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She finds him at the computer looking over Jeevan’s shoulder at their next target, but right now, there’s no room for that on Bam’s radar. She’s out of breath from running through the mine. She knows her emotions are on her sleeve, staining as brightly as blood. She knows she should have just run deeper into the mine and paced and stewed and broiled until her anger and disgust had faded. But she couldn’t do it.
“When were you going to tell me?”
Starkey regards her for a moment, takes a sip from his canteen, and sends Jeevan away. He knows from the look on her face exactly what she’s talking about. How could he not know?
“Why do you think it’s your business?”
“I am your second in command. You don’t keep secrets from me!”
“There a difference between a secret and discretion.”
“Discretion? Don’t you dare talk to me about discretion after scoring your little hat trick.”
“This is a dangerous thing I’m doing out there. I’m not entirely blind to that. I know it might be messed up, but I want to leave something behind if I don’t survive—and it’s not like I forced them.”
“You never force anyone, do you, Mason? You just hypnotize them. You dazzle them. And before you know it, people are willing to do anything for you.”
Then Starkey slices through to the one thing hanging in the air between them—the one thing that shouldn’t be said.
“You’re just pissed off because you’re not one of them.”
Bam slaps him so hard he stumbles, nearly knocking over the computer. And when he comes back at her, anger in his eyes, she’s ready. She grabs his ruined hand and squeezes it. Hard. The reaction is immediate. His legs buckle beneath him, and he falls to his knees. She squeezes harder.
“Let . . . go . . . ,” he squeaks. “Please . . . let . . . go . . . .”
She grips his hand a moment longer, then releases it, prepared for whatever he does to her next. Let him throw her to the ground. Let him spit in her face. Let him hit her and hit her again. At least that would be something. At least there’d be some passion from him launched in her direction.
Instead of retaliating, he just grabs his ruined hand, rises, and closes his eyes until the pain passes.
“After all I’ve done for you,” she says. “After all I’ve been for you, you go off with them?”
“Bambi, please—”
“Don’t call me that! Never call me that!”
“If it were you instead of them, you couldn’t be out there with me changing the world, could you? It would be too dangerous!”
“You could have given me the choice!”
“And then what? How could you be my second if that’s between us?”
Bam finds she has no answer to that, and Starkey must know he’s having an effect on her, because he takes a step closer. His voice becomes kinder. “Don’t you know how much you mean to me, Bam? What we have is something I’ll never have with those girls.”
“And what they have, I’ll never have.”
He regards her. Gauging. Assessing. “Is that what you really want, Bam? Is that what would make you happy? Really?” Then he steps deep into her airspace. She’s so tall that standing this close, he seems even shorter than he really is.
He cranes his neck to kiss her, but their lips are still an inch away, and instead of suffering the indignation of rising on his tiptoes, he reaches behind her head, pulling her down into the kiss. That kiss is like a conjurer’s act. It’s artful, it’s worthy of applause, it is everything Bam ever dreamed it might be . . . but nothing will change the fact that it’s only a trick, and today there is no audience to applaud it.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, Bam. And you’re right; you deserve something real from me.”
“That wasn’t real, Mason.”
He offers her something between a grin and a grimace. “It’s as real as I get.”
• • •
Bam wanders the mine, feeling spent in every possible way. Her fury at Starkey no longer knows where to go. Neither do any of her emotions. She feels the longing for something unnamable that’s been lost. If she were more naive, she’d call it her innocence, but Bambi Ann Covalt has not been innocent for a very long time.
