Royal Palms
Sunday
Fully dressed, Rand sat beside the bed and watched Kayla sleep, telling himself how many kinds of fool he was. The problem was that he couldn’t decide whether he was a fool for letting himself love her last night or if he was a fool because he wasn’t in bed with her now.
I’m sorry, Reed.
When Rand heard his own thought, he was shocked. Was he really feeling guilty because Reed was dead and he was alive?
Got that in one, fool.
He didn’t know if it was his own voice or Reed’s that pitied him.
After I kill Bertone, then I’ll…
Then what? Reed would come back from the dead? Rand would be alive again?
I was alive last night.
And guilty as hell for it this morning.
Rand set his teeth and told himself he was a fool.
Big news flash that was.
Sunlight slid through a crack in the drapes and spread across the bed, across Kayla, highlighting the rose tattoo on her collarbone. He’d been with other women since Reed’s death, but he’d never felt guilty about it. Why Kayla? What was it about her that made him want…too much?
That’s easy, bro. She makes you feel alive.
Rand went stiff. Reed?
About time, too. I told you to live for both of us. One of us dead is plenty. Kayla is good for you. Don’t fuck it up and blame it on me.
Before Rand could move, could think, he realized that Kayla’s eyes were open, slowly focusing on him.
“Who was here?” she asked sleepily.
“Just me.”
“No. Someone else.” She yawned. “Like you, but different.” Her eyelashes lowered, stayed down. “’S too early to get up.” She sighed, pulled the covers up over her shoulders.
“Go back to sleep,” Rand said softly.
One eye opened. “What about you?”
“If I get in bed, neither one of us will sleep.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Or are we out of condoms?”
He smiled in spite of himself as he remembered the hours before they fell asleep. “Getting there.”
“No wonder they gave you five thousand dollars.” She yawned again. “Condoms aren’t cheap.”
Rand laughed out loud. It felt so good that he did it again.
“Are you laughing at me?” she asked around another yawn.
“No, at me,” he said.
He took off his shoes and stretched out next to her on top of the bed. She turned toward him. She smelled of bath oil and sex and sleepy woman. He pulled a bundle of covers and her against his body.
“Go back to sleep,” he said against her forehead. “I kept you up too long last night.”
“Huh. I thought I was the one keeping you up.”
“Sleep, Kayla.”
She tried to, but it didn’t work. She was awake enough to remember all the reasons she shouldn’t be relaxed.
Bertone.
Handcuffs.
Dirty money.
Her name on the bottom line.
“Well, damn,” she said against Rand’s chin.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m awake.”
“Hungry?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call room service.”
“Food?” she said, nibbling on his chin, tugging on his beard with her lips.
“Not many calories in a beard,” he said dryly.
“Mmmm, the Beard Diet. Works for me. Nibble the pounds away.”
“You don’t need to lose weight. In fact, some more weight would look good on you.”
“More? Yowsa. Now I know I’m in love.”
Rand didn’t fight the laughter crowding his throat. He just let it go and enjoyed.
She snuggled closer. “Yesterday I felt like I was in a combat zone. Today I feel ten feet tall.”
“Life is a combat zone. That’s why you have to take love where and when you find it. But I’d forgotten about that until last night. You aren’t sorry, are you? I know you’re not the one-night-stand type.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” she mumbled, flushing.
“I read your file.”
“When do I get to read yours?”
“What do you want to know?”
Everything. Nothing in particular. “Is this a one-night stand?” she asked.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” he said. “You know, don’t you? You knew last night when you held out your hand to me.”
“What did I know?”
“I’m going to kill Andre Bertone.”
She looked at Rand’s eyes, sage green and clear. Cold.
“I knew,” she said. “I saw it at the party.”
“You didn’t let it stop you last night.”
It wasn’t a question, not quite, but it was close enough that she answered.
“You haven’t killed him yet,” she said.
“And when I do?”
Silence came, grew, and vanished into a sigh. “I don’t know. I’d like to kill Bertone myself. I thought about doing it. A way out of this mess, you know?”
Rand nodded and watched her like a feral cat.
“It wasn’t so much a thought,” Kayla said, “as a bone-deep desire to wipe him off the face of the earth. For the first time in my life I understood how someone could be driven to kill.”
“If you back a mouse into a corner, it will try to rip your throat out. And you’re no mouse.”
She let out a long breath. “Were you and Reed working for St. Kilda when he died?”
“Sort of. The Camgerian government was paying, but we were hired through St. Kilda, though we didn’t know it at the time.”
“You were soldiers?”
“As in mercenaries?”
She grimaced. “I guess.”
“No. We were hired to train Camgerians to use the kind of arms that would give them a chance against the ivory poachers who were destroying the elephant herds. We were also trying to teach Camgerians management techniques for their game preserves. So officially we were members of an international wildlife conservation group helping the locals to protect and manage their valuable resources. Unofficially…” His voice faded.
“What?”
“The poachers were all rebels bent on overthrowing the government. Ivory, oil, coltan, hardwood, whatever would sell, they stole it and got arms in return, AK-47s and RPGs.”
“Bertone.”
“Krout, the Siberian, Bertone. All the same man.”
“So you were training men to fight the rebels.”
“In a side-door kind of way, yes. Back then Reed and I were young enough to be idealists and smart enough to know that idealism is a young man’s game. We didn’t think of ourselves as starry-eyed virgins, but we were.” Rand’s mouth flattened. “We believed that the good guys always win in the end.”
Kayla bit her lip and didn’t ask any more.
Rand kept on talking. “We thought we’d seen it all. We hadn’t. Somebody once described Africa as a place where anything that can be done by a gun has been done there. Faroe knew that.”
“Joe Faroe was over there, too?”
“Through St. Kilda, Faroe was working an operation on behalf of an American NGO, trying to discourage the arms trade. Reed thought Faroe was the greatest man he’d ever known, smart, tough, resourceful. I wasn’t quite as charmed. I kept telling Reed that Faroe could get us in trouble.”
“Did he?”
“No, hell no. We did it all by ourselves. Our training gig was up, but we both were sick of seeing what the arms trade was doing to Africa. We talked to Faroe. St. Kilda hired us to gather information on Krout/Bertone and his operation. To shut the bastard down.”
Kayla’s hand touched Rand’s cheek, stroked lightly above the soft beard. “It was a job worth doing.”
“Intellectually, no argument. But my gut doesn’t think that Reed’s death was worth it, no matter how many others might have survived because of what we did. His death was goddamned real. The lives he saved…” Rand shrugged. “Not real enough.”
“So you set out to get proof that the Siberian was a gunrunner,” she said, luring Rand away from his bleak thoughts.