and smoothed a stray lock of hair back from her face. She turned toward him, cheek resting on soft cushions, and met his eyes.
They both froze.
His hand was still brushing her skin, fingers light and warm, but there was nothing casual about the look on his face. Dangerous, that look. Especially here, in the dark, after adrenaline and a hard day and the destruction of the universe as she knew it, with a comfortable couch to lie back on.
Really, really dangerous.
Jazz moved away a little. Just enough to put space between his hand and her skin. He took the hint and leaned away, elbow on the back of the couch, staring at her but not quite as nakedly hungering. "I should call Lucia," she said.
"This early?"
He had a point, and the couch felt far too comfortable. "I should go home," she said. "Then again, I should be here in three hours."
"Sleep," he advised her, and pulled her legs into his lap. She couldn't honestly remember when it was she'd allowed him to get that close to her, allowed herself to be touched with that much freedom. His hands felt huge and burning hot through her clothes, points of fire on her skin. She closed her eyes, sucked in a deep breath and concentrated on the sensation of his palms moving lightly across the backs of her calves, massaging. He stripped off her shoes and let them drop to the floor.
She didn't mean to fall asleep, but there was something so achingly soothing about the warmth of his body near hers that she dropped into a field of black behind her eyelids, and was gone.
Jazz woke up alone, to the blaze of overhead lights. She blinked, coughed and dragged herself upright, wishing for hair-trigger reflexes and managing more like a blunt object.
Lucia was framed in the door, paused in the act of walking into the room, staring at her with an expression of utter surprise.
"Hey," Jazz muttered, and ran both hands through her hair. She didn't even want to think about how she looked. There were bag ladies going through Dumpsters who probably looked better.
"Hey," Lucia said cautiously, and closed the door behind her. "Ah...were you supposed to be back today?"
"No. Change of plans." I'm marked for death, Jazz started to say, and decided to hold that back for later, after coffee. "Where's Borden?"
"Was he here?" Lucia set her purse down and swung dark hair back over her shoulder with a practiced swing of her head, smiling like the Mona Lisa. "And is there something I should know about this?"
"Nothing interesting."
Lucia pulled a chair up and sat down, elbows on her knees in a pose Jazz realized was a mirror of her own. Only, of course, Lucia was dressed in an olive-green pantsuit with a peach silk blouse, flawless makeup, and didn't look as if she'd ever in her life had a black eye, a chipped nail, or a short night's sleep on the office couch.
"What happened?"
Jazz didn't intend to tell her all of it, but that's what came out. All of it. From the saving of Santoro's life - which, if one believed Simms, wasn't the greatest of all possible good deeds - to the creepy prison conversation, to her own newfound status as Eidolon's Most Wanted, which by extension endangered all of them. She dug out the letter and handed it over. There was a lipstick smudge on it that baffled her until she remembered the lip print on the Plexiglas in the visitor's cubicle. She'd forgotten about it when she slapped the paper to the surface. It looked now as if somebody at Eidolon had given her a sloppy, openmouthed kiss as a parting gift.
Lucia took it in without comment or question, until Jazz finished, and then looked up. "Do you believe it? Any of it at all?"
That was a tough question. At five in the morning, she'd believed a hell of a lot more than she did sitting in the office, with morning light streaming in through the blinds and the smell of coffee beginning to percolate through the air-conditioning system.
"Some," she finally said. "Look, one thing's for sure - he didn't arrange that demonstration last night with the plane, and the chances of it being a lucky guess? Zero. Well, probably so close to zero that you couldn't see them without a microscope."
"And the thing about trying to prevent the end of life as we know it?"
"I have no idea," Jazz admitted. "Combine delusions with an