Page 64 of Breaking His Exile
She shook her head. “What they have is rare.”
“What if we could have it?”
She didn’t respond.
The song wound down. She was still in his arms, her hand still in his, and she hadn’t rebuilt the distance.
He took the opening. He always took the opening; that part of him had no survival instinct at all.
“Go out with me. Dinner. Real dinner — not the Rusty Spur, because I know you hate that place. Somewhere we have to dress up. Saturday. I know Tate’s got plans with Oliver.” He kept it easy and braced for the usual rejection. “One dinner, Mariah.”
She stared up at him for a long moment, lips parted. Her thumb moved, barely, against the inside of his wrist, where his pulse went wild.
“Yes,” she said.
He missed a half-step and covered it with a spin, smooth enough she might not have caught it, though the flicker at the corner of her mouth said she had.
“Yeah?” His grin hurt his cheeks, and his heart was going in Spanish and making very little grammatical sense.
“One dinner,” she said. “Don’t make it strange.”
“Reina, I would never—”
“Xavier.”
“Nothing strange. Completely normal. Boring, even. I’ll be boring, you’ll be impressed, it’ll be—”
An alarm went off.
Puta madre.
Ghost appeared in typical Ghost fashion, said a few sentences to Walker, and Walker’s posture shifted. Boone, Brandt, and Bear were already moving toward the fence line.
River jumped to his feet, his eyes wild. “What is that?”
“Someone at the western gate,” Ghost said.
River broke into a run, following Boone, Brandt, and Bear.
X turned to Mariah. “Take Tate inside. Main house, stay in the kitchen, away from windows.” If it was the Sins, he wanted her as far out of the line of fire as possible.
She nodded and gathered Tate with one hand, crossing toward the house, unhurried, because running scared the kids, and she was Mariah Duval, and she didn’t run. X watched them clear the porch before he turned for the west gate.
He had his holster unsnapped before he reached it. The jacket felt absurd over the weapon.
Beyond the gate, the tree line stood thirty yards out, dark where the reception lights fell away. X tracked the movement that had tripped the alarm, a shape resolving from the shadows, then breaking into multiple figures. One taller, wider through the shoulders, a rifle raised. The other shape beside him, smaller, a hand at his back. A big black shape moved low at their feet, alert.
They came into the light.
The man’s face was a mess — a cut at his temple gone black, a bruise climbing his jaw. His shirt was torn at the shoulder. He moved like every step hurt.
Evander Cole.
The woman had blonde hair loose. Tattoos on her arms. A septum ring catching the light. She scanned the crowd and her gaze stopped on River.
The smile she gave was weak. “Hi, River.”
eighteen
