And he knew she hated it.
Her instinct was to bang right through that door and battle on, but . . . He’d probably like that, wouldn’t he? She paced and prowled around her office. Her space! He’d just love it if she went barging in, raging on, while he sat there with his scary Roarke iced calm.
She knew how to get through the ice, oh yeah, she did. She knew which buttons to push to bring on the heat. But he’d probably like that, too. He’d just love being able to think he’d been reasonable while she barged and raged and bitched.
She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction.
Screw it. She’d come home to take an hour to clear her head, she’d take the damn hour.
She stalked out of her office, snarled all the way to the bedroom, where the cat’s full, pudgy length was sprawled across the center of the bed.
“Don’t even start on me,” she warned as he opened his bicolored eyes to stare at her. “How would he like it if I had somebody come in here?” She yanked off her coat, tossed it on the bed. “If I just decided, Hey, I’m going to change everything in the bedroom. Yeah, a decorating bug crawled up my ass, so I’m going to toss this all out and haul in something else.
“How do you like that?”
She dragged off her weapon harness, pulled out her ’link, her communicator, her badge, tossed them and the other pocket debris on the dresser.
Galahad, who knew something about moods and timing, kept his own counsel while Eve stripped out of her street clothes, pulled on workout gear.
“You could be next,” she warned Galahad as she strode onto the elevator. “He could get another bug up his ass and dye you pink and dress you in a tux.”
She fumed all the way down to the gym. Definitely not the time for a holo-session with Master Wu. She considered beating the crap out of one of the sparring droids, but thought Roarke would probably enjoy that, so she opted for the tread, programmed it for a hard urban run, with obstacles.
A beach run would have relaxed her, but she wasn’t ready to relax. Instead she pounded the city streets, kicked a little street-thief ass, climbed, leaped, rolled over barriers until she had a solid five miles in.
She switched to weights, pumped until her muscles burned, then finished up with some ab-searing crunches before she stretched it out.
Sweaty, winded, she headed to the tropical wonder of the pool house, stripped off. Dived into the cool, blue water.
Five double laps later, her body begged for a break. And her thoughts snuck back.
Her space. Hers. He didn’t have any business pushing her to change her space, bringing in some fancy redhead because it wasn’t all . . . fancy.
Nothing wrong with her office, she thought as she let herself coast through the water. It was serviceable. It was good enough. Maybe it was a blight, a dumpy box in the grandeur of the house.
But it was her blight, damn it.
She got good work done in there, and he had never complained about it before. He’d made it like that in the first place, completely stunning her with the replica of her apartment, right down to the crappy desk.
Damn it. Damn it. He’d turned her heart inside out with that gesture, and now he wanted to change it.
Because she didn’t live in the old apartment with the crappy desk anymore, she thought.
She hissed out a breath, muttered, “Hell,” and let herself sink under the water.
She had herself under better control when she came back up. The mad simmered under it all, but the control skimmed a fine veneer over the rest. She changed into cotton pants, a sweatshirt, skids, then sat down, stroked the cat.
“He wouldn’t dye you pink or dress you in a tux. He likes you fine just the way you are. Sometimes I wonder about me, but you’re good.”
Galahad bumped his head against her arm, so she stroked him into ecstasy. It only took a couple of minutes, making her think cats were a hell of a lot easier to live with than people.
He followed her out and to her office, where Roarke’s door remained shut.
She curled her lip at it.
“He could stay in there, iced over, for days. So let him. I’ve got work. See anything wrong in here?” she asked the cat.
Galahad looked at her, then jogged over to leap onto her sleep chair.
“See? Everything we need. Except my damn board.”
She found it, neatly stowed in the storage area, hauled it back.
She updated it, got coffee, studied it, circled it, made a couple changes, then went to her desk—suitably crappy for her—and reviewed her notes.
She barely glanced up when Roarke walked in. He went to the wall panel, chose a bottle of wine.
Uncorked it.
“Wine?” he asked.
“No, and I’m not going to apologize.”
“What a coincidence. Neither am I.”
“I’m not the one who had some redhead poking around, humming in those boots.”
He cocked a brow. “You object to the boots?”
“I object to any boots that have six-inch heels the width of my pinkie, but that’s not the point. And you can go all ice storm, but I have plenty of objections to coming home after a pissy day and finding out you’ve decided to make changes to where I work without saying a damn thing to me about it. Without seeing how I felt about it.”
“You’re wrong.”
“The hell I am.”
“You’re wrong,” he repeated, “that you wouldn’t have been consulted, that I would have changed a single square inch without consulting you or seeing how you felt, what you wanted. That’s bollocks, Eve, and I don’t deserve it.”
“You’re the one who had her in here. I didn’t get the memo.”
He looked down at his wine, drank. “I had her come in to revisit the space, to take a fresh look at it with some ideas I’d given her.”
“You’d given her.”
“Yes. As I’m intimate with where and how you work.”
“This is where I work when I’m here. This is how. You’re the one who put it together like this in the first place. Goddamn it.” She shoved up from her desk, yanked out the tear-shaped diamond she wore on a chain under her sweatshirt.
“When you gave me this fat-assed diamond and said you loved me, I just thought you were crazy.”
“I recall.” Eyeing her over it, he took another sip of wine. “Clearly.”
“But when you showed me this, what you’d done for me here, in your home. How you’d made this space for me, just like my apartment, because you understood I needed my own, I needed what I knew. You got that, so I started to believe you did. You loved me. Now it’s not good enough.”
“It’s not good enough, no,” he said, striking her to the core. “It’s not good enough for you—for who you are and what you do every bloody day. But that’s only part of it. Once, you needed that familiarity, that security, to leave your apartment and come here. I needed you. So I gave you what you needed to be here, to have your own here. I thought three years was enough time for you to let it go, really leave it behind, and to make something new, for yourself. Not in my home. In ours.”
His eyes remained cool on hers, but she thought she caught something behind that blue frost. And that something was hurt.
“It’s . . . troubling to realize you still need to hold on to what was before. Before us.”
“That’s not it.” No, no, she wouldn’t swallow that. “That’s not fair. That’s bullshit wrong. I’m not holding on to anything. Much,” she amended. “I’m not insecure. Exactly.”
Shit, shit, shit.
“I’m used to the space. It works fine. How can I have cops come up here, work here, if you go all fancy with it? It’s a work space, for solving murders, closing cases, not for showing off.”
Frustration eked through the ice—which was better to her mind than hurt.
“Updating and creating an efficient work area isn’t showing off. Christ Jesus, for a woman with such professional arrogance, you’re forever worried about your idea of showing off otherwise.”
“You want to talk arrogance, pal.”
“No. I want to talk about that desk.”
“The—what?”
“Are you attached to that desk?”