“Thank you for everything,” she said quickly, trying to get her mind off that ominousyet. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Ella.”
Ella hugged her. “That’s what friends are for—to make jokes about being surveilled by wizards.”
Eventually, though, they could put off going to bed no longer. Beatrix trudged back to the house with Ella, feet heavier with each step. She passed through the kitchen, with its camera and audio recorders, walked under the device in the hallway and changed into nightclothes in the bathroom, where at least the magiocracy would not be able to see.
Their bedroom was dark and silent. Lydia faced the wall, taking the deep, even breaths of the sound asleep. Beatrix crept to her own bed and lay there, unable to get her mind off the invisible cameras pointing at them both. At her.
Then it struck her—the essential irony of the situation. When shedidfall asleep, however long it took, she would have sex with a man to whom she was not married. Exactly what the wizards wanted to record—and would never get.
Hah.
“Hah!”Peter grinned down at her, running his fingers along her warm skin. “Now I’ve another good reason to have you in every conceivable way we can think of: Sticking it to the magiocracy.”
She stretched, pressing against him, making his pulse leap. “Do you ever miss it? Being part of the magiocracy you’re now sticking it to?”
That didn’t require a second’s thought. “No.”
“What do you miss? You had a life in D.C., and you gave it all up.”
He lay down beside her, slipping a hand in hers. “I miss my home. A few of the people—Tim Martinelli, my deputy. The café around the corner and the candy shop a few blocks away.”
It wasn’t a lot, now that he thought of it. He didn’t miss the work or the social scene or the entertainment.
She shifted, cupping his face with her free hand. “You weren’t happy.”
He wouldn’t have said that at the time. But he hadn’t been, not really.
“And now you’re stuck in the town you were glad to see the back of twenty years ago,” she said, “trying to find a defense to Project 96 and running interference for us against the most powerful people in the country. Hardly an improvement.”
He snorted. “Don’t forget ‘possibly under investigation for stealing military secrets.’”
“But I thought Garrett hasn’t?—”
“No,” he said, pulling her closer. “He hasn’t been back. Not since that night.”
The one good thing about the evening a few weeks earlier when Garrett nearly killed him by accident—besides not dying, anyway—was the certainty that the man had nothingon him. Not even something circumstantial. Otherwise, he would surely have made a threat of it.
Instead, Garrett treated him like a rival. Which was both true and utterly false.
“One other item for your list,” he said, moving their entwined hands to lay them on his chest. “In love with a woman who will never love me back.”
She said nothing at first, and he thought he’d gone too far. But then she murmured, “Itfeelsas if I do, and I won’t know for certain unless you stop loving me, or …”
He waited before supplying the words himself, the possibility that loomed before him like the outstretched finger of the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Or I die.”
She laid her head on his shoulder. “In here, it’s enough, that feeling. Outside—in the harsh light of reality?—”
“—you remember your principles.”
“Awkward things, principles.”
They lay silently for a while, Beatrix pressed so close that his senses were full of her—the hint of orange from her hair, the swell of her hip against his hand, her flushed cheeks, her deep sigh.
“You’ll hate me eventually,” she said, so quietly he almost missed it.
“No,” he said.“Never.”
She kissed him. He slid his hand from her hip to her bottom, lust jolting through him as she moaned, and?—
