Page 113 of The Maverick
Everybody knew her face.
"You're Lexi Montgomery," I said.
"Guilty," she said. "How's the leg?"
"It hurts."
"It's going to for a while. The doctor says you'll be fine. Long cut but it missed everything important."
I looked at the ceiling again. Tried to organize what I remembered. The pier. Tommy's hand in mine. The warmth and the roar arriving at the same time, and then nothing.
"What happened?" I asked.
"The yacht exploded."
"I gathered that part."
She smiled. It was a real smile—not the magazine smile, not the red carpet smile, but one that moved all the way through her face. "Tommy's handling the rest of it. He'll be back soon."
"Is he okay?"
"He is very much okay. He is, in fact, disturbingly okay for a man who was just knocked off a lawn by a shockwave." She sipped her tea. "I've been told this is normal for him."
I let out a breath that was most of the tension I'd been holding.
"My guitar," I said.
She reached beside her chair and lifted it into view—the case, latched and intact, a long scrape across the outside that hadn't been there before, but the latches holding. She set it where I could see it from the bed.
"It was on the lawn," she said. "Blown clear. One of the men brought it in."
I looked at it for a long moment.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it for more than the guitar.
She waved it off. "I'm Lexi, by the way. Lucas's wife. Which makes me—" she tilted her head, working it out— "your sister-in-law, possibly, if the way Tommy talks about you is any indication of where things are going."
I stared at her.
"He talks about me?"
She smiled. "I don't know Tommy well yet—we've only just all found each other, which is its own long story for another time. But I've been around the Dane men long enough to have a read on them." She uncurled from the chair and stood, and she was taller than I'd expected, with the easy physical confidence of a woman who'd spent years being looked at and had made peace with it.
I looked at the door.
"Can I get you anything?" she said. "Water? Something to eat?"
"Water would be good."
She went to a small counter along the wall and filled a glass and brought it back and sat on the edge of the bed rather than the chair, which was the move of a woman who understood instinctively that sick people needed proximity rather than distance.
"How's the pain? Really."
"Manageable," I said. "I've had worse."
"Have you?"
I thought about it. "Emotionally," I said. "Tonight, before—before the explosion. I had a bad gig."
