Knowing he couldn't personally return the relic to the allies in the mosque, Darius followed established protocol. After some coded exchanges with his handler, it was arranged that a courier-a longtime informant for the U.S.-would take a package containing the relic and slip back into the Kashmir. He would deliver it to the conspirators.

The courier, who was not told what the package contained, never arrived at Srinagar. Efforts were being made to discover what happened, but the bottle, as well as the courier, were missing.

Darius, waiting in Islamabad, still had custody of the cleric when he received orders to fly back to New York. He turned the cleric over to others. He didn't know where the man was being held. He didn't know whether he had been brought to the U.S. He doubted it. They never were.

Darius squeezed my hand. "That's the story. All of it. As far as I was concerned it was an intelligence operation. It had nothing to do with you. It had nothing to do with me coming to your apartment. I came to see you because being away from you was tearing me up inside."

He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he started talking again, his voice low, strained, filled with pain.

"I had resigned myself to your marrying Fitzmaurice. I've been a soldier all my adult life. I always figured I'd die young. I had girlfriends, sure. I never had a committed relationship. You seemed to need it. I didn't do such a great job giving it to you.

"I found out who Fitzmaurice was. n.o.body had a bad word to say about him. I figured the right thing to do was step out of the picture. Give you a chance to be happy.

"But, d.a.m.n it, Daphne, it killed me. If I had still been human I would have hung it up. I really didn't care anymore about anything. When I found out you didn't marry him, I can't lie to you, I was glad.

"Right then I started making arrangements to wrap up the band tour and get out of Germany. Before my orders came through for the mission I was putting in for a transfer back to the States. If they didn't go for it I was going to resign. I had to see for myself how you felt."

Despair had dictated his words. Hope came with confession. His face had more color now. His stare moved up and down my face. I hoped he saw what he was looking for.

"I have to be up-front with you. I can't promise much. I don't know what the h.e.l.l is going to happen. We'll have to figure it out as we go along. But if you want me to love you for as long as I exist on this planet, I can give you that."

A seismic shift took place deep inside me. "I never asked you for anything else," I said, and leaned toward him.

His lips came down on mine. I felt the kiss all the way to my toes. I slipped off the stool and melted into his arms. I had nothing on under the leather jacket. His hands came up under it and stroked my back. I made a little sound in my throat, something between a purr and a moan.

I positioned myself between his legs and pressed into him, feeling him getting hard through his jeans. I knew what I wanted. I knew what he wanted. We were always good at the physical part of our relationship. Right now I'd settle for true love and great s.e.x. We'd wrangle about the domestic details of our relationship some other time.

The city was quiet in the hushed moments between the end of night and the first stirrings of dawn. No traffic sounds rose up from the street. No sirens wailed. I glanced toward the window. A moth struggled against the gla.s.s, its wings moving as fast and fluttering as the beating of my heart.

In my bedroom, in the bed where I did not sleep but where I lay with Darius this morning, I cared about nothing but being with my lover. I cared about nothing but what his hands were doing to me as they pulled off my tight black pants and spread my legs.

His thumbs pressing into the white flesh of my thighs, Darius knelt down beside the bed. His fingers glided up my naked sides, leaving a trail of fire. Pausing at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, their tips brushed my nipples with electric effect. I shut my eyes and reveled in the pleasure.

Now his soft lips began to nibble where his thumbs had pressed, kissing one inner thigh, then the other. Then he pressed his face into my nest of curls. His tongue was warm when it touched me, there at the dark, wet center of myself. His lips encircled the small, hard nub above my velvet shaft. He sucked and nibbled. I moaned.

I moaned again, then mewed, the sensations rapidly building in my belly. I pulled my knees up and back until my feet were flat on the sheets near my waist, giving Darius complete access to me. I wanted him to do whatever he wanted with me. To touch and probe, bite and suck. I offered myself completely.

He used his mouth in magic ways. My pleasure was a playground swing carrying me toward the heavens, then back to earth, each arc going higher. But soon, as much as his c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s excited me, it was not enough. A stronger yearning drove my needs; a nameless yearning filled me.

I needed to join our bodies, fuse our flesh. I had to have the oneness of lovers, the loss of my own self in order to gain his.

"Come on top of me," I whispered, lifting his head with my hands.

"I want to make you come first," he said and refused me.

"No, please," I begged. "Go inside me," I pleaded.

Instead his lips came down on my nub again, making me groan partly in protest, partly in submission.

But he let us join-not as I expected, but just as completely. He shifted his body to one side of me, pressing one of my legs down. Then, his body inverted, his leg swung over me, until he knelt astride my head, his long, hard member poised above my face. I reached up and stroked its smooth length. Then I saw Darius look back and begin to lower himself until the smooth head of his shaft touched my lips.

I opened my mouth and took him deeply into it, enveloping him. My fingers encircled his base, and I sucked on his rod of love.

And then my body jumped. I felt something hard entering me below where his lips had been. It was not his member, which I greedily devoured, but his rough, thick hand. First he pushed his index finger in, then his middle finger with it; then he pulled them out and added his ring finger. Three firm, long fingers slowly worked their way into my body, forcing their entrance, stretching me wide.

I bucked and bore down. My weight forced the fingers in deeper. He pressed harder with his mouth at the same time as he slipped his pinkie around to join the others, and his hand, his whole hand, slid deeper, my slippery wetness allowing him to do what I didn't think could be done.

That engorged with him, I was struck with a lightning bolt of sensation that coursed from his hand through my entire body. I moaned, the sound issuing despite my full mouth. I sucked on him harder, and Darius matched my rhythms with his rocking hand.

We did this for what seemed like a very long time, together in the most intimate way, our boundaries gone.

Finally, though, I began to peak. Sensations gathered inside me, starting to lift me high. Wild and out of control, I wanted still more.

My velvet well pulsed around his fingers. My own hands grabbed hard on the cheeks of his a.s.s.

I took my mouth from his hard rod. It was wet with my saliva. At that moment I pulled myself up with my arms and bore down with all my might, forcing his fingers deeper till they hit that place inside that sent me into a swoon.

"There," I whispered. "Press there." The G-spot. The tantric secret. "Oh, my G.o.d. More, more." I whimpered. "More, oh, my G.o.d. Yes. Yes."

The sensations were sweeping me toward distant realms. I was on the verge of o.r.g.a.s.m. I was holding off, prolonging the pleasure, rhythmically moving against his hand. Then, without warning, Darius's other hand stroked across my a.s.s, slipping under me. I felt a finger enter me from behind.

My eyes snapped open. He pressed from that direction, and a guttural groan came out of my throat. His member sought my lips again. I opened and swallowed him hard as waves of ecstasy began to rock me. My body shuddered.

Darius refused to release me. He held me with all his strength. The o.r.g.a.s.m intensified. I could barely breathe. His fingers impaled me front and back, his mouth still fastened tight on my nub as his fingers probed.

He had me then. He had me forever. He had me body and spirit for his own.

A still greater o.r.g.a.s.m rocked me from head to toe; my whole body shook; I gave up all control and let the feelings consume me as Darius consumed me with his lips, his tongue, his teeth, his hands. And then, only then, when my pleasure had pa.s.sed and my body relaxed, did he himself start to shake.

In a warm flood he released his sperm. His fluids filled my throat. I drank them down.

I was completely in his power, holding my lover inside me, unwilling to let him release me. Tears sprang to my eyes, and, finally realizing I was sated as I never had been before, I became still.

Later, Darius had carried me from the bed into the living room, my face buried in his neck. With me on his lap he sat on the sofa and held me. We didn't speak, we just let all the hurts of the past fade away. I felt whole and content.

We made love again before we entered my secret room. We slept in each other's arms, on blankets on the floor next to my coffin. I didn't want to release my embrace of him. I couldn't bear to let him be out of my touch.

When we awoke at dusk I stretched the length of me next to him. "What do we do tonight?" I asked in a whisper.

He stroked my hair. "I have to go to talk with my people. I have to leave. So do you. But it doesn't matter. I'll be back. I'll always come back. I'm never leaving you again, Daphne. And when we're apart, I'll still be with you."

He kissed my eyelids. " 'Twice or thrice had I loved thee / Before I knew thy face or name / So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame / Angels affect us oft, and worshiped be.' John Donne wrote that, and you, my angel are," he said.

"And you are my sun, my moon, my guiding star," I replied.

Benny had asked me what I had in common with Darius. The answer was, my soul.

Chapter 15.

"Sweetest love, I do not go For weariness of thee. " For weariness of thee. "-Jonn Donne, "Song"

Duty demanded our parting, calling us both to the same work for different masters.

Darius washed, dressed, and started to leave, not revealing where he was going. He still kept his secrets, far too many of them. I stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the jamb, watching him as he headed for the front door. Before he left he turned and recited, " 'The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.'"

"Wordsworth," I said. "You are a man for pretty words."

"That I am," he said, and was gone.

Only then did I jump in the shower and wash away the traces of our loving.

The Darkwings had a briefing scheduled at eight thirty. Despite my remorse at arriving late the other day-which upon second thought had clearly been an overreaction-I called Benny and told her to meet me at Saks Fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick's in twenty minutes.

I called Audrey too. She didn't answer her cell phone. I hoped she was busy in a good way.

Benny and I decided we should get our stories straight before we saw J. And I needed to pick up some D & G Light Blue, my favorite summer fragrance. Some people might think that the middle of a national crisis wasn't the right time to go shopping. I believed in mult.i.tasking and taking advantage of opportunity. Saks was as good a place to meet as any.

Benny didn't mind. She liked Bulgari Blu and wanted another bottle. Wearing white linen pants beneath a navy blue linen blazer and in full makeup, as always, she blended in with Saks' clientele as she waited for me in the cosmetics department.

I didn't. Not that I wanted to. I had a thing for Neiman Marcus, especially the store in the Houston Galleria. To me, anything from Saks was dressing down. And I had a motorcycle lesson later, so I had opted for just denim-if Neiman Marcus's two-hundred-dollar jeans and D & G jacket costing the earth were "just denim."

"One thing about this here job of ours," my pal Benny said as she let one of the roaming salespeople spray the underside of her wrist with L, Gwen Stefani's debut line for L.A.M.B. "What do you think?" she said, thrusting her wrist beneath my nose.

"Nice. Floral. Some musk."

"And 'watery greens,'" the saleswoman said, hopefully aiming the atomizer in my direction.

What the h.e.l.l are 'watery greens?? I thought. Seaweed Seaweed? I shook my head in the negative. I liked a citrus base for myself.

Benny gave the woman a thank-you, but no sale. We walked on.

"As I was saying," she said, "about this job, I surely do like the paycheck. And the use of the apartment. I never could afford to live in Manhattan."

I didn't know the agency had provided Benny with a flat. I didn't disapprove; in fact, I thought it was a great idea. Cormac, in his tiny Greenwich Village s.p.a.ce, might see things differently. But why shouldn't he get an apartment too? And what about Rogue, stuck out in New Jersey? I didn't think he was living in Newark because he liked the amenities. I put housing on my list of things to stick my nose into at some point.

I didn't need government funding. Like Audrey, who lived down in the Village, I owned my apartment, always had. In fact, through a dummy corporation, I owned the building. Money was not an issue with me for a lot of reasons. My mother's being one of the world's wealthiest women was one of them. She had endowed me with an inheritance stashed in a Swiss bank account long ago.

My interception of a multimillion-dollar cashier's check destined to buy blood diamonds was another. Interception Interception is a euphemism for what I did. I stole it, pure and simple. And I didn't feel the least bit guilty about is a euphemism for what I did. I stole it, pure and simple. And I didn't feel the least bit guilty about that that.

Our purchases made, we left Saks by the Fifth Avenue exit, and I flagged down a cab. Once we were settled into the backseat, I said to Benny in low voice so the cabbie couldn't overhear us-not that he could hear much above the screaming announcer at the Yankees game-"You know, I've been thinking. We know what these guys want. It's not up to us to give it to them. So I think we have to focus on finding the ship."

"You think they're all dead? The crew of the Intrepid Intrepid, I mean?" Her eyes looked distant. She curled a strand of blond hair around her finger.

"Forget what you saw on the Belgium Belgium. The terrorists need the Intrepid's Intrepid's people for hostages. They'll be okay," I said with more certainty than I felt. In truth, I figured it could go either way. They could already be dead. "What are your ideas about our next move?" I asked her. people for hostages. They'll be okay," I said with more certainty than I felt. In truth, I figured it could go either way. They could already be dead. "What are your ideas about our next move?" I asked her.

"Let's see," she said. "Audrey might have something to tell us. And maybe J got information out of that there tire fellow. Then we can go talk to the Looie again," she suggested.

I thought for a moment. "If you had to guess, where do you think the Intrepid Intrepid is?" is?"

"Right now, with what we know, I'd say it's within fifty miles of here."

"Why?"

"There ain't no advantage taking it farther. If the threat is to blow it up, what's the fun of blowing it up out in the ocean? h.e.l.l, n.o.body would even know it. Right?"

"Smart, very smart. So it's someplace nearby, but we can't see it. How are we going to find it?"

"Now, I ain't no fortune-teller, Daph. That's more your thing. I'm out of ideas."

I went back to thinking. I'd known a lot of Gypsies throughout my life, and not one of them was a real fortuneteller. They were sensitives, a lot of them. I mean they "sensed" things, seen and unseen. They had a talent for guessing. That was as far as it went.

We didn't need a fortune-teller. As Rogue had said more than once, the best way to get information was by getting ourselves a snitch.

"You know, Benny," I said. "I think we need to talk to that tire guy ourselves."

"I hope he can still talk. I don't want to think what the men in black have been doing to him," she said.

Or my mother, I silently added. And speaking of my mother, I realized I had some unfinished business with her. I had come close to cutting her out of my life more than once over the centuries when I thought she went too far. This thing with Darius, it was a deal breaker. She'd stepped over the line this time.

Rain was falling when we got out of the cab at the Flatiron Building. A brisk wind swept across the island from New Jersey. The leaves on the trees in Madison Square Park on the other side of Twenty-third Street moved in a crazy dance, stirring memories of forests long gone.

"d.a.m.n," Benny said. "I didn't even bring a scarf. I'm going to be all frizzed."

"I hope it's just a shower. Rogue promised to teach me to operate my bike before dawn."

"You didn't wear your leathers," Benny remarked.

"I'm wearing jeans and a denim jacket. I'm probably just going to be riding around a parking lot at five miles an hour. I'll risk it."

In the elevator I said to Benny, "Where do you suppose they are?"

"Who? The crew?"