Chapter 4 #2
She breathed out slowly through her nose. The discipline held. Barely. Only knowing Prescott was going to get what was coming to him. Doing anything tonight would do nothing but tip him off.
She needed to move, keep circulating. Prescott was still at the bar—she could hear the murmur of his conversation through the receiver—and she had at least another hour of useful observation ahead of her.
She dropped her untouched wine on a passing tray and started toward a cluster of guests near the auction tables.
She saw him from twenty feet away, and her whole body went still.
Isaac.
Dark suit, no tie, top button undone. A glass in his hand. He’d been talking to a woman in a green dress, but he wasn’t talking to her anymore. He was looking across the room. At Fallon.
He was already moving.
She turned away. Adjusted her path toward a cluster of guests near the auction tables, keeping bodies between them. Her left knee twinged on the pivot—a sharp little flare that reminded her she’d been on her feet for over an hour in a room with concrete floors.
She kept moving. Maybe he wouldn’t be sure it was her. She’d changed everything tonight—the makeup, the hair, the way she carried herself. If she kept walking, he might second-guess himself. Let it go.
“Fallon.”
Her stomach dropped. She stopped walking, and for one full second she considered not turning around.
Just keep moving. Pretend she hadn’t heard.
Disappear through the service door she’d clocked earlier and be in a cab before he made it to her.
But she couldn’t take a chance on him shouting her name and drawing attention to her.
She turned.
He was now just a few feet away. His expression was hard to read—not angry, not cold, but not the easy warmth from last week’s gala either. He looked like a man who’d crossed a room on instinct and was now figuring out what he wanted to say.
“I thought that was you.” He tilted his head. “Wasn’t sure for a second.”
That had been deliberate on her part, but she couldn’t explain that to him.
“Isaac.” She let herself smile. Small, controlled. “Hi.”
Up close he was worse than she remembered in all the best ways.
The suit fit him like it had been cut for his body, and without a tie the open collar showed the line of his throat, the hollow at the base of it.
His jaw was still just as sharp, but the stubble on it tonight made him look less polished and more dangerous.
His eyes caught the overhead lighting and shifted—green at the edges, gold near the center.
She looked away before she could catalog anything else.
“You look different tonight.”
She kept her voice light. “You know how it is: new event, new look.”
“It’s working. You look good.” His eyes moved over her—not the way men usually looked at her, cataloging parts. He was studying. She could practically watch him filing away the discrepancies between what he saw now and what he remembered.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, because she needed to steer this somewhere she could manage. Prescott’s voice was still humming in her ear, but she ignored it.
“Working. You?”
“Same.” She left it there. The less detail she offered, the less he could cross-reference later.
“That’s a shame. Because there’s a perfectly good dance floor over there that nobody’s using, and I’ve been standing here for an hour trying to figure out what to call the music this DJ is playing. Best I’ve come up with is a computer having a dream.”
Her mouth tilted into a smile before she could stop it. “A computer having a dream.”
“It’s either that or elegant dial-up noises. I’ll workshop it.”
She couldn’t stop the full smile at that. Damn it.
“Dance with me.”
Her smile faded. She should leave. Right now, while the conversation was light enough to walk away from. He was a distraction she couldn’t afford. And more than that, he was a material witness. Someone who could place her at potential crime scenes.
But her body wasn’t moving toward the door. Her body was angled toward him, weight shifted onto her right foot to ease the ache in her left knee, and the distance between them had somehow closed to two feet without either of them stepping forward.
“One dance,” she said. “Then I have to get back to work.”
He held out his hand, a half-smile tilting his lips, causing ridiculous somersaults in her belly.
She took it, and as they walked toward the open floor, his palm settled against the small of her back.
The heat of it registered through the thin fabric of her dress.
She used the motion of tucking a strand of hair behind her ear to press her fingertip against the receiver in her left ear.
The tiny device loosened. She palmed it in one smooth motion and slid her hand into the pocket of her dress, dropping it in without breaking stride.
Prescott’s voice cut out. The silence in her ear was sudden and total.
As if on cue, the DJ shifted to something slower—still electronic, but a melody had surfaced underneath.
Isaac turned to face her. His hand settled on her hip this time, lower than the waist, his fingers curving against the fabric.
Her hand landed on his chest instead of his shoulder.
She could feel his heartbeat under her palm. Steady. Unhurried.
They might as well have been the only two people on the floor.
“You disappeared on me last week,” he said.
“I had somewhere to be.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You had somewhere to not be. There’s a difference.”
The easy humor was gone. He was just watching her, steady and quiet, waiting for an honest answer.
“You’re right,” she said. “I left.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to stay. That’s usually my cue to go.”
He processed that. “That’s a lonely way to live.”
“It’s a safe way to live.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“They’re close enough.”
His thumb moved against her hip. A slow, absent pressure that sent heat down the outside of her thigh. She didn’t step back. She should have stepped back.
“I’m not going to be in Boston much longer,” she said. The lie came out smooth, rehearsed. “My contract wraps up in a few days. I’ll be moving on.”
“Where?”
“Wherever the next job is. That’s how freelance works.”
She waited for him to let it land. To nod, say something polite, give her the graceful exit she was building toward.
“Have dinner with me,” he said.
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“I heard you. You’re leaving soon. That’s not tonight.
Tonight you’re here, and I’m here, and we’re dancing to whatever this music is, and I’d rather have dinner with you than stand by another pillar at another event hoping you walk in.
If we can’t work it in before you leave, I can come to wherever you’re going. I travel for work, too.”
His hand was still on her hip. She was still close enough to feel the warmth coming off his chest. The song was doing something with strings now—synthetic, layered, building toward something.
“Isaac.”
“Fallon.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you read rooms better than anyone I’ve ever met.
I know you drink wine you don’t actually like because it gives you something to hold.
I know you had a complete tactical plan for destroying that guy’s suede shoes and you let me rescue you anyway.
And I know that right now your hand is on my chest and you haven’t moved it. ”
She hadn’t. Her fingers had spread against the front of his shirt, and she could feel his heartbeat picking up under her palm. Not steady anymore. Not quite.
Her knee ached. Prescott’s transmitter was recording without her.
She had work to do, and this man was making it very hard to remember why any of that mattered more than the heat of his hand through the thin fabric of her dress and the way he looked at her like she was the only sharp thing in a room full of soft edges.
“One dinner,” he said. “If you hate it, I’ll never bother you again. You can go back to disappearing, and I’ll go back to pillar duty.”
“And if I don’t hate it?”
His mouth curved. Not a grin. Something quieter, something that started in his eyes and reached his mouth half a beat later. “Then we’ll figure that out.”
The song ended and the next one started. Fallon’s hand was still on his chest. His fingers had tightened against her hip—not pulling her closer, just holding on, like he was bracing for her to slip away again.
She could feel the word forming. The clean, smart no that would end this. She’d said it a hundred times to a hundred versions of this moment, and it had never cost her anything.
But this time it would.