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He eased down, cursing under his breath. It was taking longer than he’d anticipated to make it to Tam’s. He was reasonably sure they weren’t being followed, but he could use some sleep, in someplace secure. Tam’s fortress was as secure as it got, after Seth and Raine’s Stone Island hideaway. Seth had rigged it up for her himself. Pure, high-tech, state of the art paranoia. Just what the doctor ordered.
“What language was that?” Liv asked.
He glanced over, startled to find her awake, and dragged the incredibly filthy epithet he’d just uttered out of his short term memory bank. “Latvian, more or less,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
He hesitated. “Uh, well, it was directed at the car,” he hedged.
“Yes?” she said sweetly. “And the meaning?” Her soft, beautiful voice was froggy with sleep, but full of curiosity. She waited.
He sighed. “It was a crude, vicious attack upon the virtue of the mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of the mechanic who last serviced this piece of shit car.”
She made that muffled little giggling snort that he loved so much. “How awful,” she murmured. “Those poor women. How unfair.”
“Yeah, right. My manners suck,” he said sourly.
“So where did you learn Latvian?”
He shot an uneasy glance, but there was nothing to see in the dark but the pale glow of the oversized T-shirt she wore. He’d been pathetically grateful when the princess collapsed into exhausted sleep the minute they got on the road. She needed the rest, for one thing. And he needed space just as badly. Time to process what was happening.
He wasn’t done with that processing yet, but Liv was done with her nap, and feeling fresh and chatty and curious. He was so in for it.
“In the Army,” he told her. “After my stint in the military, I bummed around in Europe and Africa for a while. I got contract work through military contacts. The money was good. And it suited my mood, at the time.”
“Contract work?” Her voice was delicately cautious. “What’s that?”
“Mercenary,” he said.
That shut her up. She was probably thinking that he’d been a hired thug. In some ways, he guessed he had been. It all depended on your point of view. Life was like that. Hard to define, hard to justify.
“Wow,” she said faintly. “Isn’t that, ah, really dangerous?”
“Yeah. I got lots of work because I pick up languages fast. I speak some Russian, some Croatian, Farsi, some Arabic, some Persian, some Somali, decent French, and a bunch of obscure dialects you probably never heard of. That photographic memory seems to work aurally, too, if you program your brain right.”
“Wow,” she whispered. “Amazing. I wish I could do that.”
He shot her a glance. “Why couldn’t you?”
She gave him a derisive snort. “Get real.”
“No, really,” he protested. “It’s just a trick. My dad taught us. You just have to set your mind to it. No biggie. Anyone could do it.”
“Yeah, right.” Her voice was heavy with irony. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Sean, but what you describe is not normal. It is, in point of fact, what other people would describe as freak genius.”
“You got the freak part right,” he agreed. “You should hear my brothers talk. They think I’m an idiot savant. I can do tricks like a dancing bear, but I can’t seem to stay out of trouble with the cops. What does that suggest about my intelligence level?”
She covered her face. He heard smothered giggles. It gave him a happy glow to get a laugh out of her, even if it was at his own expense.
“So you’ve been doing, ah, contract work ever since then?” she asked, when she got her voice back under control.
“Nah. I burnt out a while back. For a while, after Kev died—after Kev was murdered,” he corrected himself. “I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But after a while, I started caring again. And if you keep putting yourself in harm’s way, it doesn’t matter how lucky you are. Statistics will catch up with you. Besides, it was so freaking depressing. I would have ended up eating a bullet in the end. Just so I didn’t have to keep seeing all that awful shit every time I closed my eyes.”
“Oh dear,” she whispered. “That’s awful. I’m sorry.”
“You know that diamond mine fuck-up I told you about? The electrical wire episode? That was the clincher, for me. I got this other scar in that incident, too.” He put his hand over the side of his abdomen, against the throb of remembered pain. “I had lots of time afterwards to lie around watching a bag drip into my arm and ponder how fucked up my life was. I decided it was time to lighten up.”
She was quiet for a while, thinking about what he’d said, but he knew he wasn’t off the hook yet. Long car trips were the pits, when it came to curious women. It was like being chained to a chair.
