I knew so little about her. She’d mentioned a bad relationship, and we’d killed her friend during Viper’s job, but that was it. I knew nothing about her past, and I had no idea what could make things better for her.
I examined her stormy eyes and found a restlessness and… something else I couldn’t identify.
“I guess I’ve always been focused on satisfying other people’s expectations,” she said slowly. “Doing what they asked me to do as well as I could. And sometimes I liked that. But I’ve never really had a chance to make all that many decisions on my own.”
I could hear the honesty in her voice, and it brought an ache into my chest, bittersweet. No one should have a life like that, but she’d trusted me enough to open up to me.
I leaned toward her, intending to grab her hand but stopping myself. She didn’t like being touched, so I wouldn’t touch her. But I could still help.
“Well, what’s something that makes you happy?” I asked. “Just for you, not because you know someone else will be happy about it too.”
“Just for me…” She trailed off, and I could see the wheels turning in her mind. Again, unwavering sadness washed through me as she struggled to come up with a single thing that made her happy for its own sake.
“I like chocolate,” she declared, a smile springing to her face that looked almost triumphant, as if it was a victory for her to land on that one thing. Maybe it was.
I remembered the hot chocolate that Garrison had made and shared with her. She had looked shocked and utterly delighted when he’d given her some. That was an easy thing for me to offer, whether Garrison liked me dipping into his collection or not, and I had every intention of making sure she had plenty for as long as she stayed with us.
“What else?” I prodded.
She answered a little more quickly this time. “Exercising makes me happy. The adrenaline rush and feeling how much I can do with my body. Sparring and coming out on top.”
Which I’d bet she did most of the time. I wished she’d pummeled that boyfriend of hers good before she’d taken off on him.
“What about entertainment?” I asked. “Like—movies, music, TV, books?”
She brightened up so fast my pulse skipped a beat. “Oh! There was this TV show I saw once… Years ago, and I think it was already kind of old. I just happened across it one day when I didn’t have anything else to do at that moment, and then I got sucked in and couldn’t help watching the whole thing. It was about a spy and her husband solving crimes.” A crease formed in her forehead. “I missed the title sequence, though, and I never could find it again.”
But it’d stuck with her all this time. I stood up, abruptly energized. This was something I could do for her, something no one else in the penthouse could, at least nowhere near as easily. And it’d be so worth it to give her a little more of the happiness she’d obviously been sorely lacking.
I beckoned for her to follow me. “Come on. We’re going to find your spy show.”
Dess leapt to her feet, her eyes widening. “Just like that? How—”
I grinned at her. “You’ll see.”
I marched back to the penthouse with Dess at my heels. Talon had moved to the kitchen where he was making himself a cup of coffee. He didn’t comment when I grabbed my laptop and stole his spot on the sofa.
Dess sank down next to me. “Do you really think you can find it?”
There was something almost childlike about her hesitant excitement, something that contrasted sharply with the lethal fighter I’d witnessed in the safe-house attack. Yet again, I found myself wondering just how this woman had become who she was… whoever that was exactly.
“I know I can,” I told her with total confidence, flexing my fingers over the keys. “All I need are a few details about the show—the plotline in the episode you saw, the characters, the setting—as specific as possible. We already know it had a woman who was a spy and her husband… was he a spy too?”
Dess frowned, tapping her lips. Somehow she got even more gorgeous when her expression went distant with thought, still lit with hope, the black waves of her hair tumbling around her face.
“I think he might have been a doctor?” she said hesitantly. “There was one part where she got shot and her arm was bleeding, and he had to give her stitches. He had some kind of medical experience, anyway.” An amused gleam came into her eyes. “Maybe he picked it up in the army like Julius.”
“Could be.” I added that note to my first search string. “Did you recognize any of the actors? That would help narrow it down too.”
She shook her head with a sheepish grimace. “I’m not very up on celebrities and that sort of thing. I remember she was blond, and he had dark hair. Both slim and fit. I think…” Her eyebrows drew together with concentration. “His name was Ron—Ronald. He hated it when she called him by his full name, so she did it to tease him sometimes. I can’t remember what her name was… It might have started with H?”
Now we were getting somewhere. My fingers flew over the keyboard, typing in all that information, tweaking a word here and there as the search results spilled out across the screen, narrowing by date because she’d said the show had looked older—ah ha!
I clicked on an image of the DVD cover to enlarge it and turned the laptop toward Dess. It was a campy ‘60s show that’d only run two seasons, with a blond spy named Helen and her husband, a dark-haired paramedic named Ronald. They were posed in the image back-to-back beneath the title, Spy Time, her with her fingers held up in front of her in the shape of a gun and him looking shocked.
It wouldn’t have struck me as the kind of show I’d expect Dess to be into, but her mouth dropped open immediately. “Wow. That’s it. You just—it only took you a couple of minutes.”
I waggled my fingers, flushing with pleasure. “The magic of the internet and a healthy respect for search algorithms. Now that we’ve found it, how’d you like to watch an episode?”