Page 21 of Power Play

For a span of seconds he isn’t the operative or the calculated dispenser of information in measured doses. He is a man laughing at a joke I made. The unguarded quality of it hits harder than anything his hands have done or failed to do across bars and sidewalks where the distance between us kept shrinking.

Wanting his laughter is something else entirely, and the smile it pulls out of me costs something I can’t yet calculate.

Kincaid sets down his empty mug. The conversation has been running longer than the information required. Both of us know it, and neither of us has moved toward the door.

"I should go," he says.

"Probably."

"You're not arguing."

"I'm not agreeing, either."

His jaw works, the tell I’ve been reading since Pilsen. His focus drifts to my mouth, stays there for a count of two, and comes back to my eyes. The detour is unhurried and unapologetic.

He moves toward the door. I follow, my feet silent on the hardwood and his boots heavy beside me.

He reaches for the deadbolt. His hand pauses on the lock he installed.

"Lock both of them," he says. "Set your alarm."

"You said that last time."

"Last time I was standing in your hallway in the middle of the night with a bag of hardware and a very thin excuse." He turns. The hallway light cuts across his face, hard angles and deliberate shadow. "This time I'm standing in your hallway after nine with a worse one."

"What's the excuse?"

"Coffee." His stare pins me. "Next time, put shoes on before you answer the door."

"Why?"

His eyes travel the length of me one more time, slow, and the inventory he takes is thorough enough to leave marks. "Because a woman who answers the door in bare feet is telling a man she isn't planning to leave," he says. "And a man who noticed is going to have a very hard time leaving himself."

He steps into the hallway. His hand comes up and grips the frame above my head. The lean of it brings him close enough that his breath lands warm against my forehead, and the restraint is worse than anything contact would be.

His jaw is tight. The muscle along the side of it jumps once.

"Keating." His voice comes out low and rough, the register from the phone calls, the one I feel in the base of my spine. "Lock the door."

He lets go of the frame and walks toward the stairwell without looking back, and the sound of his boots on the thin carpet hits the same rhythm as my pulse.

I don't realize I've taken a step into the hallway until my hand catches the doorframe.

I lock both locks. I set the alarm. I stand in my apartment with two empty coffee mugs on the counter and the scent of leather still pressed against the air where he stood.

My phone rings.

"Meagan." Sophia Oleander's voice comes through clipped and focused, the cadence stripped of the small talk she never bothers with anyway. "I've been going through the family office's co-investment records. The European intermediary my father dismissed last month, the one Arthur mentioned as cold outreach from the Dusseault family?"

My hand tightens on the phone. Arthur mentioned Dusseault in our meeting weeks ago, casually, as context.

"The outreach wasn't cold," Sophia says. "The intermediary has a documented relationship with Beaumont Capital Partners. The same Beaumont that appeared in the Lark Pryor incorporation filings. The connection runs through a subsidiary I found in the family office's own transaction records, a vehicle my father signed off on eighteen months ago for a co-investment he described to me as routine diversification."

The train passes. The light moves across the ceiling.

"My father's money is already inside whatever this is, Meagan. It's been there for eighteen months, and he either knows exactly what he invested in or someone made very sure he didn't ask the right questions."

"Can you send me the intermediary documentation?" I ask.