Page 12 of Forbidden Protector

I have never seen him without it. That should not be a thought and it is one anyway. Black suit, no tie, all that black hair, wet-combed back behind the pierced ear, shining under the amber light, one strand already working itself free.

And he is already looking at me.

Not caught at it. Waiting on it, the way you wait on a door you know is going to open. Dark eyes, sooty, long lashes, steady, no apology in them anywhere. He holds it while I take in the bare jaw, the arrow straight hair, and the hoop. He lets me, and he does not blink.

Then his eyes drop to my throat.

Not my mouth. My throat, where the heat is, where it has been climbing since the floor announced him, and he looks at it exactly one second too long and comes back up.

He knows. He has the color of my neck and he is not going to be gracious about it.

I face front.

My fingers curl in my lap. They want that loose strand. They want to put it back behind his ear and find out whether it's as soft as it looks.

I sit in a packed church and inform my own hands that they work for me.

Fifty minutes of service, and I use every one of them.

I count who came. I count who came and sat wrong.

Gideon takes the front left with his wife on one side and his daughter on the other, receiving condolences without moving. A king holding still while the county files past.

A man in a good coat two rows behind him checks his phone twice and doesn't sing a single verse.

A young Sullivan with a golden-retriever face catches me working the room and grins at me outright, at a funeral, and I have to study the ceiling.

Through the fourth window from the front, the snow has gone to nothing much, a few flakes whipping past the glass sideways off a storm already sliding east toward the plains. Out over the tree line, something small holds in the sky and does not move.

Bird, my head says. Birds get shoved around in this wind. That isn't getting shoved.

The priest says Jacob Mercer stood at this rail for his own wedding and both his children's baptisms and never once sat in the back like the rest of you. The town laughs, all together, one wet sound, and then it stops. Wyatt puts his face down into his hands for the first and only time today. Knox reaches over without looking, lays a hand flat between his shoulder blades, and leaves it there.

Behind me, no shift, no cough, no breath I can hear. He came in on a floor that would not shut up about him and has not made a sound since he sat down. I have run interviews in soundproofed rooms with less silence in them than the four feet at my back.

Then, on the last verse, the floor gives. One board. A man's weight coming forward and settling again. Somebody two rows up turns at the noise, which is how I know it was the front of the church he leaned toward and not me.

I don't turn around. I have wanted to for forty minutes and I am not going to give him that.

Outside, the snow has quit and left a couple of scoured inches on everything, drifted deep against the east side of every headstone and blown down to brown grass on the west.

The cemetery sits on the rise east of the church with nothing to break the wind.

Everybody in black crossing ground nobody has crossed yet, hats held on, the older ones taking somebody's elbow, and every set of tracks in the county going up the hill behind us in a place where a man died three days ago for leaving the wrong ones.

The small thing in the sky has moved a quarter mile west and stopped again.

A woman falls in beside me. Auburn, hazel-eyed, boots that have worked.

"Maren Sullivan. My father told you I'd talk to you, so let's not do the part where you wonder."

"Agent Tatum."

"I know." She looks straight ahead. "You made him do arithmetic Tuesday. He hasn't mentioned it, which means he did it twice."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It's a compliment, and it's the only one you'll get from a Sullivan this week." The wind takes her hem and she doesn't grab for it. "Jacob taught half this valley to sit a horse. Me included. Whatever you're doing, do it fast."