Page 33 of The Maverick
I was nodding in the right places. I wasn't tracking. I'd taken in maybe one word in three since we'd left the donut shop, which was a thing I prided myself on never doing, especially with women, especially with women I'd just kissed in a public place after deciding to in approximately the last six minutes of a morning that was not supposed to involve kissing women at all.
I'd come into Charleston at midnight to be briefed on a federal investigation into my own brothers. I'd been visited at six in the morning by a deputy director of the FBI. I'd called Grant from a hotel suite and gotten silence. I'd walked into a restaurant to think about all of it, and instead I'd walked across the room to fix a stranger's guitar, and now I was walking that stranger home with a piece of cardamom donut still on my breath and the kiss I'd given her sitting on me the way bourbon sat on an empty stomach.
She talked the way I'd noticed musicians talked when they were nervous. Filling the spaces. Smoothing the silences. Telling me about Tasha, who shared her dry shampoo. Telling me about Devon, who worked nights, and Geoff, who quoted books at her in the kitchen until she felt about half a foot shorter than she was. She pointed out the live oaks she'd come to know.
I let her. I needed the space to think.
The trouble was, I wasn't thinking.
The dishonest answers came easy. She was pretty. The voice had gotten me. I was in a city I didn't know with a head full of FBI and I'd needed something living to hold on to for ten minutes. Those were all true. They were also not the answer.
The answer was that she'd looked like a thing left undone.
A button on a shirt left unfastened by a man who'd run out of time. A song with a missing third verse. A chore on a list that nobody was getting around to. She'd looked like that, and some part of me that had no business making decisions on a winter morning in Charleston had saidI will get around to it.
I didn't love that answer.
It implied things about me I usually managed not to think about.
I didn't pick up strays. I was a stray myself in a neat suit, and we did not adopt other strays. We drank our bourbon, didour work, and slept alone unless the company was going to be uncomplicated and over by morning.
This wasn't going to be uncomplicated. I'd known that the moment her hand had given me the Gibson and she'd let me see, in her face, how much it was costing her to hand a stranger something she only handed a few people in her life. There had been a math problem in her eyes.How much can I give this man before I owe him.And I'd taken the guitar with both hands and tried to be worth the answer.
That hadn't been the move of a man who was passing through.
That had been the move of a man who'd already decided something and hadn't told himself what it was yet.
I genuinely did not have time for this.
There was a deputy director two blocks back from me with an investigation aimed at my family. There was a brother in Charleston I hadn't laid eyes on yet. There was another one in a riverside park in Utah yesterday who'd come and gone. There was something coming in this city, big enough to pull seven brothers out of seven different lives, and I was walking the wrong direction from any of it because she'd looked like a thing left undone.
A real Tommy move.
I'd hate myself for it later, if it didn't pay off. I'd hate myself for it later, anyway, probably, because the kind of guy who let a girl into the gap in his concentration on a day like this one was the kind of guy who got people killed.
But she was talking, and the sun was hitting the side of her face, and every twenty seconds or so she'd glance up at me with the cautious half-smile of a girl who still wasn't sure whether the man walking her home was the same man who'd kissed her in a donut shop. Every time she did it, something in my chest did something I was going to have to get a handle on.
"This is me," she said.
She'd stopped on the sidewalk in front of a narrow walk-up with an iron stair railing and a glass front door that had seen better days. The kind of building people who waited tables in Charleston could mostly afford if they had three roommates, a generous landlord, and didn't ask too many questions about the heat in the winter.
"This?"
"Up there." She nodded at a window on the third floor, two over from the corner. "Yellow curtains. Tasha picked them."
"They’re cheerful."
"Aggressively."
"Sounds like a Tasha."
"Yes."
We stood there.
This was the part of any walk where the man worked out whether he was being invited up. I'd done this part more times than I could honestly count. I had a routine I ran. Low-key. Smooth. Nothing pushy. The kind that left a woman feeling like she'd made a free choice in either direction.
I didn't run the routine.
