Extinction Machine

Chapter Twenty-four

Little Palm Island Resort

Little Torch Key, Florida

Sunday, October 20, 6:39 a.m.

“Where are you going?” asked Berenice.

Erasmus Tull looked up from the suitcase he was packing. Berenice stood in the bedroom doorway. She still wore the bikini bottoms but she’d pulled on a loose white cotton shirt. His shirt. It hung open and unbuttoned. Purple shadows painted her skin and darkened the undersides of her breasts.

“I have to go to Maryland on business.”

She came in and leaned against the dresser. “I thought you were retired.”

“I am,” he said, stuffing his shaving kit into the corner of the bag. “But I take it in installments. Now I have to go back to work to pay for the next installment.”

She stepped over and removed his shaving kit from the suitcase, unzipped it and held it out. The small .22 pistol was wrapped in blue silk. She whipped off the silk and held out the pistol flat in her pam. “And so what business is this?”

Tull gently took the pistol from her. “My own.”

“Are you a criminal?” she asked, her green eyes searching his. Concern etched a single vertical line between her brows.

Outside the window a mockingbird taunted Tull in a hundred voices.

“No,” he said. “The gun is protection.”

She straightened and her features hardened. There was a small crescent scar on her cheek, a souvenir from a baby moray they’d encountered in the waters off Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea. When she was hurt or angry that scar darkened to the color of autumn wine. As it did now.

“Am I a fool that you lie to?” she demanded. “Am I some little beach bunny that you hump and dump?”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Why? Is it less polite than lying?”

He sighed and tossed the gun down onto his folded pants. “I thought we agreed not to talk about our pasts?”

“Easy for you,” she said. “You already know mine. Donderbus Elektronica is hardly unknown and I may be last in the line of succession to take over the company. I am still an heiress, which means that you could Google everything you need to know about me.”

Tull had to force his lips not to curl into a smile. When they’d first met, he had done exactly that. “I know, but you still agreed to the arrangement.”

“Because I didn’t think it mattered.” She indicated the pistol with a curt uptic of her chin. “Until this.”

“This doesn’t involve you—or us,” he insisted. “I’ve got a small matter to handle and then I’ll be back.”

“What is this ‘matter’?”

“It’s confidential,” he said. “I can’t discuss it with anyone, not even you. Considering what your family does, I’m sure you can appreciate the need for secrecy in some aspects of business.” He reached to take her hand. “Look, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Berenice took a step back from him.

“So that’s it? You just up and leave and to hell with me and us and everything we’ve—”

“Believe me,” he said, “I’ll be back.”

“How many times have you said that? How many women have stood where I stand now? Involved with you, in love with you, fascinated by everything that you know and all the mysteries you never shared? And then—what? Abandoned? Is that what drives you? To seduce and abandon?”

Tull laughed. “Seduce? As I recall, Berenice, you seduced me. Or as near as. You came up to me at that party in Marseilles and dropped a killer line on me. What was it? ‘I’m a lot more interesting than anyone you’ll find here. Escape with me.’ You had me on your hook from the beginning.”

The stern expression on Berenice’s face flickered momentarily. “I was only telling you the truth. We were more interesting than those inbred swine.”

“No argument. The point is, you’re not a victim of my irresistible seductive powers and I’m not the love ’em and leave ’em type.”

“Oh? What type are you?”

“Mostly,” he said, “I’m alone.”

Berenice came and sat down on the bed. The action caused her shirt to flap open, revealing a perfect breast. The nipple was as dark as her scar and fully erect. Caused by anger, he knew, but that was a form of passion, too. He busied himself with folding his shirts so that he did not stare at her.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked.

“I—don’t know. A few weeks at least. Maybe longer.”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone? Sit here and pine?”

“Cut it out, Berenice,” he said softly. “You define your own life and always have. That’s why they don’t like having you at board meetings. It’s why you picked me out of the crowd at that party. So, skip the guilt trip. You’re playing the wrong card.”

The mockingbird hopped onto the windowsill and regaled them with a schizophrenic diatribe.

“Will you have to use that gun?” she asked.

He picked up the blue silk and rewrapped the pistol.

“You’re not answering me?” she said. “Is it because you don’t want to lie? You’d rather say nothing?”

“What do you want from me?” said Tull. “I told you this is confidential … Can’t we leave it at that?”

“Not if you want to be able to find me when this is over,” said Berenice.

He looked at her.

“That’s what it comes down to, Tull,” she said. “We’re both adults, so if this is the end of what we had, then have enough respect for me to say so.”

“I—”

She stood up and moved in close, pressing her body lightly against his. Tull was infinitely aware of her animal heat, of the familiar curves and planes of her body, of the insistence of nipples hard enough to be felt through the fabric of her shirt and his. She looped her arms around his neck and looked up into his eyes.

“I can bear any truth,” she breathed, “but never lie to me.” She reached for his belt, unbuckled it, popped the top button of his trousers, slid the zipper down.

“I…”

His trousers fell down. Her fingers, clever and cool, slipped inside his boxers, found his hardness, squeezed it, stroked it.

Tull closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers. He was breathing as hard as if he’d run up a flight of stairs. So was she, and for a moment they breathed the same breath back and forth.

“Berenice…,” he murmured.

“Please,” she whispered.

And then his lips were on hers. On her lips, on her face, her throat, her breasts.

He reached out and swept the suitcase off the bed and then they crashed together onto the sheets. Their mouths breathed fire, their hands were everywhere. The bird stood on the window sill, silent now, wise enough not to mock this.

* * *

AN HOUR LATER, Berenice lay naked on the tangled sheets, the sweat still drying on her skin. Tull could see her through the open bathroom door, through the gap between the shower curtain and the wall.

When he’d left the bed to go into the bathroom, he’d taken the pistol. It lay on the closed lid of the toilet, wrapped in a towel.

Waiting.

While he and Berenice had made love, his thoughts kept drifting from the beautiful woman under him to the gun.

To its elegant lines. To its potential.

To the way in which it simplified things.

He wished she hadn’t asked him about it.

He wished she hadn’t asked him about where he was going. Or when he was coming back.

As the hot water rinsed away the soap and their commingled oils and the scent of her passion, Erasmus Tull tried to keep her in his thoughts. Only her.

But the gun was there. So close.

It never asked anything of him.

It never complicated things for him.

He closed his eyes and leaned into the spray.

And wondered what to do.

What was the right thing to do?

What was the human thing to do?

The shower pounded on his back, his head. The questions pounded inside his mind.

He ached for Berenice. To be with her. To be normal with her. To be able to be normal.

He ached for the gun and its simplicity.

In the past, when he was torn like he was now, the gun always won.

It always won.

Always.