Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
“I’d relocate him first.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“I’m a considerate man.” But his hand comes out of his jacket and finds my waist instead. He pulls me in and kisses me once. It’s unhurried like he doesn’t have a care in the world, when I know he’s carrying the weight of it on his shoulders.
When he pulls back, his eyes are still moving. “Get in. I’ll take you home.”
Home. He says it like it’s a settled thing, my things in his closet, and I don’t hate it.
But I don’t get in.
I’ve spent three days going from his house to this building and back to his house, escorted on both ends, watched the whole way. I love him for it. I really do. But I’m also losing my mind a little.
I’m a grown woman and a trained operative and I haven’t stood unsupervised in open air since the gallery. I glance at Occidental Park across the street. The cobblestones and the bare-branched trees call to me.
Normal. Ten yards away.
“Let’s go for a walk in the park,” I say.
“Josie.”
“Ten minutes. Across the street from Jameson. In full view of approximately forty people.” I take his hand, the one that isn’t his shooting hand, and I lace our fingers. “I’m tired of being moved between two boxes, Finn. I need to stand in the actual world for ten minutes with the actual man I’m—” I stop just short of the word, and I watch him notice that I stopped. “Ten minutes. Please.”
He looks at the park and then back to me. I can see him running the math and I can see the exact moment he decides that giving me this is worth more than his worry.
“Ten minutes,” he says. “We stay where I can see the street and if I tell you to move, you move, no questions.”
That’s a bit dramatic, but I say, “Deal.”
We cross at the light, hands clasped tight. The cobblestones are uneven under my heels and Finn keeps to the street side of me without making a thing of it, his eyes never fully still, even as his thumb brushes over my knuckles.
We find a spot near the pergola where he can put his back to a column and see the whole square, and only when he’s settled there does some of the tension come down out of his shoulders. “This okay?” he asks.
“This is perfect. Thank you.”
For a minute, we just stand there and watch a little boy chase a pigeon, shrieking with joy when it bursts up into the gray sky. A dog noses at the base of a tree, considers lifting his leg, then moves on. It’s so perfectly ordinary that I feel my whole nervous system unclench a notch. I lean into Finn’s side and let myself have it.
His arm comes around my waist and he presses his lips to my hair. For a moment, he relaxes into the hug, but then I feel a change.
Upon sensing a small pulse of tension, I lift my face to him. “What is it?”
“I saw Connie today.”
“And?”
“She came on board the boat, walked in like nothing happened.” His jaw works. “Easy. Light. Like the gallery was a fever dream.”
“That’s great, right?”
“If I believe it was authentic.”
“And you don’t?”
Finn sighs and I pull out of his embrace to face him.
“I don’t know what to believe.” He says it without hesitation, and then, slower, “That’s the problem. I had her pegged. I sat across from Marcus this morning before she showed and told him flat out she’d gone to Mikhail, that I knew it in my gut. And then she walked in and she was just… Connie. Hungover and apologetic and giving me grief, and I felt the certainty start to slide.”
“What did you do?”
“I tested her.” He lifts a shoulder. “Sort of, and she passed… sort of.”
“Tested?”
“I told her she was off an upcoming run we have.”
I can’t help but wince at the mention of something illegal he’ll be doing soon, but he doesn’t catch it.
“The Connie I know would have gotten pissed about it. I think if she was harboring guilt, she would have meekly accepted it, and she didn’t. She was an ass, and that sort of made me feel like things are okay.”
I don’t say anything right away. I think about how all of life is a performance and a person who knows you for eighteen years knows exactly which version of herself reads as innocent. A guilty Connie who understands Finn would not take the easy exit. A guilty Connie who understands Finn would fight him for the cut, because she’d know that the fight is what he’d read as proof.
The pushback isn’t evidence she’s clean.
The pushback is evidence she knows what clean looks like to him.
I don’t say that, though, because I’m sure Finn has already turned that over in his brain a million times.