“Did you tell him you would? Did you let him think you would?”
“I told him I wouldn’t.”
“He was touching you,” Benton says, as he touches me. “He thought you would. That you wanted it.”
“I told him I wouldn’t, and that’s the end of it,” I reply, and he moves me back to the bed.
“Is it really all there is? Has there been anything more?”
“There is nothing more than that.” I unbuckle his belt.
“Because if there’s more, I might kill him. I will, in fact, and get away with it.”
“You won’t.” I unzip his pants. “And you can’t get away with it.”
“I wanted to kill him in Vienna because I knew it then.”
“There’s nothing to know. There’s nothing more than you already know,” I reply, and I ask about her. “You’re going to wrinkle your shirt.” I ask about Douglas Burke. “I’m going to wrinkle it. I’m going to ruin it.”
White cotton and dark silk are smooth against my bare skin, and I ask him again, and then I don’t ask him anything else until we are in the kitchen and I’m feeding the dog and the cat.
“Shaw certainly seems to have made herself at home.” I spoon her food on a plate and set it on a mat near the pantry door. “It’s as if she’s always lived here, but I think it’s a good idea to shut her in the guest room, in a confined space, until she’s really familiar with the house. Although I have a feeling Bryce is going to want her. He’ll take one look at her and that will be that.”
“She should be checked by the vet.” Benton pours coffee, and he’s tall and straight in a dark suit, his silver hair damp and combed straight back.
He doesn’t answer me about Douglas Burke.
“I’ll send Bryce to get her at some point today, get her checked from stem to stern.” I open a can of dog food. “Are you coming by my office to see what we find with the car?”
“I have to deal with the Marino problem.”
“You’ll talk to him?”
“Talking to him doesn’t help anything. He’s been talked to enough, and there’s nothing else. And nothing happened, Kay,” Benton then says, and he’s referring to something else entirely. “Nothing happened, but not because of her. But because of me.”
He lets me know that Douglas Burke is attracted to him and has tried to do something about it. She might be in love with him, and when he says that, I know she is. I know she has it bad.
“That could be part of the problem.” He sips coffee and looks at me as I set Sock’s bowl on his mat, which is a safe distance from Shaw’s mat, although the two of them seem at peace with each other, as if they know what they’ve been through and wouldn’t deny any creature the courtesy of rescue.
“What do you mean, ‘could be’?”
“When we first started working together I really thought she was gay. So it’s been very confusing.” He hands me a coffee.
“How did you suddenly become so obtuse? What is it you do for a living? Suddenly you’re a blockhead?”
He smiles. “Not so astute when it comes to myself, maybe. I’m always the last to know.”
“Bullshit, Benton.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
“That’s the more likely story.”
“I would have bet you money she was gay.”
“Whatever she is, she shouldn’t have done what she did last night.”
“She knows that, Kay. And as bad as it was for you, it’s pretty terrible to be an FBI agent and lose control like that. She’s lost control. She has. Badly. And it will have to be addressed beyond my giving her hell about it.”
“You don’t want her.” I give him another chance to confess.
“I don’t want her like that, and in fact I was sure she wanted Lucy. She’d get unbelievably flustered around Lucy,” he says.
“Lucy could fluster Mother Teresa.”
“No, I mean it.” Benton opens the refrigerator and retrieves a jug of blood-orange juice and pours each of us a glass. “I’m trying to think of the last time when it was so obvious I was almost embarrassed. Doug was dropping me off at Hanscom, where Lucy was meeting me. She’d just shut down the helicopter and was walking across the tarmac, and Doug was so distracted I thought she might hit a parked plane.”
“When Lucy flew you to New York this past June, right before my birthday,” I recall. “That recently you didn’t get what was going