At the charity fundraiser Lucas was Pete. Cocky, suave, a city banker, just a little too self assured, a little too used to getting his own way. Ros was there as Pete's Jenny – the cool sophisticate to complement his over inflated ego.
And Jo was invisible – or at least she should have been. Just one of a sea of black and white amongst the crowd, only there to provide a service no name, no identity of her own. Lucas had noticed her though, his eyes picking out the blonde contrast with the startling blue of her eyes and the rosy pink of her lips.
Everything went smoothly until Lucas spied a face amongst the crowd he recognised, Acer Dalek, Ros said. That wasn't part of the plan.
Neither was what happened next. As Jo moved towards the other side of the room she saw the back of the man in the business suit in front of her. Then he turned and for a moment he was Boscard, the face from her dreams. For a second she was back in that cell – his body on top of her, his hands rough and demanding and his breath hot against her face as she tried not to think about what he was doing to her and focus instead on how the bars from the window had broken the light to cast shadows on the floor.
Lucas heard a sharp intake of breath and then turned to see Jo collapse while the tray clattered to the floor in a flash of glass and metal and champayne.
He excused himself and, taking her arm, dragged her into the kitchen.
"What's going on?" he asked her accusingly, as she hastily brushed off his grip.
"I'm fine – I slipped," she said, avoiding his gaze.
"I think I know what happened and if there is a problem you need to speak to Harry," he said coldly, watching her face intensely while she stared at the floor, secretly hoping it would open up and swallow her so she wouldn't have to face the humiliation of his open contempt.
Jo said nothing for a moment, but continued to look at the floor. She wondered why out of all the team it had to be Lucas who could read her mind. Over the past few weeks, they had worked together successfully on a number of operations, but their relationship could hardly be called close. She still didn't really know anything about Lucas North and he had a quality about him, a foreigness, that made her uneasy.
She wished that it was Ros or Connie or someone she wouldn't have felt so at a disadvantage with standing here in the kitchen with her. Someone familiar, someone who wasn't so …masculine, someone who wouldn't judge her so harshly for exposing the rest of the team to danger by her behaviour.
Jo desperately wished she could fix herself so that she could avoid making a spectacle of herself in the future but she had no idea how to do that without opening up her wounds in a way that was undoubtedly going to be painful.
She took in a breath and prayed he wasn't going to say anything further about the reason for her actions because God knows he was the last person she wanted to talk to about that.
After a moment she straightened herself up and put out her palm, "I'll return it," she said quietly. He hesitated for a second, then handed her the wallet and distractedly watched her as she left the kitchen.
As moved towards the door Lucas cursed softly to himself.
Earlier that day he'd noticed how distracted she'd been when she returned from Meynall's office, seen her nervous fidgeting and wondered what the problem was. He should have guessed that that would be the cause. He could see now in retrospect that Jo had been trying desperately to hide the little lapses in her behaviour over the past few weeks, to disguise the evidence that she was in trouble. He supposed it was an instinct. She was a spy after all. And also an instinct to keep to herself the effects of something so private.
Lucas couldn't help but feel angry with Harry for not picking it up, for wilfully choosing to ignore the fact that Boscard had raped her because it was the kind of conversation that you wouldn't know how to begin and once it started it was likely to quickly get much worse as it progressed, if any truths were to be spoken.
The same kind of conversation, he thought to himself, that Harry had deliberately avoided about what had happened to him in prison. Polite silence reigned, but at a cost.
He would have to let Harry know about Jo. Although he'd told her to talk to Harry, from her expression it was clear that she would be unlikely to be able to bring herself to talk to either him or Harry about what had happened. Lucas knew that an officer unravelling in the field was a dangerous state of affairs for everyone involved.
He sighed and returned his attention to trying to remember where he had last seen Acer Dalek.