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uncomfortably, until Sean had crossed to the Shogun, unlocked it, and we’d both climbed inside. He finally moved away only as the engine turned over and fired. I followed my would-be protector’s progress in my door mirror. He looked back twice before he finally disappeared from my field of view.
    When I glanced over I found that Sean had sat back in his seat and was regarding me with those bottomless black eyes.
    I had a raw fluttering in my chest as reaction set in, a kind of adrenaline hangover. I knew if I reached out now he’d see that my hands were shaking, and I would not give him that satisfaction. I kept my hands together in my lap and refused to meet his eyes.
    He sighed. “I was wrong about you, Charlie,” he said evenly. His eyes flicked to the windscreen. “You’ll never know how sorry I am that I had to threaten you to find out for certain.”
    I wanted to ask,
What were you trying to find out?
But what I asked instead was: “So why did you?”
    The question came out stark and I knew he’d picked up on what was there between the lines, but he was silent for long enough for me to regret asking.
Did I really want to know the answer?
    “Because I care about you,” he said at last, turning his head and looking straight into my eyes with such sincerity that my body lit up in reflexive response, the way a pupil reacts to light.
    So, yes, I did want to know, after all.
    He had exactly the same concentrated look on his face that he’d had when he’d pulled the knife on me. It was that, more than anything, that shut down my unexpected spike of pleasure.
    “Oh, of course,” I said with a kind of breathless little laugh that didn’t entirely obscure the bitterness in my voice. “In some cultures, coming at me with a blade could be considered almost akin to a proposal of marriage.”
    He reached out and pushed a few strands of hair back from my face with infinitely gentle fingers. My heart stammered in my chest, then overreached in its effort to catch up.
    “In my head, I know how good you are, Charlie,” he said. “I’ve always known. Right from the moment I first started to train you—you had that instinct, that spark. You should have had a brilliant career as a soldier. You burned so bright you were dazzling.” He paused, looked away and said quietly, “What happened to you was criminal, in every sense of the word.”
    I didn’t speak. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say.
    Somewhere below, on another floor, a multitone car alarm siren was sounding, muffled by the distance and ignored anyway. London teemed and bubbled around us. We were encircled by millions of people, and utterly isolated from all of them.
    “But in my heart,” he went on, “I’m so afraid for you every time I send you out on a job, I can hardly function.”
    Part of me knew what he was saying, but something goaded me into provoking him, even so. “You don’t trust me,” I said, an accusation rather than a query.
    He made an uncommon gesture of frustration. “Christ, you know that’s not it. It’s not being able to be out there with you.” The Shogun’s engine note dipped as the cold-start disengaged and it dropped back to slow idle. “It would break every rule in the book if I put us on a team together when we’re involved. How could I be sure, if you were in the line of fire, that I’d always cover the principal? And if that happened, well—,” he shrugged his shoulders, “I’d be finished.”
    “So instead you have to keep reassuring yourself that I’m ready,” I said slowly. “Is that why you assigned me to work with Kelso in Prague? Is that why you’ve sprung this trip to the States on me? Some kind of test?”
    “Partly,” he said, throwing me a tired smile. “Kelso’s a useful man but a hopeless misogynist, and you proved—yet again—that you’ve got what it takes to cope with the Kelsos of this world.”
    He’d carefully avoided the rest of the question, I noticed, but I