Chapter 20
TOMMY
Iwas waiting for her in the lobby.
I'd told her seven and I'd been there at six-forty, which was a thing I'd never done in my life. Tommy Dane did not wait early for women. Tommy Dane arrived on time and on point, and the woman in question caught up. That was the rhythm. That had always been the rhythm.
I'd come down at six-forty so I could see her come in.
The Palmetto Rose lobby was a long, warm room with palmetto trees in big planters and a fire in a fireplace the size of a horse stall, and the staff moved through it with the smooth Charleston choreography of a place that had been doing this for a hundred and fifty years.
Sasha was at the front desk with her dark curls pinned back, working a leather guest book, and she'd looked up when I came down the staircase and given me the small private nod she gave that meant we're set.
We were set.
I'd called Lucas after the flower shop. He'd picked up on the first ring like he'd been waiting on me, which he probably had been.
I'd told him what I needed. He hadn't asked twice.
Hadn't asked once, really. He'd said give me forty-five minutes, and forty-five minutes later I'd had a confirmation that I'd had to read three times to believe.
There were perks to saying yes to a home for wayward warriors.
I stood by the fire with my hands in my pockets and watched the front door.
She came in at six-fifty-eight.
The bell above the door gave the small bright ring bells gave in old buildings, and she stopped one step inside the door and looked around the way a person looked around a place she'd never been.
She wasn't in a gown.
She wasn't in a tiara.
I'd known she wouldn't be, because I knew Rebecca Lynn. But knowing she wouldn't be was different from seeing her stand inside the front door of The Palmetto Rose in dark jeans, a black top under a cream cardigan, and brown leather boots.
She was spectacular.
It hit me low.
I'd seen her in a t-shirt this morning. I'd seen her in nothing the night before.
I'd seen her stand on a Charleston sidewalk in a coat with a guitar case slung across her back and look like a girl who wasn't sure she was allowed to want what she wanted, and I'd seen her walk across a restaurant floor toward me with her face still doing the slightly-unfinished thing faces did right after a person had been somewhere bigger than the room she was standing in.
I had not seen her dressed for a thing she'd decided to do.
The hair was loose and curled. Gold earrings caught the firelight.
The cardigan was the color of the inside of a peach.
And the boots—God, the boots—were probably the same boots that had walked her into Charleston with a few dollars in her pocket and a guitar on her back, and she'd worn them tonight, and the wearing of them was a sentence I didn't know how to read out loud yet.
She saw me and her whole face changed.
I crossed to her.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"You came."
"I said I would."
"I know."
"You doubted me?"
"Not for a second."
I tipped her chin up. Kissed her once, soft, in front of God and the front desk and Sasha and a man in a suit who had no reason to be looking and looked, anyway. Then, I took her hand.
"Come on," I said. "Let's go upstairs."
The Magnolia Suite was full of candles when she walked in.
Not a lot. Not enough to look like a movie.
Just enough. Six or seven of them, scattered on the coffee table and the side table and the dresser, lit by somebody from the staff in the half hour before, and a small round table set up in the middle of the room with a white tablecloth and two place settings and a bottle of wine in a stand that wasn't ice but was the right kind of cold.
She stopped one step in.
"Tommy."
"Yeah?"
She looked at the table. Looked at the candles. Looked at the bourbon I'd poured myself before I went down to wait for her, sitting half-drunk on the side table next to a copy of the dinner menu I'd been working through earlier.
"This is—"
"Easy," I said. "Don't get scared on me yet."
"I'm not scared."
"That's a relief."
"This is just—"
"Salad and steak."
She looked at me.
"It is," I said. "Don't let the candles fool you. I had a long time to think about what I was going to feed you tonight, and I had to talk myself out of approximately six bad ideas before I landed on this one."
"What were the bad ideas?"
"Lobster. Escargot. A tasting menu with seven courses and a sommelier who would have lectured us about the wine."
"That sounds awful."
"It would have been awful." I pulled out her chair. "What I figured out, somewhere between the second bad idea and the third, was that I didn't want to take you to dinner to impress you. I wanted to take you to dinner to feed you."
She sat. She was looking at me with the steady kind of attention I was starting to recognize as her serious face.
"Caesar salad," I said, lifting the dome off her plate. "Filet mignon with the little fingerling potatoes. Red wine that's good, not great. Cooked by the man downstairs, who, near as I can tell, is the only chef in Charleston who knows how to put pepper on a steak without insulting it."
The salad was right. I'd watched the kitchen send it up.
The steak was a steak. The wine was the kind of wine you drank at a small round table with a woman whose attention had gotten serious.
I'd asked Sasha specifically not to send up anything that came in a bottle people were supposed to talk about.
Rebecca Lynn picked up her fork.
"Tommy?"
"Yeah."
"This is the nicest thing anybody has ever done for me."
"It's a Caesar salad."
"It's not."
We ate.
We talked. Not about anything heavy. About the morning.
About Marco from the kitchen. About the song she'd written before her shift and didn't sing for me.
About her phone call to Wren Calloway. About the boots, which I told her I'd noticed in the lobby, and which she rolled her eyes about and then admitted, quietly, were the only good ones she had.
The wine was good. Not great. That had been the point.
The food was enough. I'd told the kitchen enough, and the kitchen had listened. By the time we'd put our forks down, she wasn't full, she was satisfied, which was a different state and which was the one I'd been after.
I leaned back in my chair.
"You ready for dessert?"
Her eyes flicked—small, quick, before she could school them—toward the bedroom door.
I laughed.
I couldn't help it. It came out of me before I could decide whether to let it.
"Sweetheart, that's later. That is one hundred percent later. I have plans for later. But that is not dessert."
She bit her lip. The flush rode up the side of her neck.
"Okay," she said.
"Don't go shy on me now. I've been thinking about that flush since I saw you do it in the donut shop."
"Tommy."
"Come here."
I held my hand out across the table.
She put hers in mine.
I didn't let go. I stood up, walked around to her side of the table, and pulled her up to standing, slow. Held her by both hands. Looked at her.
"You trust me?"
"Yes."
She didn't pause to think about it. She didn't qualify it. She didn't ask what for. She said yes the way she'd said I want you inside me last night—immediate, level.
It hit me low, the same way the boots had.
I let go of one of her hands. Reached into the inside pocket of my jacket. Pulled out the silk.
It was black, soft, six inches wide. A blindfold.
She looked at it.
She looked at me.
"Close your eyes," I said. "I want to take you somewhere."
She didn't ask where.
She didn't ask why.
She closed her eyes.
I stood there for a second and looked at her standing in front of me with her eyes closed and her chin tipped up just slightly because she was waiting for me to put my hands on her.
The candlelight caught her earrings. Her mouth was soft.
There was no fear in her face at all, and the absence of fear was, in its own way, the most thrilling thing she'd handed me yet, because it was her gift, it was her trust, it was her saying here, take this, you can't break it.
I wasn't going to break it.
I tied the silk over her eyes. Tested it gentle—two fingers along the edge to make sure it was snug without being tight, a slow pass of my hand in front of her face to make sure she really couldn't see. I told her stay with me and put her hand in the bend of my elbow.
We went.
I walked her out of the suite, down the carpeted hallway, into the elevator. The elevator dinged. We rode down. She held my arm and didn't speak. Whatever was happening inside her chest under that silk was happening in private, and I respected it.
The lobby was lit warm and low when the doors opened.
The staff was lined up in their unobtrusive way along our path. Sasha at the head. Two bellmen in their crisp jackets. The night manager. A waitress from the bar, who'd come around to look.
None of them said a thing—I'd asked Sasha to ask them not to.
They smiled. They watched us go past. The smile I caught from Sasha as we crossed the marble told me that whatever staff scuttlebutt had spread through The Palmetto Rose in the last hour, they were into it, and any woman who showed up at the front desk asking for me in the future was going to have a long, complicated relationship with the staff before she even got to the elevator.
Sasha opened the front door for us.
The Charleston night came in. Fresh and clean and a little salt off the harbor.
The limo was at the curb.
Long black thing, idling soft, the driver standing at the back door with his hand on the handle. He was a man I hadn't seen before, but the suit and the bearing told me he was a Dominion Hall man. Of course, he was.
Sasha helped me get her down the front steps. Watch your step, sweetheart. There's a curb. Curb. Door.