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The bathroom door opened and she did her best to leave the couch with composure. Making a beeline for the room Brodie had just vacated, she snagged her purse from the floor and didn’t make eye contact as she went into the bathroom and locked the door.
THIRTEEN
Dropping her purse to the vanity, she fell against the locked bathroom door. “Stupid,” she hissed at herself.
Art and Brodie had both told her that Tuck was a private person. She’d always assumed they were exaggerating because he was open with her. Now she saw that he was open about the Kindred, open about Brodie, all things that involved her. His life beyond the Kindred was a closed book, and she should have taken the advice of those who knew the hacker better than she did.
When she got to the bathroom mirror, the reflection staring back didn’t look like her. Her hair was a matted mess. Her makeup was smeared. She’d taken on the appearance of the persona she wanted outsiders to think she was. It was no longer an orchestrated façade, instead she was one hot mess. Random, rough sex and backcombed hair were a recipe for a grooming disaster.
Turning on the faucet, she washed her face and took her comb from her purse to try to tease her hair into some semblance of order. The battle was a losing one, it would take serious time to score victory and she didn’t have that to spare. Her scalp was beginning to hurt, and she was already grumpy enough after her dumb misstep with Swift. If she went back into the room with a headache, her bad attitude would probably get her into an argument. In close quarters with these guys, for an undefined period of time, Zara didn’t want to test their tempers any further.
She pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it with a tie from her purse, then she took out her rolled ballet flats and put them on. Wherever she and Brodie were going, being covert was going to be more important than being sexy, so the thigh-highs just wouldn’t do. Content that she’d done the best she could, she psyched herself up to leave this room and apologize to Tuck before departing with her love.
With a deep breath, she opened the bathroom door and dropped her purse to the floor again. Striding into the body of the room with her mouth open ready to launch into her apology, she came up short when she saw that Tuck was the only one here.
“Where’s Raven?” she asked, deflated.
“Doing a job,” Tuck said and slid along the couch. “See for yourself.”
He’d ditched her? She was supposed to be going on this job with him. She was more than a little pissed and disappointed that she’d been left behind when she hadn’t been in the bathroom for a prohibitive period.
“No,” she said, hurrying over to sit on the couch and peek through the lens to see her love inside Kahlil’s bedroom, hunkered down right next to the bed. “Why did he—”
“He thought we could use a minute alone.”
It made her feel somewhat better that she hadn’t been cut from the team for fear she might be incompetent, but that did leave her facing an awkward conversation in her immediate future. “Oh,” she said, slumping. As soon as her spine hit the back of the couch, she was inspired to jump to her feet. “You should be sitting there. Keeping an eye on him ready to… you know.”
Her conversation with Tuck could happen wherever she was in the room, but Brodie still needed someone to watch his ass while he was prowling in enemy territory, and if someone needed to take a shot to save his life, Tuck was a better bet than she would be, as she’d explained to Brodie already.
“He’s nearly done,” Tuck said but moved over to seat himself behind the rifle, and she appreciated him being there even if he was just humoring her.
A serendipitous side effect of him leaning forward and paying attention to Brodie was that she felt more comfortable about what she had to say because she didn’t have to look him in the eye. “You were right, Swift, I should’ve kept my nose out of your private business. I wasn’t judging you, I… I should’ve respected your boundaries.”
She gave him time to process and kept quiet, praying he would forgive her prying, and that they could move on without things becoming awkward between them.
“She always just understood me. Kadie. She always understood me,” he said and because he didn’t move away from the rifle sight, she guessed that he, too, was more comfortable having this conversation while they had the job to distract them. “For the first few weeks after we split, I had to keep telling myself not to hack her email or her phone like I did when we were together.”
That was an odd admission but fit with who Tuck was. Zara often wondered what he did during all the hours he spent gazing into his different laptop screens. This confession was beginning to answer that question. “She was ok with you doing that?”
He wasn’t embarrassed or hesitant about discussing his invasion of Kadie’s privacy. “It was a game,” he said, lowering his chin. “She knew I did it and encouraged it by acting all affronted when I spoke about things I could never have known without accessing her personal data. Getting her riled always ended well for both of us, if you get me.”
Zara’s guess was that teasing and banter were a part of their foreplay. “I get ya.”
Tuck was fixated on a single point just beyond the scope. “If I didn’t do it, if I didn’t track her movements and conversations, she’d get so pissed. Violating her privacy was a way of… showing how much I cared, I guess. She liked that I couldn’t help myself, that I had to pry into her life because I loved to feel like I was a part of it. We couldn’t see each other every day, but I always knew what she was up to.”
Zara wasn’t too sure of what else to say. One thing was clear. “You don’t have anyone to talk to about how you feel… about her.”
He’d broken up with Kadie in reaction to his grief over losing Art. Zara could understand how that tested his security in his own mortality. But Tuck was a bit of a loner. During Brodie’s seclusion, Tuck went off on his own. Zara always thought he was going to Kadie or going to other friends or family he might have. Now it seemed to her that he’d been dealing with his bereavement and his break-up by himself.
He cleared his throat. “Told Rave when we were through.”
“That’s not the same thing,” she said, sliding over to take his hand from his thigh. He chose to watch their physical connection rather than to meet her eye. “I didn’t mean to upset you or to take liberties talking about her… It’s just… I’m in a kind of unique position to understand her… I know what it is to love a man who could disappear one day.”
“She doesn’t know what we do.”
“She knows what you do, doesn’t she? If she knows you can hack her email…”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said and took his hand out of hers.
