You've Got Male (34 page)

He said nothing as he entered, looking more tired than she had ever seen him. But then, he’d had a pretty busy couple of days. After instructing Gillespie to take Benny Culver in for questioning and assuring him he’d be right behind them, Dixon had driven Avery home—
home
home this time—and helped her get settled. There was no reason for her to accompany him to OPUS, and East Hampton was too far to drive when he had a suspect waiting for him. Plus, he knew she’d be more comfortable at home after everything she’d been through. Within minutes of their arrival, though, he’d been off again. And within minutes of his departure, Avery had known she would never be comfortable at home again. For some reason, home didn’t feel like home anymore. It hadn’t since Dixon had left.

Although he’d told her he was returning to OPUS to question Benny Culver, she knew Dixon would be questioned, too. He’d have to justify cutting short the meeting, something that had let Adrian Padgett slip through their fingers. She still didn’t understand why he had done that, why he had revealed himself when she hadn’t even been in any danger. Had he waited even ten more minutes, Adrian might have considered the situation safe and made an appearance. It didn’t make sense for a man of Dixon’s experience and expertise to do something so irresponsible and stupid. She’d told herself there must have been some danger she wasn’t aware of, that maybe Gillespie had identified something about the situation that put her at an immediate risk. But Gillespie had seemed as confused as Avery when he’d joined them.

“Is everything okay?” she asked now as Dixon went straight to her sofa and collapsed onto it.

He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday—jeans and a sweatshirt under the leather bomber jacket he’d worn that first night. The one she had feared might hide a weapon—other than his hands, which she recalled thinking then might be more dangerous than any manufactured firearm. She realized now that she’d been right about that. His hands really were very dangerous. Just not in the way she’d first thought, that was all. She was back into her usual at-home attire of battered pajama bottoms—these printed with cartoon cats—and an oversize sweatshirt of her own. Slowly she crossed the room to where he was sitting and folded herself down onto the sofa next to him.

“No, everything’s not okay,” he said wearily.

“What happened with Culver?” Avery asked.

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” he replied. “Your part in the assignment is officially concluded, so now you’re not on a need-to-know basis anymore.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought you’d say.”

“So what happened with Culver?” she asked again.

Dixon sighed heavily and told her, “We’re reasonably certain the guy is innocent of any real wrongdoing. It seems he was duped by Adrian the same way everyone else was.”

“Like me, you mean,” she said softly.

“Like lots of people,” he assured her. “He says he met Adrian at Columbia, where they were in the same postgrad class, and that they became friends because they shared an interest in a certain computer virus that was unleashed on the world some years ago.”

Heat swamped Avery’s insides. “Mine, you mean.”

Dixon nodded.

She expelled an exasperated sound. “God, I still can’t believe there are people out there who remember that thing and think it was so great. I’m never going to live it down.”

Dixon said nothing, only continued, “You would have thought Culver had just met Paris Hilton, he was so starstruck by you.”

Avery closed her eyes but said nothing. Would there ever come a day when she could just be a normal, anonymous person? Oh, right. Of course not. She was too whack. And the world was too unforgiving.

“Anyway, he said Adrian told him he’d met someone online who had been badgering him to meet in person—”

“Oh, please!” Avery said, outraged now. “I badgered him?”

Dixon smiled. “I told you you were good at that.”

She growled at him but said only, “Go on.”

“Long story short, Adrian told Culver he’d pay him fifty bucks to meet you first, in case you turned out to be a nutcase, and Culver, being a broke college student, not to mention an ardent fan, jumped on it. Of course, we know Adrian offered him the money to do it in case you were being watched. Evidently he did get suspicious of your too-quick capitulation to meet. I shouldn’t have pushed you to make contact so soon.” He paused for a moment, then added, “I shouldn’t have done a lot of things I did for this assignment. But I guess it’s too late now.”

Avery swallowed hard.
Here it comes,
she thought.
The big brush-off.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, huh?” she asked softly.

“Whoa, yeah.”

“You didn’t lose your job, did you?”

He shook his head. “No, but I got a nice diatribe from my boss that lasted a good forty-five minutes. And they’re bucking me down a few ranks, which will limit my benefits and delay my retirement. And I’m probably going to keep hearing about this for the rest of my career. What’s left of it anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Dixon,” Avery said.

He turned to look at her, meeting her gaze intently. “I’m not.”

She arched her eyebrows in surprise. “Why not?”

“It’s not the job I’m talking about when it comes to being in trouble,” he told her. “I’ve been in trouble at work lots of times. My butt gets chewed for forty-five minutes at least once a year, and the bust in rank is mild compared to what they could have done to me. It’s
you,
Avery,” he added. “You’re the reason I’m in a lot of trouble.”

“I know,” she said, her words touched with exasperation. “That’s why I’m apologizing. Because I screwed up everything so badly.”

“You didn’t screw anything up, I did,” he told her. “You were doing just fine. You don’t owe anyone an apology. Not OPUS for the job. And not me for the trouble you put me in.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “So then what kind of trouble are you talking about?”

He grinned. “Woman trouble.”

“I’m not woman trouble,” she countered.

“Peaches, you’re nothing
but
trouble,” he assured her. He lifted a hand and brushed a strand of her hair back over her shoulder, then dropped it nervously back into his lap, as if he feared some kind of reprisal for what he’d done. “But as anyone in OPUS will tell you,” he added, “I love trouble.”

Her heart hammered hard in her chest at hearing him say what he did. She told herself not to hope, that she must be misunderstanding. He couldn’t possibly mean—

“I love you,” he said further without one iota of uncertainty or frustration. And without another word, too, as if he were waiting to see how she would react to the announcement. As if he feared maybe she didn’t reciprocate.

Men could be such idiots sometimes.

“You love me?” she said softly, still not quite able to believe him.

“I do,” he told her.

“Even though I’m not…normal?”

He chuckled at that, and some of the tension she’d sensed in him seemed to ease. “Normal means common,” he told her. “It’s ordinary. It’s routine. It’s predictable. It’s boring. Why would anyone fall in love with normal?”

“Why would anyone fall in love with whack?” she countered.

“You’re not whack,” he said softly. “You’re unique. You’re distinctive. You’re rare. You’re special.”

Never in her life had she been called such things. Things similar, certainly, but never flattering.
Strange, bizarre, odd, peculiar—
those were words she had heard applied to her often enough. And those were the most polite. Not once had anyone said she was special. Not once had anyone thought she was special. Until Dixon.

“That night at my parents’ party,” she said, thinking now was her chance to ask him about that healing comment he’d made.

“What about it?” he asked.

“When we were dancing, you told me my scabs had healed but I couldn’t stop showing off my scars,” she reminded him. “What did you mean by that? How could you say I was healed? Especially since I’d just nearly had a panic attack.”

“How can you not understand that?” he countered. “Especially since when I said it you’d just successfully battled a panic attack?”

She opened her mouth to say something more, then realized she had no idea what to say.

“Look at you,” he continued when she didn’t speak. “How can you think you’re
not
healed?”

“I do look at myself,” she said. “I look at myself every day. I’m a mess. My life is a mess.”

He started shaking his head before she even finished talking, even went so far as to chuckle at her. “No, Avery, you’re not a mess,” he said. “And neither is your life. Maybe you don’t live conventionally, but you’re not a mess. Your family—now, they’re a mess,” he said with a smile. “You…you survived that mess. You knew a long time ago how you wanted to live your life, what you wanted to make of it and yourself, and you went after it. In spite of them. In spite of everything. Maybe you didn’t make it easy on yourself and maybe you stumbled a little here and there along the way, but, hell, who doesn’t? That’s what life is all about. You’re a survivor,” he told her. “Even with all the adversity you had to put up with—your family, prison, agoraphobia, seclusion—you’ve made a productive life for yourself. You have a job, a home, money in the bank. Hell, you’ve made more of your life than a lot of people without adversity have. And you did it all by yourself.”

“But I’m terrified to leave my home,” she reminded him.

He met her gaze levelly. “Yeah, well, that’s something we can work on. And what, you don’t think most people
aren’t
afraid to leave their homes from time to time? You’re just in a position where you don’t have to, that’s all. There are a million people out there who, if given a choice, wouldn’t go out in this world. And frankly I don’t blame them.”

“But—”

“You’re not perfect, Avery,” he continued, not giving her a chance to interrupt. “But you’re not a mess, either. You’re a decent human being, and at the end of the day you can go to bed knowing you haven’t hurt anyone. You haven’t betrayed anyone. You haven’t made anyone unhappy. Do you know how few people can honestly say that?”

She realized she wanted to keep arguing with him, then asked herself why she was so determined to. He was right. Maybe she hadn’t lived a normal life so far, but neither had she led an empty one. Because she had found enjoyment in many of her pursuits. And she had learned from her experiences. And now she wanted to learn more. Wanted to be more. Wanted not to be normal but to be…unbroken. Complete. Whole.

She smiled at the thought. She was whole, she told herself. Because what she had been missing, she finally realized, was love. Someone to love and someone to love her in return. Now that she had both of those things, she could…

A feeling welled up inside her then that very nearly overwhelmed her, a potent concoction of happiness and well-being and hope and a certainty that everything would eventually be all right. It was unlike anything she had ever felt in her life, and for a moment she was nearly drunk with it.

“I love you, too,” she told Dixon, exhilarated to finally be able to say it. To finally be able to acknowledge it. To finally be able to feel it.

She launched herself forward and into his arms, her mouth finding his unerringly. For a long time they remained tangled in their embrace, reacquainting themselves with the feel and smell and taste of each other. And Avery was filled to near bursting with an exhilarating understanding that this was only the first of an infinite number of such embraces. She would never, ever be alone again. Because she would always, always have Dixon. And he would always, always have her.

When he pulled his mouth from hers, she murmured a disappointed sound and pushed herself forward again. But after one brief kiss Dixon placed his hand between their mouths and said, “There’s something else I’m not supposed to tell you about the assignment. Something else you need to know.”

And even though the assignment was the last thing Avery wanted to talk about at the moment, the look on his face made her pause. “What?” she asked.

He shifted their positions until they were seated next to each other, Avery cuddling at his side, one arm draped over her shoulder, their hands linked in her lap. “You need to know the reason we took the assignment to your parents’ house.”

“I already figured that out,” she said, thinking it odd he would bring up something like that just when things between them were heating up. “To keep me under Adrian’s radar.”

Dixon shook his head. “No, that’s what they told me, too, at first, but it wasn’t that.”

“Then what?”

His gaze found hers and held it. “It was because your father wanted you to come home, Avery.”

Certain she must have misunderstood, she said, “What are you talking about?”

“My boss, the one who ordered me to take you to East Hampton, knows your father.”

“What?”

“They went to college together,” Dixon said. “He met you, in fact, when you were a kid.”

Avery recalled that first night at OPUS, the man she’d met right after Dixon had taken her out of her restraints. “I knew he looked familiar!”