Chapter 10
TOMMY
Tommy Dane did not get rattled.
That was a documented thing. Other men had said it about me in a number of countries, sometimes admiringly, sometimes not.
I could walk into a room with the wiring still smoking and ask a joke about it before I asked who'd lit the match.
I could take a phone call from a colonel and a phone call from a smuggler at the same time and lie expertly to both of them.
I was not the man you put in the back of an SUV when you needed somebody who'd shake.
I was, apparently, the man who got rattled by a girl with a guitar case slung across her back.
We were walking up King Street and she was telling me something about her roommate.
I was nodding in the right places. I wasn't tracking.
I'd taken in maybe one word in three since we'd left the donut shop, which was a thing I prided myself on never doing, especially with women, especially with women I'd just kissed in a public place after deciding to in approximately the last six minutes of a morning that was not supposed to involve kissing women at all.
I'd come into Charleston at midnight to be briefed on a federal investigation into my own brothers.
I'd been visited at six in the morning by a deputy director of the FBI.
I'd called Grant from a hotel suite and gotten silence.
I'd walked into a restaurant to think about all of it, and instead I'd walked across the room to fix a stranger's guitar, and now I was walking that stranger home with a piece of cardamom donut still on my breath and the kiss I'd given her sitting on me the way bourbon sat on an empty stomach.
She talked the way I'd noticed musicians talked when they were nervous.
Filling the spaces. Smoothing the silences.
Telling me about Tasha, who shared her dry shampoo.
Telling me about Devon, who worked nights, and Geoff, who quoted books at her in the kitchen until she felt about half a foot shorter than she was.
She pointed out the live oaks she'd come to know.
I let her. I needed the space to think.
The trouble was, I wasn't thinking.
The dishonest answers came easy. She was pretty. The voice had gotten me. I was in a city I didn't know with a head full of FBI and I'd needed something living to hold on to for ten minutes. Those were all true. They were also not the answer.
The answer was that she'd looked like a thing left undone.
A button on a shirt left unfastened by a man who'd run out of time.
A song with a missing third verse. A chore on a list that nobody was getting around to.
She'd looked like that, and some part of me that had no business making decisions on a winter morning in Charleston had said I will get around to it.
I didn't love that answer.
It implied things about me I usually managed not to think about.
I didn't pick up strays. I was a stray myself in a neat suit, and we did not adopt other strays. We drank our bourbon, did our work, and slept alone unless the company was going to be uncomplicated and over by morning.
This wasn't going to be uncomplicated. I'd known that the moment her hand had given me the Gibson and she'd let me see, in her face, how much it was costing her to hand a stranger something she only handed a few people in her life.
There had been a math problem in her eyes.
How much can I give this man before I owe him.
And I'd taken the guitar with both hands and tried to be worth the answer.
That hadn't been the move of a man who was passing through.
That had been the move of a man who'd already decided something and hadn't told himself what it was yet.
I genuinely did not have time for this.
There was a deputy director two blocks back from me with an investigation aimed at my family.
There was a brother in Charleston I hadn't laid eyes on yet.
There was another one in a riverside park in Utah yesterday who'd come and gone.
There was something coming in this city, big enough to pull seven brothers out of seven different lives, and I was walking the wrong direction from any of it because she'd looked like a thing left undone.
A real Tommy move.
I'd hate myself for it later, if it didn't pay off. I'd hate myself for it later, anyway, probably, because the kind of guy who let a girl into the gap in his concentration on a day like this one was the kind of guy who got people killed.
But she was talking, and the sun was hitting the side of her face, and every twenty seconds or so she'd glance up at me with the cautious half-smile of a girl who still wasn't sure whether the man walking her home was the same man who'd kissed her in a donut shop.
Every time she did it, something in my chest did something I was going to have to get a handle on.
"This is me," she said.
She'd stopped on the sidewalk in front of a narrow walk-up with an iron stair railing and a glass front door that had seen better days.
The kind of building people who waited tables in Charleston could mostly afford if they had three roommates, a generous landlord, and didn't ask too many questions about the heat in the winter.
"This?"
"Up there." She nodded at a window on the third floor, two over from the corner. "Yellow curtains. Tasha picked them."
"They’re cheerful."
"Aggressively."
"Sounds like a Tasha."
"Yes."
We stood there.
This was the part of any walk where the man worked out whether he was being invited up. I'd done this part more times than I could honestly count. I had a routine I ran. Low-key. Smooth. Nothing pushy. The kind that left a woman feeling like she'd made a free choice in either direction.
I didn't run the routine.
I just stood there and watched her work it out.
She was thinking about whether she could ask me up, and what it would mean if she did, and what it would mean if she didn't, and whether she had clean dishes in the sink, and whether Geoff was home, and whether the man on the sidewalk wanted to be asked or didn't want to be asked, and whether—if she got it wrong in either direction—she'd be standing here later wishing she'd done the other thing.
It was a lot of thinking for one sidewalk.
I let her have it.
I'd already decided the answer for her, in the way I tended to decide things for women I was about to disappoint.
I was not going up to that apartment. Not because I didn't want to.
God, I wanted to. I wanted to take her up those stairs and through that door past the aggressively cheerful yellow curtains, and find out, slowly and patiently and at my leisure, what other things she'd been keeping under the shy.
Because there were other things. The kiss had told me. The kiss she'd answered.
Half of me wanted to find out what was under all of it today.
The better half of me knew that today was the wrong word, and quickly was the wrong tempo, and a girl like this one was going to need to be unraveled, not unwrapped.
She wasn't a thing for a quick afternoon.
She was a thing for a long week and a longer weekend and, possibly, a calendar I didn't currently own.
The other matter was that I wasn't free this afternoon.
My phone buzzed against my hip.
I winced before I even looked.
"Sorry," I said. "One second."
A text from a number I didn't recognize and was probably not going to recognize again after today. Two lines.
An address and: Dominion Hall. ASAP.
I read it twice.
I read it out loud, because I'd already shown her enough that pretending to be a man with a normal job at a normal pace was an insult to both of us.
"Dominion Hall," I said.
"Dominion Hall? What is that?"
"Honest answer? I don't know."
She tipped her head, studying me.
"And you have to go."
"I have to go."
I watched her work to keep her face the way she wanted it. She did a respectable job. I caught the small flicker around the mouth where the disappointment leaked through, anyway.
It matched in my own chest. Which was a thing.
"Rebecca Lynn."
"Yeah."
"I'd like to see you again."
"Okay."
"That sounded too official." I tried again. "Do you make a habit of being at The Carolinian?"
Her mouth turned up.
"I'm there most days. Lunches and dinners. The schedule's not glamorous."
"Schedule's not the point."
She looked down. Looked up. The shy was back, but there was something behind it now that hadn't been there before. Something brave, maybe. Something that had decided to risk a small thing.
"If you mean it," she said, "come find me at work."
"I mean it."
"And if you tip well," she said, "next time, maybe I'll buy the donuts."
I stared at her.
She stood there with the strap of her guitar case across her chest and that uncertain courage on her face like she'd just stepped off a ledge to see if there was a floor.
It got me again. Right under the rib. Same place she'd gotten me at the table.
What else was under that shy exterior? What else, Jesus Christ?
She rocked up onto her toes.
She put her hand on my shoulder, light, and kissed me on the side of my jaw—a quick, warm press—and turned and pushed through the glass door of her building before I'd worked out how to breathe through it.
The door clicked shut.
I stood on the sidewalk like a man who'd been hit with something soft and heavy at the same time.
I had not seen that coming. I had not seen any of this coming.
I rubbed a hand over the side of my jaw where her mouth had been, slowly, like the gesture might confirm whether I'd hallucinated it. Then I dropped the hand.
I looked up at the third-floor window with the aggressively cheerful yellow curtains. I thought I saw the curtain move. I couldn't be sure.
I gave it a second.
Then, I turned my face down the sidewalk and tapped the address into my phone.
The route ran east, away from her building, away from the donut shop, away from the morning I'd just had.
It was running me back toward the hotel I'd left, toward the deputy director two doors down from my suite, toward the brother I hadn't been able to raise on a phone and whatever this Dominion Hall was, which I'd never heard of in my life.
I started walking.
Rebecca Lynn from Caton's Chapel was going to have to be a problem for later.
The other problem was now.