Chapter 16
CLINT
Her question sat on my neck where she'd said it, warm as breath. I held her and looked out at the water for a while.
I could have lied. I've built cover stories with less material. A man visiting family, a man between jobs, a man seeing the coast. Any of it would have held for a week, and she'd have believed it, because she wanted to.
That was the problem. She'd have believed it.
"I don't know," I said.
She went still against me. Then, she lifted her head off my shoulder and looked at me, close, reading my face the way she read everything.
"You don't know."
"That's the honest answer." I kept my arms where they were, loose around her, and she stayed in them.
"My brother knocked on a motel door in Texas three days ago and said, we need you.
I asked what for. He said it'd be explained when I got here.
It hasn't been explained. I've been given a suite, a phone I haven't turned on, a credit card with no limit, and about half of every answer I've asked for.
" I looked at her. "I'm here for my family. That's the whole of what I know."
"Your brothers."
"My brothers."
"I've met them," she said.
That went through me sideways. My arms must have changed, because she felt it, and put her hand flat on my chest.
"Not like that. Through the desk." She said it carefully. "They've all come through the Palmetto Rose, one time or another. That's how I know the name Dane."
Oh. Okay. The wire in the back of my head eased off a notch. Of course, they had. A family outfit in a small city, a good hotel—the two would know each other the way the feed store knows the ranches.
But she hadn't finished. I could feel it in her, the weight of something being decided.
She sat in my lap with the morning cool on both of us and looked out at the harbor.
When she spoke again, her voice had dropped into a register I hadn't heard from her yet.
Careful. Quiet. The voice of a woman stepping out onto ice she'd been told her whole life to stay off of.
"Clint. What do you know about Dominion Hall?"
"Why?"
"Because I've seen some things."
"What things?"
"Comings and goings." She said it flat, like a report.
"What do you mean?"
She didn't answer.
I watched her not answer, and I understood what I was looking at, because I'd spent three days learning her.
This was the professional. Whatever she had, it was locked in the same vault as everything else her marble had ever shown her, and the vault was the whole architecture of her.
I'd bet my pack she'd never once opened it for anybody.
She opened it a crack.
"I don't trust Dominion Hall," she said.
The words came out of her slow and level, and they cost her. I could see what they cost. Then, the rest came out fast, the way the true thing always came out of her, like something under pressure finding the seam:
"Did you know they own The Palmetto Rose?"
I sat with that.
"No," I said. "I didn't."
The harbor went on below us. A gull came up the face of the building, hung a second at our level like it was checking on us, and slid off sideways down the wind.
They owned the hotel. The hotel I'd been put in.
Which meant the suite wasn't hospitality.
It was a room in their own house. And the woman in my lap worked for them and likely didn't know it in full.
I'd been sleeping in the middle of their machinery since the airplane door closed behind me.
The card. The kid brother with the jokes.
The eye that came open over the city and noted me.
Nothing about my three days in Charleston had happened outside their fence. I'd walked around thinking I was loose in a town. I'd been loose in a corral.
"I feel like I'm in the dark," I said.
It came out plainer than I meant it, and truer. She heard both.
"You, too," she said. Not a question.
"Me, too."
We sat with that a while, the two of us bare in the morning air, each of us kept blind by the same house from different directions—her by a desk, me by blood.
Her fingers moved on my chest, slow, thinking.
I watched the water. Somewhere down there, a shrimp boat was working the tide line, patient as a man mowing.
"Then, maybe we should both be careful," she said, finally. "Maybe we stay away from Dominion Hall. Both of us. Whatever it is."
That was where my mind had already been walking.
Away. It's where my mind always walks, and this time it had company—her voice saying the same thing my feet had been saying for years.
Stay clear of the big place. Keep to open country.
Whatever's in there, it flew you across the country without telling you why, and things that do that are never handing out gifts.
I nodded.
"But I have to help my brothers," I said. "Whatever it turns out to be. I came because they asked, and they've never once asked. I can't walk away from that."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then, she took my face in her hand and kissed me, soft and sure.
"I wouldn't expect anything different," she said, against my mouth. "That's not a thing I'd change."
She was warm and bare in my lap and the kiss went on a beat past comfort. My body did a thing before I'd signed off on it. She felt it happen under her. She pulled back an inch and grinned at me, slow and entirely without mercy.
"Good morning," she said.
"It's shaping up."
She laughed, and shifted, deliberate. I took a breath through my teeth. I decided a change of subject was the only honorable exit.
"Tell me about that bathtub," I said.
Her whole face lit.
I'd seen it the first night, hunting the light switch—a tub the size of a stock tank, white as a new hat, standing on clawed feet in a bathroom that had clearly been built around it.
It didn't match the rest of the place. Everything else in her home was handsome and careful and sensible. The tub was a throne.
"You noticed."
"It's hard to miss. It's the biggest thing in the building that isn't the building."
"That," she said, sitting up straighter in my lap, "is the one thing I really spent money on.
The whole condo, I bought smart. Good bones, good view, didn't touch a thing.
Except that." She held up one finger. "Since I was a little girl, I have had one idea fixed in my head, and the idea was a bathtub fit for a queen.
I blame a princess movie. Some Disney thing with a castle.
It planted a seed. Somewhere down in me there was always going to be a tub. "
"So, you built the castle around the tub."
"I found the tub," she said. "That's the good part.
There was a boutique hotel down the peninsula, beautiful old property, went under a few years back.
And when they closed, they sold everything.
Everything. Drapes, doorknobs, chandeliers, the lot, whole ballrooms walking out the door piece by piece.
And I went down there on my lunch break—in my blouse, on my feet all day, I had no business—and there it was.
Cast iron. Original. They'd had it in the honeymoon suite. "
"And you haggled."
"Clint." She put her hand on her chest. "I negotiated like my grandmother was watching.
The man never had a chance. He started at a number and I looked at him the way you look at a guest who wants a free upgrade on Memorial Day weekend.
By the end of it, he was helping me arrange delivery just to get me out of the building. "
I was grinning. I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
"It took four men to bring it up here," she said.
"Four. They had to take the door off the hinges and open up the doorframe.
One of them told me it was the heaviest thing he'd moved in twenty years of moving, and I tipped them like it was a wedding.
And then, I sat in it that first night, in water up to my chin, in my own home, and I—" she stopped, and her voice went somewhere softer.
"It was the first thing I ever bought that wasn't useful.
That's all. It doesn't do anything a shower doesn't do.
It's just mine, and it's ridiculous. I love it. "
"So, it's a nice tub," I said.
She looked at me. Then, she reached down between us and wrapped her hand around my cock, firm and sure. My whole spine reported in.
"Come, find out," she said.
I lifted her.
She came up out of that chair wrapped around me, laughing into my neck.
I carried her down the hall, into the bathroom, and set her down on the rolled edge of that great white beast of a tub.
She leaned over and got the water going—old brass fixtures, the handles squeaking a note apiece—and steam started climbing off the stream.
While the tub filled, we kissed like teenagers.
That's the only word for it. Her sitting on the tub edge, me standing between her knees, her arms looped up around my neck, both of us trading long, easy, greedy kisses with the water thundering behind her and the steam fogging the mirror and the morning nobody was allowed to interrupt.
She'd break off to test the water and come back.
I'd break off to look at her and she'd pull me back. The room went warm and blind around us.
The tub filled deep. We got in—me first, at her direction, my back against the sloped end, and then her, folding down into the water between my legs with a hiss and a sigh.
She'd been right about all of it. The thing fit two people the way her whole life had refused to.
The heat came up around us and took every mile out of my body at once.
She found a loofah and a bottle of something that smelled like almonds, worked up a lather, and turned around in the water to face me.
"Hold still," she said. "You're filthy."
"I showered yesterday."
"You're spiritually filthy. Hold still."
She washed me.