Page 22 of The Jackal

She hesitated. I watched her weigh it, the wanting and the wariness both.

Then, she nodded.

"Okay," she said. "Yeah. I've got a couple of spots now. Nothing fancy."

"I don't need fancy." That landed between us, both of us hearing the lo mein in it, the cheap Chinese on a Valentine's she'd told me twice not to mark. "It'd be good to catch up. That's all."

That's all. We both let the lie stand, because it was a kind one.

It went a little awkward then, the way these things do once the running and the catching are over and two grown people are left standing in the daylight with their whole history laid out between them. She didn't hug me again. She smiled instead, smaller now, shyer—the careful smile of a woman who'd just decided to risk something and didn't know yet what it would cost her.

"Call me when you're done," she said. "With—whatever this is. Your day." She didn't look at the house when she said it, which was its own kind of looking. "I'm usually done with work around five."

"I'll call."

"Okay." A beat. "Okay."

She went to her car. Got in and started it, the engine turning over rough and familiar against all that silent, expensive metal around it. And before she pulled away, she looked at me one more time through the open window—a long look, the kind that travels back over years, remembering, I think, all of it, the good and the closed door both. She smiled at me, sad at the edges, and drove off down that green tunnel of a road, and was gone.

I watched her go. I always watch a thing leave.

The woman was still there. She let out a little laugh, soft, mostly to herself, and shook her head.

"Oh," she said. "You two have got it bad. Both of you. Must be something in the water."

And then, she walked up toward the house and left me alone in that courtyard full of fortress and dark cars and steaming stone—a man who'd come halfway around the world to find what his brothers couldn't see, standing there instead with a dinner he never should have asked for, and no idea, none at all, what the universe meant to do with me next.

11

MAGNOLIA

Imade it exactly to the end of the drive before my hands started shaking on the wheel.

Not a delicate tremor. A full-body adrenaline crash, the kind you get after you've nearly been in a wreck, except I hadn't nearly been in a wreck. I'd just thrown myself, bodily, across a courtyard at a man and climbed him like a tree.

There was no dignified way to say it. I climbed him.

The second my brain caught up to what my body had already decided—that the dark shape against the glare was Cash, was actually him, here, real—I was already moving, already running across that fortress courtyard full of strangers in front of God and Claire and a bunch of tier-one operators, and I left my feet. I just left them.

I launched at him like a Labrador who'd heard the garage door. He caught me out of the air without so much as rocking back on his heels, one arm coming under me like it had been waiting there the whole time. I wrapped around him—legs, arms, the works—and held on like the courtyard was on fire.

I pulled into a gas station I didn't need and put the car in park and sat there and let myself, for one minute, just feel it again, because I hadn't let myself feel it while it was happening. I'd been too busy doing it.

He was so solid. That was the first thing, the thing my body kept handing back to me on a loop.

I'd built him up in my memory, and somehow the memory had still undersold him—the sheer density of the man, all that quiet strength gone suddenly real and warm under my hands. Catching me hadn't cost him anything. I weigh what I weigh, and I'd hit him at a dead run, and he'd absorbed all of it like I was nothing, like I was a thing he'd been made to hold.

My face had gone into the side of his neck on pure instinct and he smelled like—God. Clean and warm and a little like cedar and salt and something underneath that was just him, just male. I'd had my mouth an inch from his pulse. I'd felt it going, steady and slow, while mine tried to jump out of my chest.

And his hands. One flat and huge against my back, the other under me, holding me up like I weighed nothing at all. I'd thought, with the functioning part of my brain, oh no, because I knew those hands. I'd spent a long time thinking about those hands. They'd closed my fingers over a coin and ruined me for every set of hands since.

When he'd finally set me down—slow, both my feet eased back onto the stone like he was reluctant to give the contact back—I'd gotten my first real look at him in the morning light. That had been its own kind of disaster.

Because the man was unfairly, stupidly good-looking, and not in any way that photographed. It was all presence. He'd aged the way good leather ages, a little more weathered, a little harder around the jaw, a few days of dark stubble.

His eyes had landed on me and stayed.

I'd felt it everywhere. Down my spine. Low in my belly, a slow, heavy pull I had not felt in so long I'd half forgotten my body could even make it. He looked at me like I was the only thing in that whole courtyard worth looking at. The sheer voltage of being looked at like that, by him, after all this time, had nearly taken my knees out.