Dark of Night (49 page)

He sat now, in the circle of light thrown from his desk lamp, listening to her quiet, steady breathing, working his way through the list of black op assignments that Nash had done in the name of the Agency and the United States of America.

It was unlikely he was going to find anything. It was probably Tess who held the key.

Because, along with names, locations, and a brief description of the assignment, Nash had also marked the dates of those ops during which, even if he hadn't been overtly attacked, he'd barely escaped with his life.

The first time had been just shortly after Tess and Nash announced their engagement to be married.

It was probably pathetic that Decker remembered that date so clearly. But the news had left him—while happy for Nash—feeling oddly depressed. He'd indulged and bought himself a new truck. So yeah. He remembered the date.

And was it a coincidence that Nash's first attack had come so closely on the heels of his engagement to Tess? Deck didn't think so. He thought
it was far more likely that Tess, with her years of working at the Agency as support staff, knew something that, combined with Nash's knowledge— gained from crawling through Agency mud—was enough to make their enemy sweat.

Which didn't mean Decker didn't finish going over that list with a fine-tooth comb. He did, and then he went through it again.

When he finished that second time, the office was silent.

Lindsey was probably napping.

Or she was in the lobby with Jo Heissman, who had actually wept at the news that Nash was alive. They'd put her to work making a list of all of the Agency operatives she knew who worked for the black ops division during her own tenure there.

At the very least, it was keeping her busy.

In a few hours, Lopez was going to be relieved by two other SEALs from Team Sixteen—the result of Decker's epic ass-kissing. Cosmo Richter would take over his babysitting duties, while Bill Silverman prowled the perimeter of the office building.

Despite all of Tracy's SOS messages, no one else was scheduled to arrive until late morning, at best.

Ric Alvarado, the head of the Florida office, and his wife Annie had flown in to run security for Robin Cassidy while the actor was on set. When the news came down about the motel blast and the three dead John Wilsons, they'd tossed Robin onto a helo and flown his ass back to safety.

When Tracy called, Ric and Annie had been halfway to the safe house themselves, via van. Instead of turning around, they were continuing on to their destination. Both Alyssa and Jules wanted them out there, Tracy had reported. “It frees them up to come down here, if they need to.”

“Frees
who
up?” Decker had asked.

“Not Jimmy,” Tracy had assured him. They'd all agreed that Nash should remain at the safe house. “Everyone's on the same page about that. At least everyone but Jimmy.”

Deck's smile was tight. “I bet.”

“Jones is in Atlanta,” Lindsey had reported. “With Martell Griffin. They're catching the next flight out here.” She checked the list she was carrying. “The rest of the Florida contingent is already on the red-eye. Ric anticipated needing them. They'll head for the safe house, too, which'll free up Sam and even Tess.”

“No,” Deck said. “I want Tess with Nash. Please tell Alyssa. And Jules. That's important. Nash won't stay put unless she's there.”

“Will do,” Lindsey said.

“How about you?” Tracy asked. “Did your ass-kissing give you anything other than a pair of SEALs and some badly chapped lips?”

Decker smiled. “Nice.”

“Thank you.”

“It did, actually,” Decker told them. “I called in all the favors that I could. We'll have most of the SWCC team back here, but not until early afternoon. I tried, but I couldn't talk Commander Koehl into rescheduling their morning training op. But I did manage to convince him to let us keep Lopez for a while longer.” He looked at Lindsey. “Mark—and the rest of Team Sixteen—won't be back until the end of the month.”

Lindsey tried her best not to get tense. “Is there a problem I should know about?” she asked.

“Not that I know of,” Deck said. “Koehl sounded pissed about the delay, but not too pissed.”

“I'm going to bank on my faith in you, boss,” Lindsey said. “I'm going to trust that you
will
tell me if there is a real problem, okay?”

“Count on it,” Decker promised quietly.

“So is that it?” Lindsey asked. “Cosmo, Silverman, Lopez, and a bunch of SWCC-boys?”

“We'll get Gillman, too—at about the same time we get the
men
from the Special Boat Squadron,” Deck corrected her. “Until then it looks like we're in wait mode.”

Lindsey nodded as she headed for the door. “I'll tell Lopez not to go anywhere.”

“Take a break, while you're at it.”

“With all due respect,” Lindsey said, “you're looking like you could use a break first. I'm good for a few more hours. And I know Lopez is—”

“Lopez is off his game,” Decker told her. “He didn't see me drive up.”

“Really.” Lindsey frowned. “I'll make sure he takes a nap when Cosmo gets here. But like you said, we're in wait mode. So with all due respect—”

“I have more reading to do,” Decker said, careful to not look at Tracy.

Lindsey nodded. “If you say so, Chief. I hope you'll reconsider, though. I know I don't have to remind you that you've had a recent gunshot
wound. And the fact is, all hell
could
break loose in the very near future, so—”

“Thank you.” He dismissed her.

And with that, she was gone, closing the door—tightly—behind her.

Decker turned to look at Tracy, and they just sat there for a long moment, in silence.

Then she stood up. “I'll get out of your way, too.”

“Don't,” he said. “Please? Stay. Just… Keep me company?”

Tracy didn't hesitate. She also didn't try, in the slightest, to make it be about sex. Because she knew that it wasn't. “Of course,” she said.

But now she stirred, and Decker looked over to find her awake and watching him from his couch.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. “The blanket fairy made a special delivery while I was sleeping.”

Deck smiled at her. “I've been called a lot of things, but never that.”

“I'd like to see you in sparkly wings.” She stretched beneath the blanket. “I think I'll add that to my list of things I'm going to make you do. It's about number twenty below shaving, though, which goes right above making you lick me all over.”

“Making me,” he said, through a throat that was suddenly tight. “Why do you suppose that's so appealing. To me?”

She somehow knew that he was dead serious, and her flirty tone instantly evaporated. “Why should it matter?” she asked quietly, seriously. “If you like it, Deck, you like it. Why should there be a wrong way or a right way to have sex? And if there is, who gets to define right? The Pope? Your mother?
My
mother—kill me now? As long as everyone's a consenting adult—that should really be the only rule. If I say yes, and you say yes… ?” She laughed. “We're not talking about having sex on the front lawn. We're being private. If we're someplace safe and we've closed and locked our door … ? Let's please not bring my mother—or anyone else's mother or father—into the bedroom with us.”

Tracy wasn't done. “Because what feels good is subjective. Telling someone how to have sex is as absurd as telling them what kind of ice cream they should like best, when there's a world of flavors out there.” She sat up. “I know you don't like to talk about Emily, but I find myself wondering what it was that she said or did to you—”

“It wasn't her fault,” Deck interrupted. “She said nothing. She didn't… know. We never talked about… sex.”

Tracy was surprised. “Never? Like, not even,
Hey, hon, you want to do that thing where you do that thing … ?”

“We didn't really talk about… anything,” he admitted. “And then when Andy died, she tried for a while to … But… I just pushed her farther away.”

“Andy,” Tracy said. “Your friend who was killed in the Khobar Towers attack.”

Decker nodded.

“Was he a SEAL?”

“Air Force. Pilot. He flew F-15s.”

“Huh,” she said. “How did an enlisted SEAL manage to become friends with an Air Force officer?”

“Past life,” he told her, but it was clear that she didn't understand. Probably because that expression was just something Andy used to say.
This is my buddy Larry. We were friends in our past life, pre-ROTC.
So he explained. “We were tight since fifth grade. Andy Klein was the funniest kid in Ms. Bergeron's class at Oakmont Elementary.”

“That's amazing you stayed friends all that time.”

“Doubly amazing,” he concurred, “since I was a Navy brat. That was the longest we ever lived anywhere. My dad was stationed in Korea and my mother didn't want to go, so …” He shrugged. “We lived with my grandmother in Jersey, for three glorious years. And no, I'm not being sarcastic. It was great not to move every six months. And even when we did move— summer after seventh grade—we still visited regularly. Andy and Caroline—he had a twin. They lived across the street from my gram, so … I spent a lot of summers with them both. Right up through high school graduation.”

“Are you still friends with Caroline?” Tracy asked.

Deck laughed. Figured she'd pick up on his mention of Caro. “Not so much, no. Andy always thought I'd marry her, but… After he died, I couldn't look her in the eye.” He looked Tracy in the eye and confessed, “And that was
before
I slept with her and then didn't call her for about two years.”

She winced. “Ouch.”

“It was not my finest hour.”

“I meant
ouch
for you,” Tracy told him. “Because you lost her, too.”

They sat for a moment, just gazing at each other, and then Tracy asked, “How come you couldn't look her in the eye?”

It was time to change the subject. This was where, the few times Deck had actually spoken to anyone about Andy's death, he'd led the conversation elsewhere. But as he looked back at Tracy, as he looked into her warm and sympathetic eyes, he found himself saying words that he'd never before uttered. “He was still alive when I got to the hospital at the airbase.”

She blinked. And leaned forward slightly.
“Andy
was? But I thought you went there to bring his body home.”

“That's what I told everyone,” Deck admitted, having to whisper because he'd never before said any of this aloud. “A mutual friend, a captain, was a doctor there, and she called me. She knew Andy wasn't going to live. His wife, Becca, had just miscarried and she couldn't travel—the captain knew that and so she called me.”

“Oh, my God,” Tracy said. “Oh, Deck …”

“When I saw Andy, I …” He couldn't look at her so he looked at the wall, the floor, the wood grain of his desktop. “The injuries and burns he sustained were …”

“He must've been in terrible pain,” she murmured. “Burns can be—”

“Agony,” he agreed, losing himself for a moment in the warmth of her eyes. But then he looked away again, unable to tell her that most of Andy's legs had been gone, as well as his hands. He'd sat with his friend, but there'd been nothing to hold on to, so he'd put his hand on top of Andy's head, where somehow, miraculously, he hadn't been burned.

“The doctor told me he wouldn't last the night, but… I stayed with him for seventy-three hours. I talked to him. And I promised him—he insisted—that I'd tell his mother and Becca and Caro that he'd died right away. The captain backdated Andy's death certificate, and I made up some bullshit story about how he was missing, but then someone thought they saw him, but then they finally found his body in the rubble and … I brought him home and we buried him, and everyone cried and hugged each other and nodded and said,
At least he didn't suffer.
And I nodded, too.

“And Emily knew something was wrong, but I couldn't tell her,” Deck continued quietly. “No, that's not fair to her. I could've, but I didn't. Instead, I let it get between us and drive us even farther apart.”

“She should have tackled you to the ground.” Tracy was determined to defend him. “I would have. I would have
made
you tell me.”

He looked at her, sitting there, with her hair disheveled and her hopeful T-shirt twisted around her, the top button of her jeans undone, as if she'd tried to get more comfortable while under the cover of the blanket. Her chin was up as she gazed at him, as if she expected him to challenge her statement.

But he agreed with her. “Yeah, I think you probably would've.”

And then, after getting him to confess, Tracy would've completely rocked his world with the kind of physical sex that was meant to exhaust— to wear out and wear down. At which point she also would have convinced him beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was not just okay but
necessary
for a man to cry over the painful, horrible death of his best friend in the entire fucking world.

“I keep thinking
the hell with it,”
Decker whispered now, as he looked at Tracy sitting there, looking back at him with such love in her eyes. “I keep thinking, if I die tomorrow, which will I remember more fondly, in those last seconds of my life? The fact that I had some unbreakable rule about appropriate behavior in the office? Or the fact that I jettisoned my rule and took the best ten-minute break in the history of the world?”

Tracy laughed her surprise as she realized he'd changed the subject. “Wow, talk about pressure.”

“Come here and kiss me,” Decker ordered her. His voice sounded like someone else's to his own ears. “If you just kiss me for ten minutes, it'll rate.”

But she didn't move. “What if you live?” she asked him quietly. “Tomorrow?”

It was a damn good question.

“I've been thinking about that, too,” he admitted. “About the fact that I'd actually like, very much, to, well, live. Which sounds crazy, because most people generally want to? But it's been a long time since I've given a shit.”

It was hard to see her face completely clearly in the dimness—his circle of light didn't extend out to where she was sitting. But he was pretty sure that there was a sudden sheen of tears in her eyes.