difficult, one, to get a job elsewhere, and two, to make a proper fist of his crushed hand. There were probably more than a few establishment figures who were glad to see her move out in favor of her own team, if only to get her off their back. Maybe they were the ones keeping her in resources and support.

So we moved in dangerous waters, as a matter of course. But then why and how had the target suddenly changed to be members of the Project Team? To me, that was way more worrying. We’d never been high-profile—most of the Department’s staff wouldn’t know us if they passed us in the corridor—and we worked damned hard to maintain that anonymity. Otherwise we’d never have been able to do the things we did, or reach the people and organizations we needed. Okay, so we couldn’t all hide away in some Bat Cave somewhere, but we did all we could to distract and mislead, as a matter of course. We all had names, though they weren’t always the ones on our birth certificates. We had homes, too, and they were under whatever protective surveillance Judith could beg, borrow, or demand. Usually.

So where had the security been for Niall Sutherland?

Niall’s home.

My gut cramped with familiar nausea. He might have been killed. It had been a matter of luck that he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for three months, and when I did, he was stumbling free of the jaws of a crumbling, crushing death.

There was a context to this whole mess, of course. Niall and I had history. Like, we weren’t born glaring at each other the way we did today. No, we’d been exemplary colleagues and fellow operatives, mature young men with a commitment to the Department and the Project Team. We’d been bright and appropriately aggressive and everyone had rated us well.

At least, that was in our professional life.

I couldn’t stop my thoughts returning to the attack on him. Judith’s details had been sparse, but Niall had confirmed that his apartment was now completely gone. It presumably lay in a mess of brick and exploded plaster, miles away from here. I didn’t mind admitting, the thought of that wreckage stung me almost as much as it distressed him. Even leaving aside the injury to Niall and potential harm to others in the building, there’d been things in that apartment that were now destroyed forever—things that I’d known.

No, not just that. Things that had been mine, or at the very least, shared between us. Things that were treasured for memory alone, for a sentiment that nowadays I tried damned hard to despise. Things from a time that I tried even harder to forget.

For many months, I’d spent more time there than at my own apartment. There was a time when we ate together, did laundry together, watched TV, played chess, rehearsed our parts in upcoming missions, and rested after the frenzy of completed ones.

Lived, washed, cooked, breathed, laughed together.

Went to bed together—or the couch, or whatever square meter of carpeted floor we reached first. Yeah. That was the context.

It was a time when we were lovers.

Tuesday 00:15

 

 

NIALL SLEPT, and I continued to brood.

I should have been sleeping, too, but I never could when I was disturbed. No excuse, really, for allowing the memories to clutch long, strong fingers around my neck and choke the emotions back out of me. But they did. I teased and tortured myself with recalling everything about him.

The memories were always vivid. But nowadays, I just never let them loose.

I joined the Department over a year ago. Initially, I just sort of drifted there. I was doing contract work for some neighborhood guys I knew, working on a rather creative property deal with a major financial institution. Not that I knew anything about property; I was just there to liaise with the realtors on their behalf. Call me naïve, but I hadn’t realized the sketchy legality of the job, at least until I was approached privately by one of the financial firm’s paralegals who’d refused any part of the deal. He suggested I should look for a new career—and he introduced me to Judith Harrington. I soon saw the light and I dumped the ‘guys’. Smartish.

So I was hired, before I really knew what the job was! It was a pleasant surprise when Judith asked me to consider doing what I already enjoyed so much: becoming someone else for a while, working my way into places I hadn’t previously been invited, just taking on challenges and having damned good fun. That’s a very facile way to describe our work, I know, but at the time it was how I viewed it all.

And I thrived there, though I say so myself. She was building up the Team at the time, and I soon realized I’d been brought into the hub of the best people. It was small scale; we weren’t an army and we weren’t some kind of super secret agents. Just a group of people who wanted to make a difference, but were an uneasy fit with formal authority. It was good company for me. I hooked up with Brad and Simon and Joe as genuine friends, and I had a healthy respect for Judith as a boss. At the very least, there was plenty going on to keep me out of trouble.

In those first few months, I never bumped heads with Niall Sutherland at all. I think I’d seen his name on memos from Judith, but at that time he was a Departmental employee and not part of the Team. Besides, most of my work was in preparation, and I tended to work alone on that. I helped put together the best, most effective team: decided who were the critical people in the mission to influence—either for or against us—and then chose the particular skills we needed from our own team members. So I’d never met Niall, knew nothing of him except for his reputation in the Department and a certain amount of nervous admiration on the part of his workmates. Until Judith introduced us properly.

A Tuesday night, about 21:00. Yeah, I remembered the exact time. Judith was leaving the building, on her way home, but seeing a light still on, she came around to the office I was using. I often kept on working, regardless of office hours, until I got tired of concentrating on my latest project—or fell asleep, because that could run on into the small hours of the morning. I was working that day on planning the infiltration of a high-tech I.T. corporation, and I’d been picking Brad’s brains for several hours. This was now my quiet time, when I looked things over on my own, starting to get a more instinctive feel for the job. It was the part I liked the best—and I reckon it was my best talent.

Niall appeared at her shoulder, carrying his jacket over one arm. She introduced us, her eyes flickering between us. “Be nice to Niall,” she told me. “He’s just joined us. Excellent man, good weapons expert. He’ll be on the I.T. job with you, though he’s involved in exit strategy, not infiltration. Perhaps you can take him through some of the preliminary plans tomorrow. He’ll need to know what operative you’re putting in, the organizational structure of the target. Keep it as simple as you can, okay?” She smiled confidently. “It’s a strategy that’s always worked for us in the past.”

I nodded. At the time, I don’t think I was giving her my full attention because she coughed deliberately to get me to look up. “Make sure you put the time aside for a briefing, Tanner. I insist. I know you think we all get in your way. But you’ll live with it.” She pursed her lips in a half-smile and ran her gaze over what I called my office uniform. I was in faded jeans and a casual short-sleeved bowling shirt, my shoulder-length hair twisted into a short tail at the back of my neck. I think I probably had a chewed pencil in my mouth and my feet up on the desk; it was my usual pose when thinking through a mission plan. Someone in the past had dared to suggest that my dress and attitude weren’t particularly good for the Department’s image, but Judith had always been willing to show a little more tolerance if the job were done properly. I think she’d had a quiet word with the person who complained. I never heard anything more about it.

That evening, she’d been distracted, passing up on the chance to harass me about it. Instead, she turned back to her companion. “And I suggest you watch Tanner in return, Niall. He lives life on an impatient and unpredictable edge, and tells us all what he thinks we should know. But he’s also smart and sometimes sees things the rest of us miss. If he doesn’t exhaust you first, you’ll find his contribution to the missions invaluable.”

“Hey! And I’d always thought you such an excellent judge of character.” I was wondering whether I should be flattered or insulted, wondering whether I should let loose the grin her praise provoked. Instead, we smiled good night at each other, and she went on her way out of the building. I nodded to the new guy in a casual, friendly way and settled back to the task in hand.

I wasn’t bothered about Niall Sutherland joining the team. To be honest, I didn’t really have time to give it more thought. I had a pile of files in front of me with details of half a dozen Departmental employees. Judith had her unofficial eye on this selection, to see if they’d be suitable to join the Team. I was meant to consider them for this mission, but it was looking like a quest for the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear. There was a guy who looked more like he should be modeling designer briefs than passing himself off as a technician, and a couple who’d struggled with programming in their basic training and I doubt had progressed past basic HTML. Maybe I was being an ass about it, but I reckoned they all needed to prove to me they could blend into their environment better than an elephant in custard. So while I was considering developing new identities for these people, I knew all along I’d probably use one as a backup cleaner or something similar and go into the Service Department myself. Couldn’t trust them to know their byte from their butt, right?

“Nothing good?” asked Niall’s voice, startling me.

I cursed, rather colorfully, and the multi-layered files scattered across my desk. Twisting around in my chair, I found him standing in the doorway of the office. I’d assumed he left in Judith’s wake, but it gave me a chance to look him over properly for the first time. He was wearing well-cut linen pants and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt. Very suitable office attire. I smiled to myself. He had broad shoulders, a slim neck, darker skin than mine. Thick, short dark hair that reflected a purple sheen in the dim fluorescent lights of the office and looked damned attractive against the blue shirt. A straight nose and a generous mouth, with the hint of sharp white teeth behind the lips. A very good-looking man, I concluded, but with a serious expression. Obviously a man who wouldn’t get caught with his feet up on the desk. Dark eyes; deep, chocolate-brown irises. I got caught looking into those very eyes, and that’s where my gaze stayed.

“Can I help?” He smiled, put his jacket on a chair, and walked over to my desk. I scrabbled to collect up the files again and he watched me, quietly standing at my side. Close. He had a very pleasant smell, must have been his soap or his shampoo. Glancing over my shoulder at some of my notes—a hell of a lot of exclamation marks scrawled across them, as usual—he put a hand down to steady one of the papers. It was a strong hand. It looked well kept and graceful, but definitely strong. I stared at it for what seemed like ages, God knows why, and at how close it was to my own long-fingered hand lying beside it, half-curled around a pencil. I glanced up at his face, and suddenly he smiled, like something had pleased him. It was a striking contrast on his serious face.

It was one of those moments I thought only happened in fiction, but I remember very clearly the feelings his smile provoked, because I’d never known anything like it before. Warmth ran all through my veins, like some kind of real-time embalming. There was a churning in my gut like nausea, although I knew I’d had a reasonably bland lunch.

At the time, I laughed at myself. I tried to blame my reactions on the air conditioning, on the need for supper, on the weather, dammit. Ridiculous! This guy stood peering over my shoulder and I felt like I melted into sap. It took me a little longer to realize—and admit—what had happened.

In that very instant, I fell heavily, and hard, for Niall Sutherland.

“Tanner?”

Did he notice? I reckoned I covered my reactions well, though maybe I was fooling myself.

“I see your problem.” His voice was low and calm, recalling me from my embarrassing thoughts. “It’s a rather mixed bunch, right? You’ve got your work cut out for you. Judith’s only ever asked me to look at people with established technical qualifications. My evaluation’s only good for finding guys who’ll load a weapon and be prepared to use it, according to my orders. Who’ll set a fuse as I tell them, then stand well back.”

“Yeah.” I grinned. I felt light-headed. “Sounds a lot like my job description too.”

He didn’t exactly laugh, but his eyes flickered across to mine, and they looked warmer. They looked interested. Shit, I nearly hopped like an Easter bunny.

“Thanks for the input, anyway,” I said. “Guess I just like to do things my own way. You heard Judith. I like to work on my own at this preparatory stage, that’s all.”

“Others can’t keep up?”

“No.” I felt myself flush. His smile was very distracting. “Just too much of a maverick.”

He nodded. And dammit, despite the fact my words were arrogant and facile—which wasn’t unheard of, for me—he looked amused by them. Or maybe he was just looking at my mouth, at my lips. It was a very sensual action, though I didn’t know if he realized it. Whatever the reason, my cock reacted shamelessly to it, right there and then, my groin feeling a strange, prickly tingle. At that moment, he could’ve looked at anything of mine if he’d wanted, and I wouldn’t have minded. My worn socks, my ancient set of original comic books, my kindergarten report card. Come to think of it, that last one might have given him a good idea of what I was like, it was as accurate in its way as my most recent appraisal.

I shifted my legs carefully, trying to get my comfortable position back. He was still nodding but his eyes followed my movement. “A maverick,” he said, softly. “Not always a bad thing.” He glanced at his watch and looked surprised at the time. “You want to grab some late supper and talk some more about it?”

Did I? I tried out that insouciant look and probably just looked sour. I’d checked his hand; no ring, though I knew a lot of guys didn’t wear one anyway. Checked the way he related to Judith, because she was damned fine, but he’d been nothing but professional. I nodded agreement to the supper. I nodded; and I prayed for more.

 

 

WE WALKED to the small Italian restaurant a few doors down the street because they knew the staff from the Department there and because the food was always good. As far as they were concerned, we were just plain office workers who kept odd hours. I nodded to a couple of familiar waiters, but the rest of the time my eyes were glued to my companion. The way he shrugged off his jacket; the way he folded his long legs under his seat. The polite smile he gave to the wine waiter, and the approving nod he gave as he looked around at the cozy décor. The menu arrived under my nose, and I looked right through it like I had Superman’s X-ray vision. God knows what I ordered! I like my food, you know? But I could’ve asked for Table Napkins Carbonara, and I wouldn’t have cared.

We both chose a rich red wine and the same thick, creamy pasta. And we started to talk. Even when the food arrived, we continued, the conversation flowing comfortably and easily.

Niall mentioned his involvement in a few higher profile Department missions. Not boasting, you know, I had to give him that. Mind you, he didn’t need to; his reputation was already established, from what I could gather. In fact, one of the missions he mentioned was the very job where Judith had earned her best promotion. Despite myself, I was impressed.

“She thinks a lot of you, right?”

He shook his head dismissively. “I’m just going to be one of the team. But I get on very well with her. She’s fair. She’s a good boss.” He smiled easily, but there was restlessness in him, too, and I didn’t think it was anything to do with this evening. I suspected Niall Sutherland was a field man, through and through, and looking forward to getting involved in something more challenging. More risky. I liked that thought a lot. I didn’t have much time for routine myself.

“I have a meeting with Simon tomorrow,” he said. “To get up to speed.” He paused in his eating for a second. “Great guy.”

“You like him?” I was being mischievous, of course. Simon was a valuable colleague and he’d become a good friend. Nothing more, though; he was gay, too, but we didn’t find that attraction in each other, and neither of us minded. But he did get included in all the high level meetings. Sometimes I thought he must know as much as Judith about the mission plans, and probably more when it came to knowing how the hell they were going to be put into practice.

Niall raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I like him,” he said. “Judith speaks about him a lot.” And then he grinned as if he’d seen right through my clumsy prying. “Apparently he and Brad Richards have got up to speed already, but in a different way. Am I right?”

“Yeah. They’re together.” We both laughed, but I could tell Niall respected that. And I could also tell… what? That he liked guys too? Seemed like Judith had found a few of us for the Team so far. A happy coincidence, or maybe we’d found a place that accepted us just as we were. In my case, at least, it had colored my upbringing and helped create the kind of man I was today—a man who’d never fit elsewhere in the Department’s more rigid establishment. But that was their loss, of course.

And it didn’t necessarily mean Niall would like me.

“So what are you hoping for from your move to the Project Team?” I hurried on. “It’s been great for me, something really challenging. And the guys are the best to work with.”

“I’m looking forward to that,” Niall said. “Working with you.”

I felt a terrible ache inside, and all I could taste in the salad I was eating was the sharp flavor of need. Hell, had it been that long since I dated? Since I touched anyone? Since I had some rich, wet, sticky satisfaction?

It wasn’t just that, of course. It was all about him.

Meanwhile, he talked some more about new weapons he’d been testing, and his hope of working with more cutting-edge equipment. Judith often took advantage of prototypes in the market, offering a professional evaluation in return for exclusive use, at least until it came out to the public. He talked about some high-speed, low-weight models that had been imported from Eastern Europe; some exciting new developments in chemical research. I listened with only half an ear, the other half fascinated by the timbre of his voice, the rhythm of his careful enthusiasm.

He was also intrigued to know more about my role, which, let’s face it, didn’t lend itself to a normal job title. “I work with the people,” I explained. “Ours, and the target’s. I identify the people we need to manipulate, then help discover their motivations, suggest what triggers them. I coach people in developing alternate personalities and how to cope with undercover work. It’s like acting. I help them find the right clothes, the movements, the mannerisms. Then it’s up to them to carry out the rest of their shit.”

His eyes caught mine. That had been happening a lot, all through the meal. “Like a chameleon,” he said, and it didn’t sound sarcastic or like he’d been listening to water cooler gossip about me. “That’s quite a talent.”

Fuck, I didn’t blush, did I? “It’s just part of the process.” I shrugged. “Not as glamorous as blowing up strongboxes, or like guys in sunglasses providing security for international celebrities, or charging into riot situations, guns blazing.”

When I looked back at him, his eyes had clouded over a little. I could’ve kicked myself. I’d been facetious, just like I always was, but I’d been talking about someone else’s work, not my own. I was out of line, and I knew it. He might be really pissed with me, might think I was laughing at his role in the Department.

“Sorry,” I blurted out. “That didn’t come over like I meant.” I reached for my glass, to cover the embarrassment with a drink. He reached for something at the same time. Our hands nudged knuckles.

My body went white hot with excitement.

“It’s okay,” Niall said, and he sounded like he meant it. He didn’t move his hand and, quite frankly, mine might have been soldered to the cloth, hanging on to that small touch like discovered riches. Our fingers lay against each other’s for several moments. Niall’s gaze flickered to my face and away again. He looked wary but calm.

“Good,” I replied. I reckoned I had my answer about his preferences, but my throat was too tight to manage anything more articulate. There seemed to be a lack of blood flowing to my heart. It had all gone south.

The waiter had been hovering for some time at the edge of the room. By then, we were the last ones in the restaurant, and we’d definitely taken longer over a couple of plates of salad and pasta than anyone really had a right to. We were still smiling at each other—mine was so broad it must have looked more like a grimace—when the poor guy snatched his chance and waved the menu between us. “Coffee, sirs?”

Niall looked fully at me. It was a look of such astonishing intensity that I was suddenly breathless. His eyes were so deep that I felt momentarily dizzy; I felt as if the floor shifted under me. I tried to put my napkin down carefully and only succeeded in dropping it off the table altogether.

“Coffee, Tanner?” How could someone put so much communication into two such banal words?

I gazed back. “Not here,” I replied. Hoped to God my voice wasn’t shaking as much as my heartbeat. “Got some at home. I live just a few blocks away.”

“I’ll get my jacket,” he said.

 

 

LET’S FACE it, I’d had more than my fair share of dating; had a couple of other guys’ share, probably. But it had been a while since anything regular, and nothing had ever really lasted. No one had ever kept my attention longer than a shared summer, or finding casual warmth in bed. Just a few weeks’ unencumbered fun. It’d been several months since the lack of such company had even bothered me. And I’d definitely never felt so drawn to someone that I couldn’t hold my hands at my sides, that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that person, or stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss him….

But that’s how it was with Niall.

He walked beside me as we made our way around the corner of my street, just kind of normal, two guys wandering along. He had his hands in the pockets of his light-colored pants for a while, and he’d slipped his jacket back on, as the evening was cool. His shirt was made of a thin fabric, and I’d seen the line of his muscles underneath it during supper. I do remember thinking—again—how that shade of blue really suited his coloring. I felt shabby with my jeans and my garishly patterned shirt, but when I’d stumbled into my clothes that morning, I’d not envisaged the day ending like this. I felt all sorts of strange new things, to tell you the truth. Most of all, I felt every inch of him along the shared side of my body; I was conscious of every breath he expelled into the cool night air. It had never been such a long and charged journey back to my apartment.

I’d been living there since I joined the Department, though Judith was looking into something more secure for the Project Team members, so I’d probably be moving again in the near future. I’d always moved fairly regularly. You could have justifiably called me a bit of a gypsy. So I kept a lot of my stuff in boxes and trunks, didn’t have much time for formal furniture. Just needed a reasonable kitchen, a comfortable bedroom, and a top-notch bathroom with power shower. That made me happy enough. I didn’t watch TV, though I listened to music quite a lot. I had my system fixed up to turn itself on the minute I opened the front door, just to greet me with something good. And yes, you may well think, why was I rambling on about my household habits? Guess it was a measure of how nervous I felt that night. Nervous about what he’d think of my place; nervous of inviting him back there, like I couldn’t remember if I’d washed up after breakfast, or left my sneakers in the middle of the hallway, or yesterday’s jeans out on the couch….

I discovered that wasn’t really an issue, of course.

I fumbled with the key of the building to get in. When the lock first clicked open, even before we’d taken a step through the doorway, that was the first time he touched me properly. Suddenly there was one of his strong, steady hands on my shoulder, turning me to face him, then the other one running slowly around the line of my jaw. I stared into his eyes, and they looked darker than ever. Maybe hungry; still wary. I didn’t know his expressions well enough then. My own eyelids felt heavy with seductive delight, and my lips parted very slowly as if to release a silent groan. Swear to God, I nuzzled up against his palm like some needy cat.

He whispered very gently into my ear, and I could feel the brush of his hair against my cheek. “Tell me now, Tanner, if you’d rather I didn’t come in. I don’t know you well enough. Don’t know if this is okay. Shit, I don’t know anything, really.”

I didn’t answer with such mundane things as words. Couldn’t even be bothered with a nod. Just let my chin tilt up so that our lips were millimeters away from each other’s, and I could breathe in the warmth of his tentative whisper. Then I opened my mouth and took in his darting tongue.

We were going to bump heads that night, for sure.

Tuesday 01.25

 

 

I STIRRED on the cushions, uncomfortable and restless on the floor of my trailer, with only memories to entertain me. A cool breeze on the street and a good meal nudging my stomach; that was partly what I remembered from that evening, all those months ago. But clearest of all was the precious memory of how fantastic Niall tasted!

I’d been in some kind of sensual heaven. He kissed like a demon, but a very sweet, very sincere demon. His tongue was hot and fast and fucking gorgeous. He tasted of the wine, the pasta sauce, and the mints that came with the check. He pressed fiercely against me, like he’d been holding himself back for the last hour or so but was now released from whatever inhibitions he’d had, and his hands twisted sharply into my hair at the back of my neck. I could feel strands working loose from the tie and his fingertips pressing on the thin skin at my nape. His eyes were open, watching my reactions, and his hands never strayed past my shoulders. He was waiting, I think, to double check I was okay with it all.

I may have been an acting coach at work, but no one had ever accused me of being difficult to read when it came to sex, in all its forms. I slid both my arms around his waist and pulled him in even closer, tight against my body. My lips pressed back hard against his and I gasped my willingness into his mouth. I felt his body tighten and the muscles slide against my own, all the way from torso to knee. The door eased open behind us and we half-fell into the hallway, laughing, groaning, still nipping at each other’s lips.

“Which floor?” he gasped.

“Fifth.” I’d never cursed the broken elevator as soundly as I did that night. We stumbled up all five flights, bumping our hipbones on the banister, scuffing our shoes against the wall. From the way we clung to each other, we were like a single melded body with two sets of limbs. I nudged him around each landing, taking every chance to run my hands inside his jacket and down his sides, his warm torso tantalizing me from underneath his shirt. As I groped for the keys to my apartment, he seemed to be the only thing holding me upright, clutching my shoulders and gasping into my neck, his fingertips tracing the pulse in my throat, caressing my skin with the damp heat of his palms.

We tumbled again through a doorway, panting from our exertions and from a barely contained passion. But this time when I kicked the door closed behind us, I knew it was just us now; just the two of us, blessed privacy, and a mounting excitement that had consumed any shred of sense left in my brain.

The music playing in my apartment? It was pure soul… a low, slow beat and a voice rich with sensuous humor in every syllable and tone. I barely registered, except to feel the familiar comfort of it around me. Kind of my favorite music, coincidence or not.

And all those worries I had about the state of my place? Thankfully, we never went anywhere near the kitchen to check up on my housekeeping abilities. We also bypassed the lounge where, in fact, there were several piles of my laundry on the couch, some clean and some embarrassingly crumpled. As we staggered down my narrow hallway, he shrugged off his jacket and I dropped my keys someplace I didn’t see and, frankly, didn’t care. I toed off my boots and socks in a trail of laughter and hot breathy kisses. When I mumbled something about the coffee I’d promised him, he laughed directly into my face and kissed me again, so soundly that my eyes closed against his forehead and I felt his taste seep into my very veins. I felt him kicking off his own shoes and fumbling at my buttons. I’d wanted to take some time, to savor the suspense of peeling his clothes off of him—to tease him, perhaps, with my own unwrapping. Then his hands came up underneath the cool fabric of my shirt, running fingertips across my exposed nipples, and suddenly instantaneous nakedness would have been way too slow for me.

The bedroom wasn’t hard to find, mainly because I pushed him bodily through the door, and we fell onto the bed, entwined again as that four-limbed beast. By now, my shirt was hanging from my body by nothing more than a single sleeve, but in return I’d managed to open his without ripping off any buttons in my impatience, and also tug down the zipper of his pants. He palmed my groin, molding his hand around the swollen excitement under my jeans, but I had a hand inside the cloth of his underwear, and I had a hold of flesh—damp, hot, and tangled in amongst curls of hair already sticky with excitement—and I was making him groan aloud in a very satisfying way.

He felt exquisite. Precious. I couldn’t understand my reverence, but there was no mistaking it. I’d never felt like that before—nor since, for that matter.

I took the advantage then. I rolled myself around and scrambled up to kneel beside him, tugging at the fabric of his pants and pulling them down from his hips. His soft black jersey briefs were a fabulous contrast against his flushed skin, and they peeled off just as easily under my determined touch. I wanted him naked, and I wanted it now!

He lay on his back underneath me, with none of that coyness that some guys have when you strip them. No, he lay there with his shirt wide open and his chest heaving, his long, bare legs stretched out along the length of my bed. He looked both confident and comfortable, like a wet dream come to reality. His eager eyes glittered like flints, and they were locked on me. His arms lay by his side, and his fists clenched gently. When I reached down to pull his shirt off properly, he shifted his upper body to help me out. Then he reached up for my hand and drew it down to his mouth. I watched, fascinated, as his tongue slipped out and licked the valleys between my fingers.

“Tanner.” It was just a breath; just a murmur. No instruction, no demand.

I gazed at him, drinking in the sight of his body laid out on my bed, the sheet creased up under his hip, shadows playing along the white cotton folds as he clenched the muscles of his slim ass. The front of his thighs curved sweetly. Soft hairs on his skin, dark curls around his groin. He sucked softly on my fingers and shifted, getting more comfortable. What can I say? The movement made his cock bob gently against his belly, the flesh thick and swollen. It made the skin of his balls crinkle and the shape of the globes inside roll against the base of his groin.

I’d always thought unadulterated joy an unattainable urban myth, but I felt it then.

I leaned further over and pressed my mouth to his, trying to regain the taste of hot need in him and succeeding. He was saturated with it; his kiss in return was even greedier than mine.

My hands slid down his body, his hips straining up toward me, as I took his cock back into my grasp, and I started to stroke him. Both hands rolling around him, up and down, spreading the warm pre-come around the shaft. He gasped and bit at my lip so that I pulled my kiss away, laughing softly. And still I caressed him. He cursed a few times, like he couldn’t find the right words. Once, his hand crawled up to his own hair, gripping it like an anchor to reality. I’d never enjoyed pumping a guy so much in all my life; he was a prize in my hands. I felt his desire flooding up through my fingertips and into my own body.

I was grinning like a fool by this time, and wriggled out of my own loosened jeans until I was naked too. My hands were trying to keep the contact with his arousal, but his seed leaked out onto my palms, glistening and making them slippery. I felt the shiver of disappointment in his body every time I had to loosen my grip. His eyes were fixed on mine, widening with every stroke. His face was very flushed, his chest was covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and he was panting. Seems he was trying to tell me something; ask for something, maybe. I thought I could guess what it was. I was pretty smug by then.

I licked my lips. “Niall,” I said, trying out the sound of his voice in the acoustics of my bedroom. No music had ever sounded so good, and I grinned from pure pleasure. “So what now?”

His pupils were hugely dilated, but he smiled back as if he were savoring the anticipation just as deeply. “Whatever you want, Tanner.” His groan was husky, very sexy. “It’s your place, your room. Your call. I just want you.”

And with that deeply sensual sound in my ears, I nearly lost it. Any bantering reply I had in my throat turned tail and ran. I leaned down over his hips instead and took him into my mouth. I knew what I wanted; I wanted to taste him, to possess him, to draw him into me wherever and however I could. He cried out loudly, and his hand snatched fiercely at my hair. I didn’t care. I licked and sucked, and his cock nudged at the back of my mouth with barely controlled passion. It was better than any damned meal I could ever have ordered.

I think he was close to climax when he pushed me off. I didn’t take it as any kind of a rejection, just that he wanted it to last longer. He still grasped at me; I could still hear his harsh panting and the soft whimpers of need in the back of his throat. His hands ran over my flesh, and he rolled my erect nipples between his fingertips. Then he shifted his body so that he lay beside me, but with his head now at my hips and his groin achingly close to my chin. I had saliva glands at full productivity and a tongue caressed by trails of his pre-come, so I was more than happy to go back down on him. But I also didn’t complain when he returned the favor.

His tongue was soft at the tip, with a pleasing roughness along its length; it swiped hungrily along my shaft, and I gasped with delight. It was a shock when he took almost all of me into his mouth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not boasting, but I’ve been told in the past that I’m not small. But his nose nudged at my groin, and my balls swung helplessly at his bared throat. I started to slide down that slippery slope of ecstasy right about then, and, fuck, I was loath to resist it.

I tried to hold back; I tried to keep my mind on pleasing him, and I was thrilled when I felt the familiar throb of his cock against my lips and the strangled sob from his throat that meant, in my experience, that surrender was imminent.

“Tanner!” He pulled his mouth back up to the tip of my cock, gasping for breath, struggling for words. I didn’t know why he bothered. I wanted to throw myself off that damned slope and let the tidal wave of orgasm wash over me as well. But what did I know of him and his thoughts, back then?

“Is it…? I’m going to….” Yes, yes, get on with it…. “Tanner,” he groaned. “In your mouth? I mean, if you’ll take my word that I’m okay….”

He wanted to know if I’d prefer not to swallow, I realized. If I’d be disgusted or nervous of it. I couldn’t remember the last guy who’d bothered to ask at this stage, not that I wouldn’t have made my own preferences clear enough if things were going the wrong way. But I was intrigued, despite myself. Even if I hadn’t needed any more evidence that Niall Sutherland was a different kind of guy—which, had I been honest, I didn’t—his concern for me, even as he shuddered with a climax approaching in the fast lane of his nervous system, was very revealing.

I shook my head gently and tensed my lips around his cock to emphasize my eagerness. He groaned then, no more words available, and I was filled with the sudden burst of warm, viscous liquid from its tip. An eager burst, then another. Hot, thick flesh, shooting its delicious load, spattering on my tongue. I licked and swallowed gratefully. His thighs thrust up against my chin, his muscles clenched and strained, and I smelled the sweat and passion that suffused his skin.

It was all I needed to take me there too. I lifted my head from his groin and bared my neck, my eyes sliding half-closed. Then I stretched an arm down behind me to grab however much of him I could reach. My palm rested on his thick, damp hair, and I pressed his head further down on my own arousal.

“Me too,” I grunted. “Trust me.” And he obviously did. Two more thrusts of my hips and I groaned aloud with my climax, my cock throbbing with delight at being bedded in the warmest, softest place it had been for a hell of a long time. Niall’s mouth tightened around me, like mine had around him, and I swear I felt the vibration of a laugh run the length of my shaft. I don’t know for sure; I was rather occupied at the time with keeping my body on the planet and my voice below mega-decibels.

I came like the walls of Jericho must have tumbled.

 

 

THAT WAS never going to be enough.

Believe it or not, I don’t fuck on a first “date” as a matter of habit. But that night, as Niall shifted back up on the bed to come face to face with me, my whole body still shook with desire. I was like the string of a guitar, pulled tight and then released, but still thrumming with the note. I turned unfocused eyes on to his dark, laughing gaze, and my mouth just opened for his tongue, all over again.

“I want you,” he murmured thickly, deep into my mouth. I think he’d said it a few times already, or maybe I heard it echoing in my head, which was far from clear. I was hardening again at the mere sound of his voice. From the harsh nudging against my hip, it seemed he was as eager himself.

We rolled almost instinctively into a position where I was bottom, lying on my back. Guess I didn’t care how, and I could do both, of course, with equal enthusiasm. His hands were very sure, parting my legs, stroking at my belly. He was looking down at me with those sinfully gorgeous eyes, smiling that ridiculously fascinating smile.

God, I had it bad.

“Do you have condoms?” He looked sheepish, as if the whole thing had him bemused, and also very tense, as if he were struggling to hang on to some shred of sense. Hell, I could show some responsibility, too, couldn’t I? If I could just tear my eyes from him for a few seconds….

There was stuff in my bedside drawer, though I knew I’d have to search under a pile of books and receipts and various coins to find it. It’d been a while since I’d found anyone that attracted me enough to bother. I fumbled around for condoms and lube, one arm stretched out to the drawer while I tried with the other one to keep him close. He lay on me, murmuring nonsense into my shoulder, running his tongue along the line of my muscle, deep into the armpit and down along the sinews on the inside of my arm. It all reduced me to a mess of needy, nauseous hunger.

He took pity on me eventually and took charge of the lube, popping the top of the bottle and letting the cool gel drip on to his hand. I bent my legs up and pulled my knees further apart so he could reach more easily. When his finger slipped slowly into me, I groaned aloud. He paused for a second, maybe afraid that he’d hurt me or something.

“Tanner?”

“Don’t stop,” I gasped. “More.” I only just held myself back from a weeping “Please.”

He probed me gently but firmly. He certainly knew what he was doing, reaching inside me with care and determination. Three smooth thrusts, and he was hitting the spot. I heard myself yelping with delight like a devoted puppy. He laughed softly, his breath quickening. Giving pleasure seemed to delight him as much the receiving thrilled me. He didn’t withdraw his fingers until the last minute, continuing to stretch me, tantalizing me with strokes to my prostate while he slid on the condom with his other hand, slicking himself up. When his cock finally nudged up between my legs, pressing tentatively at an opening that hadn’t seen much third-party penetrative action for a while, I was more than ready for him. I arched up, pressing my body against his, and I pulled his head down to nip at his lips. My thighs tightened around him and my ass lifted inches off the bed with my own eagerness.

He sank into me steadily, carefully, deeply.

I know I groaned; I daresay I cursed as well. I’m not the quietest of guys regarding pillow talk. But before he could worry again he’d hurt me or I was reluctant in any way, I slid my hands around his body, under his tight, lean buttocks, and I gripped him to me. He thrust fiercely and greedily, as if the desperation overcame him; I heard his low groan in reply to mine. His cock sank in to the root, his balls slapping softly against my ass. We rocked together, skin slick with sweat, muscles keen and strong and clenching on to each other like we were afraid to let go. We both scrabbled for my cock, crushed as it was between our bodies, rubbed mercilessly against my belly. He pushed away my flailing hand, and I knew it wouldn’t take much to tip me over the edge again; and yes, a few strokes from Niall’s broad hand and I was moaning his name along with a lot of other stuff that didn’t make any coherent sense. My back arched again, and my head swam, and then the flesh between us was damp with my sticky seed, bursting free as we thrust together. I felt its warmth as it pooled in my navel and then trickled down on to the sheets beneath us.

Guess it was my night for embarrassingly quick comings.

I could feel Niall’s own climax approaching, the increased thrusting inside me and the tightening of his hand on my hip. I wanted to savor it as much as my own; I wanted to give him that same ecstasy! I hissed encouragement and clutched him close to me. I tried to mold my body against his as he leaned into me and heaved out every gasping breath. He felt like an extension of me, like we consumed each other. I couldn’t have described the feeling aloud, but the satisfaction and the rich pleasure coiled deep in my groin and started to flood thickly through my limbs. It saturated me.

When he came, I shared it with him, like I was suffering the same effort, the same sweet agony, the same ecstasy. His hips slammed sharply against mine and my ears rang with his cry of shocked delight, as if he hadn’t enjoyed such a thing for a long, long time. I didn’t know if he always sounded like that, or if it were something rare. I didn’t care, really; I was just too thrilled for sensible thought.

Like I might have said before… I’d never felt like that before in my life.

 

 

WE AMUSED ourselves for some hours after that first time; we couldn’t get enough of each other. I can’t remember much of anything we talked about, just the thrill of anticipation along my nerves every time he laughed, or moved his limbs in that way, or kissed me again… and every time our lustful desires were reawakened. Every touch made me catch my breath; another outrageous, tingling, thrilling climax brought amazement. In the end we were defeated by our own stamina—or lack of it—and we collapsed, still laughing, our muscles aching and exhausted. The mattress dipped under our combined weight as we relaxed, like it welcomed us on board.

We untangled our limbs and wiped off the more obvious mess. I suggested a shower, but neither of us could find the energy to move for a while. I eventually fetched some chilled water and the pair of us drank it slowly. We listened to the music playing throughout the apartment, enjoying it but without really concentrating. There was soul and some jazz and some more obscure European composers. It was all good. Then, when the tracks faded to nothing, we sighed into the silence—companionably—and I turned it all off. I didn’t need any other company at that moment.

We washed up and played around under the shower together. When he turned to kiss me, the water running down over his shoulders, his skin flushed with the heat, we both found our bodies stirring with the memory of recent, renewed lust. But then he shook his head and laughed, and I laughed along with him. Enough, already!

We helped dry each other and pottered back to the bedroom. Lay on the bed and drank some more, talked about music. Yawned. Finally, Niall wriggled down on the bed, his arm still over my chest, and his conversation drifted to nothing. He fell asleep soon after.

I stayed awake for a much longer time, just watching him.

Jeez. I wasn’t any kind of lovesick teenager. But he looked so good, I felt I had everything I needed, right there. He slept totally unselfconsciously, sheets crumpled around his ankles, his limbs spread-eagled across my mattress like he slept there every night.

It was all so cheesy! At any other time, it would’ve made my teeth clench. The whole romance thing was anathema to me. I liked occasional dating, I liked company. But it was usually a much more pragmatic approach for me. A couple of beers, a shared sense of humor, a measured glance down a body to see if the other guy felt the same physical interest. Then it was just a matter of seeing if anything developed between us. But this had been something very different, right from the start.

And now he was asleep in my bed, apparently staying the night.

Did I give him the usual get-outs? I searched my usual mental checklist. I always gave guys the chance to leave if they wanted; it didn’t often offend me. I’d waited for Niall to smile and say “Thanks,” to climb back into his clothes and ask if I had a local cab number. I would have offered him a drink and a sandwich, maybe. Dammit, I’d have clambered back into my own wrinkled jeans and driven him home myself. Anything to have kept that delicious, sated, sensual feeling humming between us. Anything to have stood a chance of seeing him again. And I didn’t mean at the office.

But he’d seemed happy enough to stay with me regardless. I continued to watch him, holding my breath as best I could, in case I woke him and he got up to leave after all.

He didn’t. And finally I slept myself.

 

 

AFTER THE passion comes the reckoning. Whatever. That’d always been the way for me, my usual expectation. Maybe not straight away, but payback is always waiting in the wings. Isn’t it?

I slept deeply after that first “date” with Niall, after showing him everything I had and a couple more things I thought I’d mislaid someplace along the rocky romantic way. I’d slept very deeply, but also very comfortably and right through my insistent alarm. When I finally woke with heavy eyelids and limbs full of lassitude, I stared stupidly at the clock for some time, trying to reorient myself. 08:17. I was going to be late for work.

That morning after—everyone has to face it, right?

The sheet beside me was creased, but the bed was empty. I tried to gather my thoughts, bemused by the remnants of sleep. My legs ached and my ass was unusually sore. Hadn’t I…? Hadn’t we…? Fuck.

The rattle of cups in the kitchen startled me. I sat upright under the crumpled covers and held my breath until Niall appeared in the open doorway of my room, dressed in nothing but his pants and carrying two mugs of steaming liquid. He looked in, saw that I was awake, and paused right there.

I hoped he’d found some fresh milk for his drink. I hoped he wasn’t catching a chill on the bare boards of my hallway, what with his bare feet. I hoped a lot of things, actually. I’d forgotten how good and how scary that felt.

“Coffee,” he said, a little awkwardly and rather obviously, since we could both smell the hot, rich roast. “I guessed you’d want some. I make it rather strong, but I’m hoping that’s okay with you.”

I coughed and found a thread of my voice still obeying me. “It’s fine.”

“I called in. To the Team,” he said. I was still staring at him; didn’t reply. “To reschedule my meeting with Simon. To tell them we were working from home today.” His eyes widened suddenly as he realized what he’d said. “I mean—I was working from my home, and you were working from… damn.”

I was still staring. If my eyes had got any wider, they’d have popped out of my head altogether. He stood there in my doorway, and he looked spectacular: rumpled hair, flushed skin, eyes darting around with uncertainty. Nervous, perhaps. But spectacular.

“Look, I’m sorry about last night,” he started. Perhaps he saw me wince, because he hastened to clarify. “No, dammit, not that! I mean… I fell asleep in your bed, in your apartment, without asking if you’d mind. I was too tired. I was exhausted, actually. It’s been a hard week, moving over from the Department, briefing meetings with Judith. And last night, on top of that….” Was that a blush I saw? Fuck, it was cute on him. “You should have woken me, Tanner, and bundled me off home. I had no right to assume that was okay—”

“But it was,” I interrupted. I looked at the mugs in his hands, but I wasn’t focusing on them. I couldn’t have told you what color they were or what stupid logo they might have been emblazoned with. I think I had an inane grin on my face again. “It was fine. Very fine. I wanted you there.”

He stood in the doorway a little too long for comfort, as if he were trying to decide how serious I was. I suspected the hot mugs were starting to burn his thumbs. “Put them down,” I said. I shucked off the sheet and rolled around until I was kneeling on the bed facing him. Then I wriggled a couple of feet toward him. I was still totally naked. My skin goose-bumped in the cooler morning air, but it wasn’t just from the temperature. A deep, heavy warmth was growing and bobbing between my legs. Most distracting. “Put them down,” I repeated. “And lose those pants. Get back over here. I’m not thirsty for coffee. I want to fuck again.”

His eyes flared some bright message, something vivid and sensual that sparked an answering shiver across my skin. His breath hitched in his bare chest, and his mouth twisted in a slow smile. “That’s good,” he replied, placing the mugs on the floor by the bedroom door with exaggerated care. “Because I wasn’t sure if you would. It was all rather fast, wasn’t it?”

“That suits me,” I muttered. I was only half joking. I couldn’t have held myself back from him if my limbs had been strapped to the proverbial wild horses. Yeah, it had been damned fast; I only met the guy three hours before we ended up in bed! I had no regrets at all, but I knew I ought to appreciate any that he had. “You’re sorry, Niall? You want to draw breath—take it slower? I understand….”

“No,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to. But I don’t know if I should. Hell, I don’t do this a lot, Tanner. That’s all I can say. It’s just… last night, being with you… it was like I couldn’t help myself.”

“I know.” I grinned back at him. He looked even cuter, struggling with the words. I’d crawled to the edge of the bed by now and reached over for him. I plucked at the half-undone belt of his pants. “It’s the same for me. It happened, it was magnificent. I want some more. End of soul baring for today, okay?”

He gazed at me, and that beautifully understated smile crept over his face again.

I felt the blood rush through me like the tide coming in. My mouth grew dry, and my morning arousal wept shamelessly for his touch. I fell back on the bed, ignoring his laughing protests as his falling pants snagged on his hips, toppling him onto me. He caught himself on shaking arms and leaned over me, releasing a hand to push the bedraggled hair back off my face. He gazed down at me, and laughed with me, and sank down to kiss me.

I knew even then that he was probably the best thing I’d ever seen. The best thing I could ever have imagined. The man who could quite possibly give me the best time of my life.

It was only the first time I’d met him properly, yet it was the first time we came together. There was no doubt it was right; there was never any doubt at all, though I knew very little of him then.

And probably not enough.

Tuesday 02:40

 

 

THE BEST time of my life? Oh yeah, it was!

After that night, we definitely wanted to see each other again. And then again. We wanted each other’s company like a drug; we were hungry for each other like nothing else we’d ever known. I don’t know when—or if—the other guys learned we were seeing each other, because at first we were fairly circumspect at work. But outside of work hours, we drew together like moths to each other’s flame. We drank together, ate together, watched movies, played music. All that stuff. And we fucked as if it were permanently on sale.

Glorious times. Most of the time.

We were very different, of course. From the very beginning. For me, that was the excitement, the whole stimulation. I didn’t think it mattered that we communicated in different ways too. Hell, I could manage on very little, I thought. That, and the fantastic sex.

But for us, being in a relationship was never going to be easy. For a start, we had the work situation. We weren’t always on the same jobs, and even if we were, the hours weren’t exactly nine-to-five routine. And over the course of the next six months or so, the Project Team asked more and more of us.

Judith never said anything directly, but she was obviously under pressure to produce results. She drew in about a dozen other agents, but our group remained the core. And it was a damned small core. There was no official brief, just an amazingly wide collection of skills and enthusiasms and a bunch of people who itched restlessly to use them. But there was also no margin for error. The jobs they kept pitching our way were complex and often messy. I reckoned we got the stuff that other departments had turned down as too tricky. Flattering, but risky too. We were in on anything and everything; celebrity security issues, assassination threats, industrial sabotage, political sleaze. We’d investigate it, then decide how to deal with it.

And we did produce results. Good ones.

Seemed the variety and the risks suited us all just fine. We bounced ideas off each other and developed a way of working well, whatever the combination. I never felt as good as when I was in that Team, when I was with the guys, using the talents we had, working always at top speed, at top awareness. We had an exhilarating banter going between us; we were young and fit and full of confidence. And working like dogs.

In some ways, I thought that was better for me and Niall, in that we worked together; we shared the tension and the excitement and the long days planning and directing. So okay, we had very little leisure time and weren’t always on the same schedule, but we’d find places to be together when we needed to. We laughed at ourselves, sneaking around like school kids, but I guess our passion was heightened by the adrenaline rush and the half-secrecy of our early relationship. Yeah, I got a blowjob in the janitor’s closet! Jeez, I had trouble looking seriously at the cleaners for weeks afterward. I’d recall the image of my foot stuck in a metal bucket, my pants around my ankles and my hair tangled in with a mop head. The handle jerked alongside me as I climaxed into Niall’s mouth, in a weird pseudo-sexual dance of its own. Niall laughed so much that my come dribbled out of his mouth and all down his shirt.

There were more anecdotes than could fit in one of the more lurid men’s magazines. We christened the office tables, several cubicles, underneath the fire escape. And there was one particular stall in the executive toilets on the third floor of the main Department’s head office that had Niall’s fingernail tracks as a permanent feature of the Italian tiling.

We even did it once on the back seat of an official car. Judith had been called into the Department for an update meeting, and they’d sent the official car for her. On her way back, she picked us up, intending to run a late Team briefing. Then someone from the Department rang her cell, asking for clarification on some point or other. She parked the car and went ahead of us into the office to take the call, leaving us to amuse ourselves for a while.

We certainly did that. We flipped the windows up and down and played with her video telephone like naughty kids, and then Niall pushed me on to my back on the broad leather seat and wriggled his hand down the front of my pants. Two minutes later, my pants were around my ankles, my head was twisted awkwardly against the door panel, and my legs were wrapped tightly around Niall’s bare hips as he pushed into me. Mercifully, the windows steamed up quickly, and the expensive suspension proved more than equal to the challenge.

He had to press his hand over my mouth to shut me up when I came. It was fast and funny and poignant, like the way tears squeeze out during a laughing fit. Don’t think Judith ever guessed what we’d been up to. We were easily decent by the time she returned to find out why we hadn’t followed her, though there was a rather rich aroma inside the car. Anyhow, we never risked it twice! Had to find alternative, less potentially dangerous places to satisfy ourselves.

No one had ever made me enjoy sex so much. It was brilliant. He was brilliant. That’s how it all seemed to me. We wanted each other, we were both committed to the world we lived and worked in, and life was all there in front of us. But I don’t think either of us understood what was happening to us.

I know I didn’t.

 

 

I SUPPOSE I never gave much time to thinking it through – where we might go with this affair, what we both wanted from it all. Neither of us could think straight, it seemed, except through our dicks. But Niall seemed happy enough with it all, happy enough with me. That’s what I thought, anyway. I didn’t always have a lot to go on. There’d been confusion between us as often as there was lustful joy.

“Just tell me what you’re feeling. How you think it’s going.”

“What do you mean?” That was a popular phrase of his. He stood opposite me in the lounge of his apartment on a typical evening, a half-empty beer bottle in his hand and tiredness in his eyes. “Tanner, I don’t see why I have to talk about everything. You know how I feel.”

I was frowning, and I could feel the nagging onset of a headache. For a second, I couldn’t even remember what I’d been asking him. It’d been a hell of a long day for me, too, though we’d been on different jobs. “Maybe I don’t know, not always. It’s just the way I lead my life. I like to hear things, I like to discuss them.” Dammit, he was so good—we were so good! —I wanted to praise the fact and pimp it and just generally pet it all. I felt that way about everything where Niall was concerned. Every damned feeling, from the fiercest orgasm to the strange ache that I felt inch by inch across my body every time he ran a hand through his hair.

He was puzzled but smiling back at me. He ran a hand through his hair in just that way. I stepped forward, and his hand lifted at the same time, reaching for me.

“Tanner, I was stunned from the moment I saw you.” His smile faded, shadowed by something that disturbed him. “I’ve never felt like that about anyone in my life. Even before I spoke to you.”

“Huh?” His hand was stroking slowly along the line of my jaw, and I stretched up into the touch.

“I just looked at you and wanted to know you. In every sense of the word.” He tsked softly. “Is that the kind of thing you want to hear? It’s not easy for me….”

My mouth was over his before he could finish the sentence. Words couldn’t compare to that taste. But yeah, he could be damned good with them when he chose to.

I was spending more time at his place than my own, and we were effectively living together. Because personal time was so snatched and precious, we’d decided early on that neither of us wanted to spend our nights in a game of musical beds. Instead, we took joint meals and sleepovers in each other’s apartments whenever we could and duplicated most things we owned so that we never got caught without a toothbrush or spare socks.

Niall had an apartment in the Westbridge building, in a residential area north of town. It was one of the places that Judith had cleared for security purposes. It was critical that her Team worked secretly and anonymously, and yet comfortably. Somehow she hadn’t yet got around to re-housing me as well; I’d been wondering whether to take her neglect personally. However, his place was a damned sight smarter than my downtown apartment, so I enjoyed my time there. We went our separate ways out in the field, but then we came back together—back to washing up, reading the papers at night, yawning our way around grocery stores, playing interminable games of chess, waking up with sheets tangled around us and pillows kicked off on the floor. All that stuff that comes with living together.

We just did it because it felt good. Well, it did to me. I had visions of us being as much friends as lovers, supporting each other through the missions.

God knows, we needed it.

Niall came home sometimes dirty and tired, ears obviously ringing from explosions or shots that had been too fucking close. Sometimes there’d been casualties no one had anticipated. He’d sit in the bedroom and he’d strip and clean his personal handguns, quickly and fiercely as if it burned his fingers to hold them any longer than necessary. He’d tell me about some of the missions, but others he wouldn’t, even when I asked.

Meanwhile, my reactions were more extroverted. I ranted and raved about the way things had gone, the successes, the setbacks. The damned stupid way the world ran. The arguments I had with Judith, the delays in supply, the caliber of personnel, the fucking rain when I was on outdoor surveillance in the park. I liked to talk. Hell, he knew that well enough. But he so rarely reacted. Sometimes it even looked like he was bored.

That was too painful to consider, of course.

Once, after he’d returned from a three-day solo mission, I heard him cry. Quietly, in the bathroom during his shower. With the door closed so he thought I wouldn’t see or hear. Maybe he forgot I was there or something. Though it was hardly that large an apartment.

“Niall?” I stood close to the door. I wanted to respect the privacy he obviously thought he needed, but the sound was shocking. It made something inside me ache, tightening up in my chest so painfully that my own eyes started to water. “Niall, I missed you. Hey… you okay?”

He never answered. The water stopped and I heard him padding across the floor of the bathroom.

“You want to talk about it?” Of course, that was probably the worst thing I could have said, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I wanted to help him; to hold him. The door opened, and he came out very slowly, as if walking was an effort. He had a towel twisted around his hips. I stepped up close and put my arms around him, pulling him into my embrace. He smelled of shower gel, his hair damp, his bare skin warm.

But he was tense, his body stiff against me like some kind of robot.

“Anything you want,” I said. “Tell me.” I pressed my lips to his ear, breathing into him as if I could somehow melt the tension. Yeah, the other guys could probably update me on what specifically had happened, but this was about me and Niall. I wanted to hear him tell me. “I can understand. I can take it. Tell me. Let me help.”

“No,” he said. His voice was hoarse and—shockingly—angry. “Leave it.”

What the fuck?

He turned to me then, his head buried in my neck, his teeth against my skin. I couldn’t see his eyes. He grasped my upper arms and his fingers dug in deeply. “I’m back now.” It was like a growl. “That’s all you need.”

I started to protest, but he pressed against me even harder. His heartbeat was very fast, I could feel it through the thin cotton of my tee shirt.

“Fuck me,” he whispered, raggedly. “Do it, now!”

My breathing sped up, and lust shimmered through my veins as warm as blood. Then he gave an impatient shake of his hips and let his towel fall to the floor, his body bare and flushed, his cock thick and rubbing its wet need along my leg.

I didn’t ask about the crying again.

 

 

WE WERE very different. I said that before, I reckon.

Took me a while to realize that was what it was really about.

The sex continued to be as hot as it had ever been. We’d be apart for a while, and then we’d be back in the same apartment like newly married yet sexually familiar partners. At first there’d be a thick cloak of tension, clutching around us like a straitjacket. We’d argue over something—or nothing—like we needed to let off steam before we could touch. And then we’d clamber over each other’s bodies to get to the soft, sensitive bits, and we’d fuck like starved bunnies.

After all, it had been his body I wanted, right from the first time I saw him. It was that rush of thick, ecstatic delight that suffused me every time I saw him. That was all I needed to keep me riding the crest of a wave. So maybe I didn’t need to nag at things any deeper. Or so I told myself. Dammit, I spent my whole time at work organizing people and trying to analyze their motives and behavior, it was damned stupid to want to do a whole lot of it between the sheets as well. Niall’s approach was probably just fine. He suffered the same pressure, after all. We both knew how significant the work was to us, and what it represented in our lives. Anything else was just a diversion, just entertainment. If strong and silent was the way he wanted to be, I could play along.

Liar, liar.

It didn’t work that way, of course. By then, I knew how deeply I really felt about him. Not just his body, fit and lean and deliciously demanding as that was. No, I knew how I felt about all of him; how he dressed, how he laughed, how he puzzled, how he wrote, how he smiled… yeah, all of him. But he rarely gave me any opportunity—or encouragement—to tell him so.

Guess he didn’t want to know.

I don’t think either of us had realized the Team work would be its own kind of trial, as well as an unbelievably exciting challenge. Ridiculously long hours, reams of paperwork, and the need to have a portion of your brain concentrated on the mission and the other Team members at all times. Great successes, but some horrible, terrible failures, too, where decent people suffered. And throughout it all, a constant exposure to people whose motivation would probably remain incomprehensible for the whole of your conscious life and whose lack of humanity was often staggering.

How we coped with this? That’s where most of the differences lay. The arguments followed, far too close on the heels of the passion.

“You’re going out again tonight?” Niall had watched me gel my hair, pull on my jacket and collect up my keys. From the look on his face, he was pissed.

“Out. The club. Whatever.”

“Why not stay in for a change?” The edge to his voice belied the casual query.

I raised an eyebrow. “No way. Not after the week I’ve had. Two missions back to back, extra hours planning the embassy job. I’ve had enough.” I’d earned a couple of free days, and I was damned well going to make the most of them. “Come with me.”

He shook his head; he didn’t do clubs, I knew. But it felt like he’d been quietly disapproving all evening. When I turned the music up, he’d gone to the bedroom to read. When I served up some dinner, he ate half of it, then said he wasn’t hungry any longer.

“You need to relax,” I said. “Seems to me, you don’t know how to wind down.” I felt particularly provocative that night. “Sometimes it’s hell to live with, I know. But we have to find ways of getting through it.”

“Hell to live with, eh?”

“The job. The job’s hell to live with.” I stared at him, challenging him. “Or do you want to make that something else?”

He glared back at me, just as steadily. Anger flickered like a tiny blue flame in his eyes. His quietness annoyed the shit out of me, and when I was tired and frustrated, I’d start to push him to open up. And sometimes, that was exactly what he did. He could give as good as he got, you know. He was no shrinking violet.

“Seems to me, you’ve found your way of winding down, Tanner. Every damned night.”

“Huh?” I was damned tired; all I wanted was a dance and a few drinks and some mindless fun. And now I was on the defense. “Why don’t you stop scowling at me and chill out? There’s nothing wrong with letting loose. It helps.”

“Not for me. I don’t see how clubbing all night and drinking yourself insensible can help.” That sharp tone to his voice really pissed me off. “Can’t you see? You’re surely not that stupid. It’s just running and hiding—”

“Hiding?” You’re surely not that stupid? My personal fuse got way shorter. “But you’d know all about hiding, wouldn’t you?”

His eyes darkened. “I don’t want to talk about me—”

“You sure as hell don’t!” I snapped. “But all I’ve got is one guy’s point of view, so that guy’s entertainment rocks my boat, okay?”

I left the apartment soon after. I didn’t come back until the small hours of the next morning.

Expectations were high: from the Project Team, from my own ambitions, from a new and demanding relationship. I wasn’t used to being so screwed up all the time, so tired, so tense. I didn’t have time to look at things any more closely; any more tolerantly. Pity that it took argument to draw Niall out of his shell, but after a while, that became an end in itself. In some warped kind of way, the arguments were exciting. They were fierce and fast, and often finished up with grabbing hands and clothes torn off. And despite the raised voices and harsh words, I reckoned I had control over it all, that there was a foundation underneath us that made the friction nothing more than lively sex play.

It was a new, unfamiliar time for everyone, right? Perhaps it was all too much, too soon. It was what I wanted, though. He was what I wanted. And I had him too.

But I guess, being brutally honest, I was never sure for how long.

Tuesday 08:30

 

 

THE TRAILER creaked as I turned on my bed and bumped carelessly against the outside wall. I bit back a groan.

The morning light sneaked in through the blinds of my tiny bedroom, throwing zigzags across my covers. I peeled a grudging eye open and let consciousness creep in. What time was it? My watch lay on the nightstand and it was winking past eight o’clock at me. I groaned again and spent a couple of minutes trying to re-orient myself. I was lying on the top of my bed, fully dressed. My jeans had bunched up awkwardly into the backs of my knees, and my shirt felt as rough as cardboard on my skin. I remembered dozing off on the floor of the lounge in the small hours of the morning before finally dragging myself in here to try to get some proper sleep. I also recalled nightmares about exploding buildings and barking dogs. And sundry other bedtime memories that had blessed me with an aching, not-so-good-morning hard-on. I considered the specific characteristics of a cold shower with vindictive thoroughness until my body calmed down again.

Then I remembered who else was at home.

I reckoned if I got up swiftly, I might avoid my new houseguest for a bit longer. I stumbled in and out of a tepid shower as best I could without making a hell of a racket. I dragged on some soft grey-fabric sweat pants and a tee shirt that had missed this week’s ironing duties. But by the time I got to the kettle—my particular Holy Grail—he was there before me. I’d obviously missed him rising from the couch. The blanket was folded neatly on the cushion, and the coffeepot was warmed already. There was the smell of toast in the small, ill-ventilated room, to say nothing of the smell of freshly washed, clean-clothed Niall Sutherland. Despite his whole life having been demolished within the last forty-eight hours, he had clean jeans and tee shirt on, and was managing to look as fresh as a chain of daisies.

“Unhh,” I managed. Thought I ought at least to be civil, though I felt nothing like it. He looked way too good for the time of day. The tee shirt was attractively tight across his muscled torso and slightly caught up at one side; there was a sliver of dusky skin showing above the low waist of his jeans. I tugged at the sweats that hung casually around my hips, feeling less than sparkling in return. I’d lost weight since I moved in here, and nothing seemed to fit quite the way it used to.

He put the mug of coffee into my hand, and I blanched at the suddenly familiar gesture.

“I put two sugars in,” he said. He sounded defensive, like I’d otherwise accuse him of poisoning me. “It’s strong.”

“Fine.” I knew how he made coffee, didn’t I? But I’d had a bad night; I had a lot to think about. I wasn’t at my best. I looked at this man in my kitchen, tall and dark-eyed and too fucking close for any kind of comfort, and I felt nausea that almost scared me. His mouth was pursed, like he gritted his teeth. I wondered at what hour he’d woken up in order to avoid me. Any other time, I’d have laughed at the situation we found ourselves in.

“I made some breakfast. I was hungry, I’m afraid.” His eyes didn’t exactly reflect the apology, but never mind. “I didn’t realize that was the end of the bread, though.”

I shrugged. “You slept through a couple of meals, I guess. Pity they didn’t deliver you with a packed lunchbox. I can’t exactly pop out to the store.” It sounded abrasive, but I didn’t seem to be able to get the right tone. “You know I don’t have a car at the moment? If you need anything, I’ll have to borrow off someone else on the park, or wait for one of the guys to be traveling into town and grab a ride.”

“Look, Tanner, I don’t like this any better than you do.” His eyes were like flint. “How many times do I need to say it? But I don’t have a choice. Some bastard tried to kill both me and Joe, and I’m not keen on him taking another shot. At least, not until I get a chance to organize some kind of defense. So let’s just get over it, right? The sooner we find the troublemakers and eliminate them, the sooner I’m out of here.”

“Suits me,” I said. I went to leave the kitchen but he’d moved around while he spoke, and his body was halfway across the narrow opening. I paused before moving forward—only for a fraction of a second—assuming he’d shift out of the way. He didn’t. I twisted sharply to avoid him, but our hips grazed. And as he turned his head away from me, his breath brushed across my neck, my skin still damp from the shower.

Every one of my nerves shuddered. Fuck. I caught my shoulder on the doorframe, biting back a curse, and then I strode out into my lounge.

I really didn’t know how this was going to work out, I really didn’t. There was just too much going on. Petty stuff like the lack of bread for breakfast toast, then big stuff like the attacks, the worry about the other guys, the disturbance of my sanctuary, the tension between me and Niall, the soft, earthy smell of his body up close and personal….

I’d missed a hell of a lot more than the Team and its good friendships. And it all concentrated around this man. The memory of my morning erection threatened to become a reality again, and I hoped he hadn’t seen my hand hovering protectively over my groin as I passed him.

“So what’s on your agenda for today?” I sat down heavily on the couch, nursing the coffee he’d made. It was, as always, just as I liked it. “There’s an old TV the previous owner insisted on leaving me. I think a couple of satellite channels work. Not many books, I’m afraid. And the music system is shot to pieces from the move. I never seem to find time to get it fixed.”

He frowned at that. “Strange to think of you without your music.”

I shrugged. I felt warm, like I was blushing. “Wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying here. Might have been moving on. You know.”

He stared at me like it was the last thing he’d know. “It’s up to you, of course.”

You said it. I didn’t like him staring at me like that. The familiar couch felt awkward underneath me, and I fought the irritable urge to wriggle.

He walked across the lounge, his gaze darting over to his boxes. “Anyway, I’m not after that sort of entertainment. I have to get to work. There are some papers that Judith found for me, some transcripts of the last communications that Brad intercepted just before the attack on the apartment. He apparently had some idea where the threat was coming from.”

“But…?” I prompted. “Simon said he was out in the field.”

“Yes.” Niall looked disturbed. “Ever since the first attack, Brad’s been monitoring some unusual satellite signals, some interference underlying the Department’s routine communications. It alerted him somehow. Then a short time before the explosion at Westbridge….” He was swallowing his distress; I could see the subtle change in him, though maybe other people wouldn’t have noticed. “Apparently he’d discovered something fairly urgent. None of us were around, so he left a brief e-mail for Judith and went out after the source himself.”

“Without backup?”

Niall shook his head with annoyance. “Tanner, the Team has been in a state of barely controlled panic ever since the attacks started. A lot of the standard procedures have moved down the priority list. Yes, Brad shouldn’t have gone without either seeking Judith’s sanction or taking one of us with him. But you weren’t there, of course—”

I grunted.

“And Joe and I were working on the toxin report after the attempt on Judith’s life—”

“What? Simon said it was nothing serious, dammit!”

He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “And although Simon was coming on duty, everything spiraled out of control within the next hour or so, culminating in the actual blast. Then he was pretty fully occupied, as you can imagine.”

Pulling you out of the wreckage. Right. I felt mean, but I didn’t feel up to admitting it.

“Anyway, I have the message records and Brad’s notes here with me. Judith brought them over for me. I insisted I wanted to look through them as soon as possible. Perhaps I can find some clues there, find out how they traced us, what their plans are. Who and where the hell they are! Simon’s also working on it, but from within the Department with the resources they have there.”

“Has he been targeted too?”

Niall grimaced slightly, but I didn’t think it was because of me. His mind was scanning other things, I knew that look of distraction. “No, there’ve been no specific threats against him so far, it seems safe enough for him to remain in place. But any of us who’ve been hit already—well, we’re either under police guard or in hiding, as you’ve gathered. I preferred the option of remaining accessible, so they had to find me somewhere to go, where I could… you know. Work.” He was uncomfortable, that was pretty obvious. “So where’s your table, Tanner? I need to spread out the printouts.” His eyes flickered over the small card table beside the couch. “Don’t tell me that’s the only work surface you have available?”

I sighed. This was familiar. His need for control; his impatience with poor standards. Niall did everything with intensity, especially his work. Mr. Control. But we’d relied heavily on that in the past, hadn’t we? The Team, that is. He’d kept us safe and secure more than a few times. I’d somehow forgotten that. But dammit, I’d also forgotten what it was like to be around him personally when he was in mission mode. Tiring. Consuming. Selfish….

Lonely.

Niall was staring back at me. There was an odd expression on his face, and it’d been there ever since I rushed past him out of the kitchen. I could sympathize with him, to be honest. The last time we’d been together, we’d thrown a lot of flak at each other, and he’d said a few things to me that still left an acid burn in my memory. And now I was his landlord! But to him, of course, there were much worse things. He’d been injured in the line of duty with no fucking idea of whom to blame. That was eating him up, I’d imagine.

His eyes kept flickering over my body. He looked like he’d swallowed a couple of lemons and then bitten into the peel. Like I disgusted him. It’s not that I hadn’t seen that look before, you know? Just not for a while.

And it still hurt.

“What do you do here all day, Tanner?” His voice was calm, but I knew that deception well. Why did you run away to a pit like this? he was really saying, I was sure. Why are you such a loser? Why am I trapped here with you when I’d rather be anywhere else?

Hell, it wasn’t like I didn’t agree with him. “That’s none of your business, man. Hasn’t been for a long time. That’s how we both wanted it, that’s how it is. You can spread the papers out on the couch, right? I’ll move off, and we can have a look at it.”

“We?”

I grunted with frustration. “Look, it’s not like all the Secret Spy stuff is your specialized subject, is it? I have more experience than you in the Nancy-Drew-invisible-ink business. It’ll take you a couple of hours to decode Brad’s handwriting, let alone the message underneath.” And you’ve been hurt. I nearly bit my tongue off to stop saying it aloud. It’d only irritate him. Someone tried to blow you up. Your brains are going to be like scrambled eggs for a while. The mix of emotions that thought raised in me was disturbing.

We both scrambled clumsily to clear a space. Niall flipped open a couple of boxes, sending dust and the waft of damp cardboard across the room, and I swept the cushions back and cleared the coffee mugs back out to the kitchen. He scowled; I scowled. But we got on with it.

When I came back into the room, he had the files he wanted, though he was clutching them to him like precious family heirlooms. I swore and tried to snatch at them—did he expect me to have X-ray vision? —and he growled and started to protest. A file got caught in the middle and its edges tore open with a loud complaint. With a fluttering sigh, a batch of papers tumbled out on to the floor.

Neither of us moved to pick anything up. We stood paralyzed, facing each other, breath stilled, eyes wide with shock. We had both reached for the slipping file together, and both missed it. But our hands had caught at the nearest alternative.

Each other’s palm.

 

 

I COULDN’T move for a few seconds. Every sense was elsewhere.

His skin was cool; rough on the pads under his fingers, smooth along the life lines. Skin against skin—it was something I’d not had for a while. And certainly not his. Memories slid cruelly under my defenses. My eyesight blurred and my heart raced.

Then I thought I saw Niall suppress a shudder. I snatched my hand out of his grip, if only to save him his coronary and me my pride. We both stood there, at a loss for what to do next.

“Been a while, eh?” I was baiting him, I knew. I hadn’t had any communication with him for months now, let alone seen or touched him like this. The others had tried to keep in contact, to support me, despite my own desire for exile. But Niall and I hadn’t spoken since the day I left.

Baiting him and tormenting myself. Ridiculous. How long did I think I could joke about it?

He took a tight breath, and his hand fell back to his side. I liked to think his step back was because of uncertainty. “Don’t be facetious, Tanner. You made your choice. We both got the same suspension period. You just chose….” He paused. Bit at his lip. Christ, I knew he hated it when I provoked him to speak without planning it all out first.

“Yeah?”

“You chose to take your suspension away from the Team. You hid yourself here. You abandoned it all.” His eyes caught mine and he glared at me. Of course, he was totally loyal to the Department and the Team. He had no sympathy for my defection. I didn’t know why I thought I saw hurt in his eyes as well as fury.

He continued to move back until he was a decent distance away from me, trying to relax the tension in his body. I bent and picked up some of the fallen papers, then laid them on the couch. They may have been in the wrong order or completely upside down; I wasn’t focusing too well. “If that’s how you see it, that’s fine with me.” I sounded hoarse. “I don’t have to explain anything to you. You stayed, of course. Hanging around the Team, working out your after-class detention. Committed to the cause until the bitter end.” Guess you had other things to stay for, though. “So you’ve been back at work for a while?”

He didn’t answer directly. He leaned back against the wall, though there weren’t a hell of a lot of other places to rest while still keeping a safe distance from my contagion. “You’re the one acting like a kid, Tanner. I haven’t had any special treatment, if that’s what you mean. I’m still in the last stage of my suspension, same as you. But I’ve been in touch with Judith all along. In your words, I’ve been hanging around the Team, but in case I was needed. When the attacks started, she called me in.” He sighed, obviously annoyed that he had to justify his behavior. “Everyone in the Team has a role to play, Tanner. We’re all needed, especially at this time. That’s more important than any internal disciplinary matters.”

“Yeah.” Maybe his dressing down hadn’t been as humiliating as mine; maybe his session with Judith hadn’t been so heated. Maybe, at that particular time, his mind hadn’t been white with fury the way mine was. “Guess when you told Judith just what a shit I’d been, the sympathy vote was with you, anyway—”

“I never told her anything,” he said sharply.

I raised an eyebrow, and the bitter words dried in my throat.

He was flushed. “She just saw our fight and disciplined us accordingly. I never told her anything about the reasons it started, nothing of what was said between us. It was private, not relevant to the mission. It wasn’t for her to know.”

It was private. His words echoed my own thoughts. Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Mind you, the mood I was in then, I’d have misjudged the Archangel himself. But that didn’t stop me feeling a little ashamed now. “Okay,” I said. Sorry kind of stuck in my throat.

“We were… dammit! We behaved appallingly, you must have realized that.” Niall’s expression was very grim. “We were unprofessional. We jeopardized the surveillance. They couldn’t let it go unpunished. But it’s all over now.”

I saw him grimace, even as that superbly pragmatic remark slipped out from his mouth, even as he realized how his words—all over now—could be taken on several levels. His eyes flashed with a depth of fury that I could have drowned in. He was angry with me, but angry with himself too.

“Sure is,” I said, smoothly. “All over. Wipe the slate clean of it all, right?”

“Don’t be such a brat, Tanner. Running off like a scolded child. Did you expect someone to come begging you back?”

“Fuck you.” I knew I deserved his anger but I wasn’t backing down. “I had to get away. You’d know that, if you had any idea about me at all!”

“Which I thought I did!” He was very flushed now. “I could say the same about you too. Imagining how I felt. You think I’m not ashamed of the whole thing?”

“Ashamed?” Of us?

“Of the fight!” He glared at me, his eyes back to that cold flint color. “We’ve hammered anything else to death, I’d say, and I don’t need any extra helpings of death wish right now.”

“That’s why I left,” I snapped. “Like I don’t need the trouble myself. The abuse, the misery.”

“That’s what it all was, then? Trouble? Misery? You gave up that easily?”

“Yeah. Maybe so.” I was warming up now. My heart was thudding and my flesh felt too hot. My fingers itched to grab hold of something. “Far as I can see, I’m out on my ass and a disappointment all round, and now I can’t even hide in my seedy little sanctuary without being hounded down—”

“For God’s sake, Tanner, I knew where you were all the time!” he growled. “I tracked you down pretty quickly.” He must have seen my wide-eyed outrage. “Tanner, I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Like what?” Like he was a stalker? Like he wanted to prove something? Like he cared?

“I mean that it was a security issue. In case… anyone needed to find you.”

“Security issue. Right. So why did Simon and Brad bother tracing me as well? Could’ve just come to you—”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, far too quickly. “I assumed you’d run here to be alone. It was up to you what you did then.”

I was trying to read any underlying feelings in his tone, in his eyes, in his body language. Fuck all to work with at the best of times. Of course, it could just have been indifference. The absence of care.

Niall was shaking his head again, forehead creasing with irritation. “Oh, the hell with it!” He looked disgusted that I’d wrung the emotion out of him. Bemused. Pained. “Tanner, what’s the point of digging over the past?”

I stared at him, my anger leeching away like water through a sieve. He’d been near death. His ordered life had been thrown up in the air like a handful of confetti and he was standing amongst the drifting pieces. He didn’t need my arguments. He was right.

What was my point?

Tuesday 08:45

 

 

HE’D MENTIONED the fight, and I guess you need to know what that was all about. Or maybe just that it happened. Niall and I had a falling out, but a rather major one. In the middle of a mission. We fought, physically—and I’ll have you know I put up a creditable defense—but Judith took a dim view of it, at work and all. We were both hauled over the coals and suspended for three months.

There you are. My fall from grace in a nutshell. Not only that, but the end of my affair—the end of Niall and me. With not a whimper, but a rather impressive right hook. His.

So what did it matter now whether I’d been humiliated or hurt? It was past history. Neither of us was going back there. What did it matter whether Niall knew where I was all along? Whatever he thought about me and what he knew… well, that was all his problem now, wasn’t it? Shit, there I was again, going around in that spiraling way that leads to plenty of sleepless nights. That’s what it’s like at the end of a relationship, after all, no new revelations there. It’s the loss of everything, including the right to know anything about your ex; to share anything with them; to have anything but a supporting role in their future life.

Niall obviously had it sorted out well. I was the one struggling.

There was silence between us for a while. Maybe he had as many questions bubbling in the back of his mind as I did, but neither of us spoke them aloud. His eyes were clouded with what looked like shock. Yet again, I’d drawn him out, and so quickly. But he could blame the trauma he’d been through.

I didn’t have that excuse.

“Why did you get called back in?” I was curious, despite myself. “Couldn’t they manage the investigation without your inimitable help?” Maybe if he’d kept withdrawn like me—kept out of the line of fire while he did his time—well, maybe he’d never have been targeted in the first place. What sort of masochist was he?

He bit at his lip again. I watched the plump flesh ease out from under his even, white teeth. “I don’t know why you want to know. You’ve made it clear you’d rather be kept out of it all.” He took a deep breath. “But I guess it’s important now that you do know. For a while, we thought I might have a clue as to the motive behind it all. There’s so little to go on.”

“And…?”

He shook his head, not answering directly. “It should have been given higher priority from the start. The Team should have contained the situation after the first attack. It was a small letter bomb, though it made a hell of a mess of one of the Departmental carports. But there were plenty of personnel available at that time, plenty of opportunity to identify the culprit. Personally, I think they underestimated the threat, thinking it was an isolated event. The work of an amateur.”

“And then it escalated?”

He nodded, very slightly, as if reluctant to engage me. “When the next attack came in, and the next after that, all in such quick succession, there was too little time to regroup. Especially when it shifted and threats started on Team personnel.”

“And then it did become priority.”

“Judith suggested she revisit some of the closed mission files to see if there were any connections, any reason for a specific vendetta against us. To see if there was anyone who’d also threatened the Team or its people in the past. I was only called back into active duty because I could identify someone who fit that profile.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not bothered that you were Mr. Popular while I languished out here. Don’t bother about trying to massage my ego, because to be honest, I don’t have a hell of a lot of time for one nowadays—”

“Dammit, I wasn’t! Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

I swallowed back a retort, and then engaged my brain instead of my tongue. “Wait a sec. The person you could identify—the previous threat against a Team member—you don’t mean it was that kid who stabbed you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”

I cursed myself. That time had been one of the most distressing… for us both, despite whatever arguments we may have had subsequently. Hi, Tanner. Meet Mr. Foot-in-Mouth. But if Niall could talk about it so coolly, well, so could I. “So, did that confirm the theory that it’s not political at all, but a personal attack? On the Team—all of us? Or just you?”

He shrugged. He was looking weary again, despite that exhaustive sleep. “I don’t know, I really don’t know. I checked out the kid, and he’s still in the specialist detention center. It couldn’t have been him.”

“Other family members? Associates? The guy who ran the club where we found him?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Whoa, when Niall let loose, he let loose. He saw the look on my face and growled with frustration, trying to rein the anger back in. “No, there was nothing else on that particular exercise to give us a lead. But Judith has other cases to examine, other people we’ve brought down or exposed or just generally pissed off—and anyway, that may not be a motive at all. Shit, I don’t know where to go from here.”

I looked at the papers on the floor and the couch. “Well, we could make some sense of this pulped rain forest and see if it gets us any further. Okay?”

And then the cell phone rang. The one that Judith had left behind for us. For Niall.

His gaze flashed to me, and I stared back. Then he grabbed it from a back pocket and flipped it open. We stood there, paralyzed like some kind of living tableau, as he listened to whatever greeting it was. When I caught sight of his expression, there was a strange kind of wildness in it.

“It’s Joe.” He might have been presenting the weather forecast for all the outward emotion he showed in his voice. But I read him far better than that. “From the hospital. They’re going to operate tomorrow.”

I wanted to snap back at him again. What kind of cold fish was he? What hospital? What operation? How serious was it for God’s sake? And then it occurred to me that he might have been holding back on the concern for some other reason… maybe for my benefit. Hospitals were a difficult thing with me. Not that I’d spent much time myself in them; I’d rarely had a broken bone or serious illness in my life. But Niall had, and the circumstances had caused me plenty of grief.

You see, six months ago, and because of me, he’d nearly been killed.

 

 

OKAY, SO I guess I knew it wouldn’t be enough just to skate over the story of our prize fight as some kind of lovers’ quarrel. It was actually at the end of a time of great stress—a culmination of a strange, tightening spiral of misunderstanding and hurt and bitter, bitter disappointment. It had been threatening for months.

Things were still tangled up between us personally. Guess we never cleared the air. The Team missions got more complex, our lives got more committed, our relationship… got more crappy.

And that’s when the Team was marked out for Mission Dove.

Judith was thrilled; we all were, really. It was our first really big break, and we’d be working alongside the Department itself. No formal recognition, of course, but she was excited that they’d see what we could do. We’d make a real contribution. The preliminary work started almost at once: preparing and monitoring the locations as the delegates began gathering for the meetings, checking out their security and the people around them.

That’s where we came up against the first hurdle. We discovered that one of the more prominent politicians was spending his nights in a downtown gentlemen’s club. Nothing new, you might say, if you’re as cynical as I am. I mean, that in itself wouldn’t have merited the attention of the Project Team, except that it turned out the pimp offered access to a special selection of kids—children who were way too young and way too vulnerable for anyone to let it pass. We alerted the Department, but because of the sensitivity of the politician concerned, they nudged the situation Judith’s way.

At first, this early work only involved Niall and Joe, with Simon on support. They didn’t waste time on diplomatic platitudes, just rounded up the politician, sent him discreetly home, and started closing down the club. They’d already alerted the police to mop up the remains of the staff and to take the pimp into custody. But then I got a call from Simon, asking me to come and join them there. They’d discovered at least a dozen kids who lodged there full-time, without any other visible means of support. He was worried that they’d need emotional help to trust the Team and accept what we were trying to do for them. I think he was just a little overwhelmed with it all, to tell you the truth.

That was my skill, you see. People. Connecting with them, understanding them, making things work for them. That’s what the Team needed from me.

And yet, I seriously misread the situation. I had some poor, misguided idea that the kids would be grateful for their release. That they’d be innocent and pliable and ready to follow our lead, that they’d be glad to leave behind the life of an abused innocent in their current home. It was just a matter of reassuring them and offering emotional lollipops, or something like that. I’d had plenty of experience with adults; I had a talent for judging many a sticky situation.

But I was frighteningly unprepared for what was there. I’d not worked with kids before, and never in the sex industry. There were all sorts of shocks in store for me. I hadn’t really anticipated there’d be boys as well as girls; I was startled by the youth of some of them. Naïve, eh? Everyone had been rounded up into the main lounge of the club, where the cops took the principals away, the emergency services did their work on any physical injuries, and Niall and Joe went off doing whatever technical things they did.

And me?

I stood like an island in the middle of a sea of scum. Beside one of the low, overstuffed couches, there was a coffee table, scattered with the tools of their trade: sex toys, bondage gear, needles, and packets of designer drugs collected in a heap. The police had been gathering up the evidence. In amongst this mess I saw a brightly colored blanket with the design of a TV cartoon character; a single slipper lying under the table. There were a couple of boxes on the floor, full of stuffed toys and a jumble of tattered old children’s puzzles and books.

My heart went out to the kids, without realizing that they wouldn’t know what to do with it. I had no idea how harsh some of them were, how broken some of their minds were, how hostile they were toward intruders. I swallowed the bile in my throat and tried to acclimatize to the distorted little faces around me, but it was an alien experience.

“Fuck off, mister,” an undersized, rather smelly teenager hissed in my ear. I caught his arm as he swung out at me, and when I released him, he stumbled back in frustration.

“Do you want to feel better? We can go to your room.” A slim boy tugged at my sleeve and smiled at me, the brightness of his voice never reaching his eyes.

A vibrantly red-haired girl ran up to me and spat in my face, shouting that she hoped I got hideous, fatal diseases from it. And then wheeled away, laughing.

“Are we going home?”

“Where’s the boss?”

There were babbling voices and crying all the time, confusing me, cluttering my hearing.

A small, silent girl slipped her hand into mine.

“The money.” A thin, pale young woman in an ill-fitting, short-skirted dress stood pressed against the wall. “He owes me my money. I have to send it home, you know.”

Others just stared at me as I moved slowly around the room. I couldn’t read their expressions. There was blankness there, and little sense of reality. I wondered who would be able to peel those children’s souls back out into a worthwhile life, because it sure as hell wouldn’t be me.

Well, I did my best. I reassured them and explained we were there to help. I sat with them as they were handed over one by one to social workers and aid helpers, I explained things they said they couldn’t understand. A few of them clutched my hand, or hugged me. I felt I was on top of it, though the room was still full of unpleasant body odors and sobbing kids, and I guess I was still a bit shocked. Whatever the reason, I lost my connection with the ones still left for a few critical moments.

And that was long enough for one of them—one of the older boys—to decide we were another version of the common enemy. He started crying, pushing away the helping hands, swearing and yelling. He refused to follow the social workers out of the building, accusing us of threatening him, bullying him. The cops were sick fuckers, he cried, we were taking him to jail, we were kidnapping them all, we were working for another house, another boss, a worse one. All sorts of stuff. Niall was over the far side of the room, signing some legal release forms. I was conscious of him turning around, looking over at us. The boy was thin, blond, and scrawny, and although he was obviously an older teenager, he didn’t look like he could lift his own body weight, let alone take me on. But he was very distracting, very loud, and very aggressive.

“Get the fuck out!” He was close to me by now, the other kids had parted the way to let him through. “You don’t understand. Leave us here, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s okay here, we’re settled here.”

“What’s your name?” I kept my voice calm, my movements non-threatening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Niall break away from the aid workers and start over toward me, presumably coming to give support. “Everything’s fine. I’m here to help you.”

“I don’t need your fucking help! All my friends are here. Family too. They care for me. They’ll be along soon, I have to stay here.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“You think we’re trash, don’t you? You want to use us yourself. Or you want us out of the way, all of us in institutions, locked up.”

“No, I don’t. Of course I don’t.” Niall was over on my left, only a foot away. I hoped he knew to keep his distance, so he didn’t spook the kid any further. I needed just a little more time to talk him down. “I’m Tanner. Tell me your name. Let’s talk about all of this. You say you have family and friends. Tell me about them. Who will be along soon for you?”

“We don’t need you.” His eyes narrowed. For a second he was totally still. Then, “Fuck you,” he spat out at me. “All of you!”

Instinctively, I leaned away. Some of the remaining kids had gathered around me, staring between us both with stark, scared faces. I knew I had to protect them, somehow. Protect my colleagues, as well.

That’s what the Team needed from me.

But I never had the chance to calm things down and explain things better to the hysterical boy. Next minute, he pushed past me with an astonishing strength, a knife suddenly appeared in his hand, and he sliced it upward with all his strength into Niall’s side.

Time stopped, just like they say in the movies.

Niall turned to me as he fell. There was a look of pained shock on his face, as if he’d expected me to know it was about to happen. As if I should have anticipated the kids were under the influence of something more pernicious than distress—that they might be armed, as well. As if I should have been watching out for him.

Which I guess I should have been.

Then he sank to his knees, hand clutched to his side. He coughed, and blood seeped out between his fingers. His face went deathly pale.

I thought I’d lost him.

Tuesday 09:00

 

 

NIALL STOOD there in the living room of my trailer, clutching the cell phone like an anchor to reality. I knew he was remembering the same things I was. I knew it.

“Tanner.” I hadn’t heard that brittle emotion in his voice for a long time. “Leave it. That was months ago. This is now. And it’s Joe we’re talking about.”

Months ago. Right.

After the stabbing, the kid had been hauled away. Kes, he was called. We were told that he was an orphan, though they were having trouble tracking down his history, but we never found out if he had any other family around, or what the fuck had been going on in his mind. Judging from the drugs in that place, I thought maybe he’d been hallucinating at the time. He was too young for prison, but the authorities considered him too mentally disturbed to face reality alone. He ended up in a secure facility somewhere, just like Niall reminded me earlier, still working the damage through and out of his young, scrambled brain. Far as I knew, he’d had no visits from those friends and family he clung to. Or anyone.

No one said the stabbing had been my fault.

But it was, of course. It was all due to my carelessness. I was complacent, slapdash. I’d done no research on the job before I blundered in, just assumed it was a social issue, that the danger was nothing more than kids’ tears and bruises. I had an affinity with many people, sure, but I’d never come across the naked aggression of a young, addled mind turned to fear and anger. Never thought to check for weapons or for unbalanced psychosis. And that, of course, was no kind of excuse at all.

They rushed Niall into surgery with me following, shocked and furious, but they stopped me at the door of the operating theatre. I wasn’t thinking too straight then. I had to be taken forcibly from the hospital, yelling that I had to be with him, whatever the fuck Judith said! Didn’t help my case much. Judith did me the courtesy of holding back on actual handcuffs, but two sturdy guys she must have borrowed from the Department Thug Pool stepped either side of me and brought me back to base with a grip that well illustrated the phrase “extreme prejudice.” So I never saw Niall when he came out of the long hours in theatre; I never saw him with the tubes and the mask and the bags of blood and plasma slowly dripping into his body.

I was facing an immediate internal inquiry.

The initial interrogation went on for several days, and my ass got well and truly kicked while they unraveled exactly what had happened. What protocols I’d breached. What standards I’d compromised. What—and who—had gone wrong. During that time, I was only allowed calls to the hospital, to see how things were going. Simon kept me posted on how well the operation went, how Niall would be okay soon. All that encouraging stuff that Simon was so good at—and that passed me by completely.

They let me in to see Niall eventually. He was in a private room by then, still weak from the blood loss and shock, still under the hospital care. And when I got there, ready to sit with him, to care for him, to do all those goddamned things that lovers do for each other—someone was already there.

“Hello, Tanner.”

“Joe.” I nodded to him. I glanced at the bed, met Niall’s pale, wide gaze. My heart ached from a strange mix of fear, relief and… well, it just ached, you know?

“Tanner.” Niall grinned, but it was a poor imitation of past ones. “I’m glad you’re here at last.”

“He’s doing good.” Joe gave one of his own quick, efficient smiles. “I’ve checked in here each night and the steady progress is unmistakable.”

Every night?

I sat on the spare chair by the window and stared at Joe’s obviously familiar seat on the other chair. The one at the bedside. He continued talking to Niall in a low, restful voice. Things about the progress of Mission Dove, about the guys in the Team, about the successful prosecution of the club owner. Of his martial arts training; of the latest weapons intelligence.

I sat silently, just watching.

Well, there we have it. I mentioned Joe Lam before, didn’t I? As far as work went, he’d always been the one to spend the most time with Niall, which was kind of obvious. They both dealt with the militaristic side of things. Not really my forte. They’d both been in the armed services at some stage; they actually knew a couple of mutual acquaintances, even before they’d joined the Team. It was obvious they’d be thrown together.

“I’ll call in again later,” I said. Joe nodded easily. Niall’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything. He looked kind of tired, really.

Hell, we all admired Joe; he was a great guy to have on your team, and had always impressed me. He was kind of fierce, though, and he liked to play on that, I’m sure. He wasn’t a guy you warmed to until you knew him better.

I guess, over the months we’d been in the Team, Niall had managed to get to know him a hell of a sight better than me.

 

 

THE INQUIRY reported its conclusion a few weeks later. I was cleared of direct blame for Niall’s injury. Yeah, I’d been under-prepared, and I should have allowed Simon to brief me more thoroughly, and I should have remembered that every situation has to be treated with the utmost caution, but I wasn’t held responsible for the unprovoked attack. I stared at my copy of the report as Judith ran through it with me, most of the words blurring to incomprehensibility in the face of my anger and misery. I was scheduled for some juvenile training and some outreach work with local youth groups, and then Judith assured me the matter was concluded.

“I know where I went wrong.”

She’d frowned at me. “You’re the one beating yourself up worst of all, Tanner.”

“You mean I wasn’t responsible for Niall getting a blade in his gut?”

She winced but recovered well. “No, not officially.”

Sure didn’t feel that way.

And that was also when things started to collapse personally for us. Seemed like every time I found time to be with Niall, so did Joe. He arranged for Niall to be taken home, he arranged the proper post-operative care. I discovered that everyone thought this was an excellent idea. Judith praised him, Simon admired his reliability, Brad was impressed with his knowledge of medical matters.

Seemed churlish to complain.

They must all have looked at me and thought, “What the fuck?” I’m sure they did. I know how they’d all seen me up until then: an easy-going guy with plenty of improvisation skills, but nothing more robust than that. And now, wait a second—hadn’t it been my fuck-up that put Niall in the hospital in the first place? Okay, so no one ever said it. But no one denied it, either. And when Niall turned those deep, dark, weary eyes on to Lam and “thanked” him for his help….

It all stuck in my throat like I’d swallowed a fucking grenade.

I knew things were on the downward slope without knowing what the hell to do about it. I felt like I’d lost Niall’s attention and his care. His respect. He never said anything that specific, of course. He never argued with me about it. And hey, I never caught him and Joe doing anything other than hugging, and let’s face it, we were all fond of that, as support and comfort and a gesture of solidarity. But it seemed to me that he withdrew his respect from me and bestowed it elsewhere. That can be a betrayal, even without fucking.

Can’t it?

 

 

I WAS still living full-time with Niall. When the heavy nursing stuff faded into general daily care, it was entrusted to me. Obviously they thought I could cope with the occasional change of dressing and some physiotherapy exercises. Hurrah for me. But whatever the reason, it was a relief to push aside the spotlight that had been glaring on us. Niall told me how pleased he was that the inquiry had concluded in my favor; he told me he wanted to put it all behind him. He rarely spoke of it again.

In fact, he was as damned quiet as always. And maybe more so.

Mission Dove was at full strength, but obviously he couldn’t be as involved as he wanted. I was still deployed, and I didn’t find any evidence that they held back on my tasks because I’d fucked up once. In fact, it was often a relief to immerse myself in the day job, because life at home was… well, tense doesn’t begin to describe it.

We still ate and drank and slept together. In fact, we still fucked, though pretty gingerly at first. We were as drawn to each other as always, but wary. He’d lost a lot of blood in the incident, and there was now an impressive scar along his torso, colored an angry red and shining with fresh new skin as it started to heal. One night, lying naked and lightly sweating in bed, I followed the impulse to kiss along it. He winced, and it felt like he flinched away from me. In my heart, I knew it wasn’t from any kind of pain.

Despite the illusion of returning to normal, life felt bad. It was as if we couldn’t be closer, physically—but we couldn’t be further apart. He was withdrawn and moved around the apartment as if he were the only one there. I had no idea what to do about it except get angry. I’d thought I’d be okay once the inquiry found me innocent, thinking I had my lover and my friends behind me. But it seemed I was a little more shaken than I thought; I felt more vulnerable than I’d ever been before.

The guys were sympathetic, I’ll give them that. But I needed Niall. Badly. I needed him to forgive me, to understand, to help me—us!—move on. To reaffirm the fact that I was living with him and he was damned happy about it all. Okay, so it wasn’t a conversation I expected to have without some serious prompting. And I had no taste for that.

I lay beside him at night as he slept and felt like we were in separate rooms. His naked body was only inches away from me, and if I touched it, he’d roll over to me with an exhalation of hot breath on my skin that sent goose bumps down to my toes. But even the sex was shadowed with a hint of desperation, as if neither of us were sure what it was all about any more. As if this was only a lull before the storm. As if it was only a matter of time….

Before it turned sour.

That physical break, while he was in the hospital and I was facing a panel of suited and booted Departmental executives—it sundered far more than our domestic routine. Niall bore the scar, and I bore the guilt. It was like he knew it, like he found it a struggle to be with me. He swung between being frustrated by me and being angry with me. We couldn’t get over it. Judith refused to put us on a mission together, even if and when Niall were fully recuperated.

And didn’t it seem like every time I arrived home, Joe was there already? Calling in with plans and briefings for future missions, bringing Niall interesting articles on military development. Could have been swapping GI Joe outfits for all I knew. He even answered the phone a couple of times when it rang, and neither of us could reach it immediately. What sort of familiarity was that in a guy’s own home? I knew I was behaving irrationally. I knew it was stupid, to feel resentful just because someone wanted to help us out.

But that was the point; it no longer felt like my home. It felt like Niall’s, like it was, of course. He could invite whoever he liked, and I was just a guest who happened to have a key. He never told me any different.

So I was restless; I went out a lot. My choice of drug, maybe. Couple of times Judith couldn’t get hold of me when she wanted to, and there were mutterings about me being unreliable. Whereas Joe Lam gave the job the kind of single-minded commitment that I just didn’t have the time for—and damn me if I didn’t hear that comparison more than once.

Though not from Niall. He never harked back to the attack; he never called me unprofessional or useless or careless. I heard it only in his silence, in his lack of defense on my behalf. And his preference for someone else’s company over mine.

He just wasn’t there for me anymore. His eyes were hot over me in the day, and at night his hands were as amazing and possessive as always. But he didn’t smile as much; he scowled at me a hell of a lot more. My attitude was irritating to him and my lack of adequate paperwork suddenly seemed a crime against the state. So I went out a lot more, and sometimes I didn’t come home. I went to my own shabby little apartment and slept alone and angry. Well, tried to sleep, anyway.

It sounds pathetic now, just cataloguing those months after the attack like that. Was it fair? Was I fair? To me everything felt like a betrayal: that Niall privately did believe I’d put him in danger. That I’d been proved a failure, compared to his standards. Everyone had been angry with me—and suddenly he was angry too. And that felt a fuck of a sight worse than any inquiry.

But however much he blamed me, or hated me, or despised me—and as always, I didn’t really know what he was thinking—that was no reason for him to turn to someone else, was it? Not while I was still around.

He’d nearly been killed. I reminded myself of that many times a day and tried to bite my tongue. The important thing was to get him fit again and back on active service. Mission Dove was our priority, and despite the personal tribulations of the Project Team, we all had to be ready for whatever was required. Perhaps I thought that when he was physically okay again, things would settle back down. Perhaps I was a fool.

Basically, we were a time bomb, fuse set and ready to blow.

Niall would have empathized with my analogy.

 

 

BACK IN my rocky, mean little trailer, I heard the snap of the cell phone closing. I waited for a minute or so, but Niall didn’t speak again. I focused back on him. He looked pale, really ill. He stood still as a rock, his eyes staring at me but his mind obviously elsewhere. I wondered if he had delayed shock, and I was startled by the thud of distress in my own body. Then he stirred and seemed to become aware of me again. “Joe’s still critical. It’s an emergency operation. It’s his leg… they’re not sure about his leg. When the door hit him, it fractured the bone in several places. The knee is badly damaged.”

“Shit.” I felt sick. Guy didn’t deserve that. “And a bit of a bummer, being stuck here, eh? You can’t go visit him. Take grapes and flowers, hold his hand.”

Even though I’d dropped my eyes like I had plenty of better places to look, I still caught Niall’s scowl. “Don’t be pathetic, Tanner. I know what road you’re driving down, and I can tell you, it’s no more fun now than it was before. I’ll say it just once more—we’re not together. Joe and I are not seeing each other.”

I suppose I could have said I was sorry they’d broken up. But then, I wasn’t. And Niall would’ve known the lie for what it was. He couldn’t have spent all that time with me without learning just a couple of my little ways, could he? “So what was the trouble then? Too many long nights out in the field while he sat at home collating your notes? My partner doesn’t understand me?”

“Don’t you ever fucking listen, you idiot?” His voice was raised now. Guess I’d got the response I wanted. “We’re not together. We never were!”

“So how come he was at the apartment with you when it was blown up? Kind of late to be working on Department business, eh?”

“I told you. We were investigating the attack on Judith. The day before, someone had sent her a package impregnated with some kind of poison. A fairly unsophisticated device, but that was partly why no one thought to check it out thoroughly. It nearly blew up in Cissy’s face when she came to check it out.” He dismissed the shock on my face with an impatient wave of his hand. “And everyone knew what we were working on. Judith did, Simon did. It was an official directive. I had security clearance, and we were in constant contact with the Team, through Joe. Hell, Simon even lent one of his guys to help us with the research, liaising with the office, that kid Greg who dropped me off yesterday. What category of hot date does that fit into?”

My anger was still simmering. “Far as I remember, you’ve never needed hearts and flowers to enjoy a good fuck.”

“Tanner!” He was yelling now. Only a foot away from me, fists clenched at his side. Just like the old days. “That’s way out of line. You are so damned childish!”

“And you’re so damned smug!”

“Leave it, Tanner. Now!” His eyes glinted with warning. “You never could hold your tongue.”

“And maybe you couldn’t resist holding something a whole lot more intimate, right?”

For just one, shocking second, I thought he might hit me. The fists flexed—but his arms stayed by his side.

“So maybe I’d have been tempted.” His face was very flushed now. “Maybe I found it more rewarding, being with someone who wasn’t out partying all the time, someone who was there more often than not—”

“So maybe the welcome was a little less frosty for him.” I was incensed now, almost beside myself. “Maybe you opened up a hell of a lot more to him. After all, there’s so much more to share between the pair of you. How was the pillow talk? Full of boyish dreams of guns and bombs? Gives a whole new meaning to Wham, bam, thank you ma’am! And so much more rewarding than my sorry little disaster stories.”

Had I forgotten what a match Niall was for me when he chose? “And maybe, yes, it was more rewarding than your pointless jealousy and your ridiculous melodrama and….” His voice caught in his throat; it was convulsing with fury. ”You stupid bastard! You stupid, stupid….”

We were struck dumb almost at the same moment, as the same thought obviously crossed our minds. Our stupid, selfish minds, obsessing over old ground, old wounds—self, self, self. And I was the worst culprit of all; me and my vicious, unruly, destructive temper. My fucking, fucking temper!

I looked at Niall, stricken. Joe had been my friend. A friend to all of us. Still was, dammit! And he was lying in a hospital bed, maybe losing the use of a limb, maybe never coming back to us as anything like his strong, active, high-principled, unpretentious self. And both he—and the man in front of me—had barely escaped with their lives.

“Tanner—”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out, speaking at the same time as his strangled groan.

And I was. For so much, I couldn’t have listed it in a day.