Page 22 of 72 Hours

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 He was withdrawn and moved around the apartment as if he were the only one there.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 Action Man 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 defence on my behalf. And his preference for someone else’s company over mine.

He just wasn’t there for me any more. 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 empathised 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.”