Page 71 of The Maverick
"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 toimpressyou. 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 specificallynotto 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."
