"You're very good at that," she murmured wheezily, nibbling on his ear.

"Yea . . ." His grin faded, and he stared at the ceiling, brows drawing down in a combination of gentle, post-coital melancholy, and renewed, if purely mental, frustration. " . . . wonder if I was married?" Her head drew back, and he could have bitten his tongue at her stricken look. "Doan' think so," he added quickly.

"No . . . no." She settled back again. "You're not married."

"Which ever one I am?"

"That's right."

"Huh." He hesitated, winding her long hair in his fingers, spreading it idly out in a fan across the burst of red lines on his torso. "So who d'you think you were makin' love to, jus' now?"

She touched a long index finger gently to his forehead. "You. Just you."

This was most pleasing, but . . . "Wuzzat love, or therapy?"

She smiled quizzically, tracing his face. "A little of both, I think. And curiosity. And opportunity. I've been pretty immersed in you, for the past three months."

It felt like an honest answer. "Seems t'me you made t' opportunity."

A small smirk escaped her lips. "Well . . . maybe."

Three months. Interesting. So he'd been dead a bit over two months. He must have absorbed a lot of the Durona Group's resources, in that time. To begin with, three months of this woman's labor were not cheap.

"Why you doin' this?" he asked, frowning at the ceiling as she snuggled carefully around his shoulder. "I mean t'whole thing. What d'you expect me to do for you?" Half-crippled, tongue-tied, blank and stupid, not a dollar to his non-existent name. "You're all hangin' on m'recovery like I'm your hope 'f heaven." Even the brutally efficient physical therapist Chrys he'd come to see as pushing him for his good. He almost liked her best, for her merciless drive. He resonated to it. "Who else wants me, tha' you should hide me? Enemies?" Or friends?

"Enemies for certain," Rowan sighed.

"Mm." He lay back in lassitude; she dozed, he didn't. He touched her net of hair and wondered. What did she see in him? I thought of it as the enchanted knight's crystal coffin . . . I picked out enough grenade fragments to be certain you weren't a bystander. . . .

So, there was work to be done. Nor did the Durona Group want an ordinary mercenary. If this was Jackson's Whole, they could hire ordinary thugs by the boatload.

But then, he'd never thought he was an ordinary man. Not even for a minute.

Oh, milady. Who do you need me to be? 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE