CHAPTER 18 #2
“Reports, Prescott. Go do your reports.”
“Go enjoy it,” she says with a laugh. “Remember… the working-it-out is the thing. I meant that.”
I leave her in the break room and take the stairs down, and the closer I get to the lobby the lighter I feel. I clear the security doors and step out into the gray Pioneer Square afternoon, and there he is.
Finn’s leaning against the side of his Range Rover at the curb, ankles crossed, looking for all the world like a man with nowhere to be. Except his right hand is tucked into the front of his jacket, resting flat against his side, where I know to the inch what he’s keeping there.
His gun.
His eyes aren’t relaxed. They’re moving—taking in the cars, the corner, the man at the coffee cart, the windows across the street—in the steady sweep of someone who’s managing the whole block until I’m in the car.
It should scare me, but for some reason, it doesn’t. He’s here and I feel free.
It makes me want to needle him a little, because the alternative is letting the fear sit in my chest where it’s been on a low boil since the gallery.
“You know,” I say, crossing to him, “you’re not going to pull that thing and start a gunfight on the street at three in the afternoon. There are witnesses. There’s a man selling oat milk lattes nine feet away.”
“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.
“I have a piece of advice,” I say softly, my hand going to rest over his.
His eyes come to mine. “Yeah?”
“I don’t think you have to decide if she’s guilty. And I don’t think you have to decide she’s clean. You can just… not decide. Keep her close, keep watching. You don’t owe her the benefit of the doubt after what she said, but it’s also okay to hope she’s still the woman you want her to be.”
Finn’s quiet and his eyes scan the area again. Something in his face eases slightly, like I’ve said the thing he already knew but needed to hear from a person who isn’t him.
The corner of his mouth lifts, but it doesn’t quite reach all the way to his eyes.
I imagine under all the analysis, under the testing and the watching and the careful not-deciding, there’s a simpler thing sitting in his gut…
grief. He’s mourning her already. He’s standing in a park holding my hand and saying goodbye to a woman who isn’t even gone yet, just in case.
I reach up and put my palm against his jaw and turn his face to me. “Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever she did or didn’t do… it’s not yours. You pulled a sixteen-year-old off a corner and gave her eighteen years of a family she’d never have had otherwise. If she threw that away, that’s hers to have thrown. Not yours to have failed.”
His throat moves and the level of vulnerability I see in his beautiful eyes will probably haunt me the rest of my life. “How do you do that?” he asks quietly, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear.
“Do what?”
“Say the very right thing I needed to hear.”
“It’s my job.” I go up on my toes and kiss him. “It’s my job because I think I’m falling in love with you.”
I feel him go completely still against me. I hadn’t planned to say it. It just tumbled right out, and I don’t have a single urge to walk it back.
Finn pulls away just far enough to see my face, his eyes almost frantically searching mine. His expression is disbelieving and wrecked all at once. “Say that again,” he demands.
“I think I’m falling in love with you. I’m not a hundred percent sure because I’ve never been in love before, but I think this is what love should feel like.”
“Josie.” My name comes out rough and he cups the back of my neck before resting his forehead against mine. “I’ve never felt this way either, and I’ve never wondered what it felt like. But yeah… I think this is what falling in love must be. I’m going to earn you falling all the way.”
“You don’t have to earn it.”
“I’m going to anyway.”
And right there, in the middle of Occidental Park with his gun under his jacket and a Russian somewhere in the city who wants me dead, Finn Marlowe kisses me like I’ve never been kissed before.