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When she didn’t say anything else, he glanced back over. Her stare was totally direct, and for a moment, he was reminded of who she really was. Yeah, sure, the hair was no longer sculpted, and that crappy fleece of his was standing in for one of her power suits, but the inner steel was still there.
Hell, he almost felt sorry for whoever was taking her on.
“I’ve taken care of us here,” she said. “Nothingshort of a nuclear bomb is going to breach this facility. Heal yourself by letting go of the guilt, okay?”
Gus blinked. A couple of times.
Well, jeez. Put like that? If she wasn’t… the most perfect woman he’d ever met, he didn’t know who else lived up to that standard. Too bad she was pregnant with a dead man’s baby, and prepared to die bringing that other man’s infant into this world. Assuming she lived even that long. Her disease was really advanced, not being treated, and very soon, the symptoms she was no doubt fighting off by sheer willpower were going to take over: The body always won over the mind at the finish line. No matter what a person told themselves as they rounded their final lap.
“Look, I just wanted to tell you something before I left.” He took a drink of the Coke like it was whiskey and might give him some courage. “I’m going to rip up those papers you sent over to me. About Vita.”
Her eyebrows bolted up. “Why in the hell would you do that?”
“I don’t want something for nothing.”
“Nothing?You made her. She’s yours.”
Gus thought back to as recently as a week ago. When he’d thought Vita was theirs. “You need that drug more than I do. Take it, sell it to Gunnar if you want—or someone else. I’ll be fine. There are other things I can work on for him. Besides, he hired me without knowing what you did—”
“I’m not going to let you do that.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“So you give her away. Do whatever you want.”
Did C.P.’s voice just crack and she tried to hide it? He wasn’t sure.
“No,” he said. “You put the money in all along, and you’re bearing all the debt. Sort your finances out with it and, you know, leave something… to your baby. They’re going to need it in this world.”
Especially if you’re gone, he thought.
“Anyway, that’s all I came to say.” Well, that and the apology she refused to accept, for being tortured and blabbing like the wuss he was. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
With a jerky swing, he turned around and headed back for the door as fast as he could. Which wasn’t that fast. When he finally got to the black panels, and he reached for the knob, he had to look back. Even though it was a bad idea.
She was still sitting behind that desk, her face a mask, her eyes unblinking as she stared over at him.
He focused on what she was wearing. “You look good in navy blue, you know that. Not as severe as all that black.” He opened things and told himself he needed to get gone before he said something stupid. “Anyway, Lipsitz is going to give me a ride—”
She bolted to her feet.“Gus.”
Looking across the distance that separated them,he thought—not for the first time—that he was willing to die for her.
And if things went the way he was going to make them go? He probably was going to, and he was okay with that. Over the past three years, he’d thought he was living for the work he was doing on Vita.
Not true. He had been living for C.P. Phalen.
“I understand you want to go,” she said, “and I don’t want to be harsh about this—but for fuck’s sake, they almost killed you. You think they’re not going to want to finish the job?”
Yup, he sure as hell had done that math. And as she confronted him, he couldn’t tell her what his real plan was. But he had to protect her.
There was only one way to do that.
“I lied,” he told her. “You don’t look like shit. You never could. Then again, the inside of you was what I’ve always loved best about you.”
With that, he left her… taking the last Coke he’d ever have with him.
TWENTY-SIX
