“Marco.” Roarke spoke softly as he laid a hand on Eve’s shoulder.
“No.” She went stiff under the touch. “Don’t defend me. Let him finish.”
“I can’t do that. I’m willing to take your state of mind into account, Marco, as the reason you would attack Eve in her own home. You don’t want to be here,” he said in an undertone of steel that indicated he was taking nothing into account. “I’ll show you out.”
“I know the way.” Marco’s eyes stabbed at Eve. “We’ll put our business association to an end as soon as possible, Roarke. I no longer trust your judgment.”
Hands balled into fists at her side, Eve trembled with fury as Marco strode away. “Why did you do that? I could have handled it.”
“You could have,” Roarke agreed, and turned her to face him. “But that was personal. No one, absolutely no one comes into our home and speaks to you that way.”
She tried to shrug it off. “Summerset does.”
Roarke smiled, touched his lips to hers. “The exception, for reasons too complicated to explain.” He rubbed away the frown line between her brows with his thumb.
“Okay. I guess I’m not going to be exchanging Christmas cards with the Angelinis.”
“We’ll learn to live with it. How about some champagne?”
“In a minute. I’m going to go freshen up.” She touched his face. It was getting easier to do that, to touch him when they weren’t alone. “I guess I ought to tell you that Mars has a recorder in her bag.”
Roarke gave the dent in her chin a quick flick. “She did. I have it in mine now, after I let her crowd me at the vegetarian table.”
“Very slick. You never mentioned pickpocketing as one of your skills.”
“You never asked.”
“Remind me to ask, and ask a lot. I’ll be back.”
She didn’t care about freshening up. She wanted a few minutes to simmer down, and maybe a few more to call Feeney, though she imagined he’d bite her head off for interrupting his compusearch.
He still had an hour to go before he lost his bottle of Irish. She didn’t think it would hurt to remind him. She was at the door to the library, preparing to code herself in, when Summerset melted out of the shadows behind her.
“Lieutenant, you have a call, termed both personal and urgent.”
“Feeney?”
“He did not grant me his name,” Summerset said down his nose.
“I’ll take it in here.” She had the small but worthy satisfaction of letting the door close smartly in his face. “Lights,” she ordered and th
e room brightened.
She’d almost gotten used to the walls of books with leather bindings and paper pages that crackled when you leafed through. For once she didn’t give them so much as a glance as she hurried to the ’link on Roarke’s library desk.
She engaged, then froze.
“Surprise, surprise.” Morse beamed at her. “Bet you weren’t expecting me. All dressed up for your party, I see. You look flash.”
“I’ve been looking for you, C. J.”
“Oh yeah, I know. You’ve been looking for a lot of things. I know this is on record, and it doesn’t matter. But you listen close. You keep this between you and me, or I’m going to start slicing off little tiny pieces of a friend of yours. Say hi to Dallas, Nadine.”
He reached out, and Nadine’s face came on screen. Eve, who’d seen terror too many times to count, looked at it now. “Has he hurt you, Nadine?”
“I—” She whimpered when he jerked her head back by the hair, touched a long slim blade to her throat.
“Now, you tell her I’ve been real nice to you. Tell her.” He skimmed the flat of the blade over her throat. “Bitch.”