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That crack stung like the lash of a whip. He recoiled from it, and covered his eyes with his hands. “Oh, Christ.”
The silence stretched out again, as cold and silent as doom.
“Can you do it?” Seth asked quietly.
“Do what?” he snarled. “You mean, can I fuck her?” He imagined it. Imagined putting it to her, looking into those luminous green eyes. Their bodies joined, juicily rocking together.
Knowing what he knew.
His gut rebelled, and it took all his willpower to keep breakfast down. No fucking way was he giving in. He’d yarked a few times in his life from stomach viruses and hangovers. Never from hurt feelings.
Fuck that shit. He wasn’t so far gone as that. He swallowed, shut his eyes, tried to breathe.Control.
He knew how to play this game. He’d worked undercover his whole adult life. He knew how to play a part. How to make it convincing.
Nick opened his eyes, and found the three men still staring at him, a question in their eyes.
“I can do whatever has to be done.” His voice sounded, to his own ears, like a dead man talking.
CHAPTER27
Becca paced the cramped hotel room. She tried Carrie’s cell again. Then Nick. She’d been calling them an average of three times a minute, but it was always the same. Nick, for some strange reason, was not answering and Carrie’s phone was still turned off.
The memory of that squat, malevolent-looking video camera behind the pink bunny on the shelf haunted her. Her stomach cramped with fear.
She tried to push away nightmare images of Carrie and Nick, in the trunk of a car, speeding off to some horrible fate. Leaving her hanging, obsessively punching the buttons on her phone.
Oh, stop. Nick could look out for himself. He’d probably just left his phone in the car. She hoped he either came back soon or got in touch soon, because she had a date with Josh in less than an hour to drive down to Olympia to look for Carrie. Nick would be extremely unhappy with her if she went off on a road trip without telling him.
She tried to stretch out on the bed, watch some TV, but she was too jittery, too restless. She kept bounding up again.
The door lock clicked. She sprang a foot into the air, and lunged towards Nick as he walked in, throwing her arms around him.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “You weren’t answering your phone!”
He felt oddly stiff in her arms for a second, but then his arms circled her. His nose nuzzled the top of her head. “Sorry,” he said. His voice sounded exhausted. “Got sidetracked. Left the thing in the truck.”
“Don’t do that to me,” she scolded, squeezing him again.
He sat down heavily onto the bed. She sat down next to him, and twined her arm through his. “So?” she prompted. “What happened? Did you see Diana Evans?”
“Yes,” he said dully, rubbing his face. “Sort of. She was dead. Someone strangled her. Yesterday, from the looks of it.”
A chilling wave of cold pumped through Becca’s body. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “That’s horrible. That poor woman.”
He shrugged. “Her own goddamn fault. Getting herself mixed up with that kind of people. She probably deserved it.”
“Maybe so,” Becca faltered. “But she was definitely regretting it.”
“She was a day late and a dollar short.”
She was taken aback by the stony, cold tone of his voice. Her stomach fluttered uneasily at the look on his face. Maybe she was reading too much into it, but his face reminded her of that awful expression he’d had when they were on the island.
And when Tam had tormented him with the ghosts of his past.
She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. Nick was a great deal more sensitive than he let on. Probably a lot more sensitive than he even knew himself. It was probably seeing Diana Evans’s body that had disturbed him so deeply. It would have done the same for her.
“Did you learn anything else?” she asked.
