Page 104 of Kazimir

I liked it.

That was maybe the worst part.

I got dressed quick, because if I sat there too long I might talk myself back into obedience. Jeans, fitted black top, boots. Armor enough. I braided part of my hair back from my face with clumsy fingers, then gave up on making it perfect. I looked like me. Good enough.

The hallway outside smelled faintly of lemon polish and old wood. The guest wing had a hush to it, but not an empty one. More like the house was awake and simply didn’t need to announce itself. I moved through carved archways and past portraits that looked expensive and judgmental and probably older than the state of Texas. The place ought to have felt cold with all that grandeur, but it didn’t. It felt watched, maybe. Guarded. Lived in by people who valued privacy more than coziness.

By the time I found the kitchen, my stomach was tight enough I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or about to confess to murder.

The kitchen itself was big enough to fit half of Pearl’s diner in it. Dark cabinetry, stone counters, a long central island, copper pans hanging where they looked too pretty to use. Outside light pooled over one section of the island where Lucia sat with a stack of documents, a tablet, and a cup of coffee.

She looked up the second I stepped in.

Lucia always looked up like she already knew who was approaching and had just been generous enough to let them finish the walk.

“Maddie,” she said.

I hovered there like an idiot for a second. “Hey.”

Her dark eyes moved over my face in one sharp sweep. She wore black, of course. Simple this morning, fitted and elegant and practical all at once. Her curls were pulled back. Not a hair out of place.

“You used to our time zone yet?” she asked.

“Gettin’ there, but couldn’t sleep past my own thoughts.”

One corner of her mouth moved. “That is usually inconvenient.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gestured to the coffee pot. “Pour yourself some before you say whatever you came in here to say.”

That stopped me cold.

I let out a short breath. “Was I that obvious?”

“Painfully.”

Well, no point dancing around it then.

I grabbed a mug mostly to give my hands something to do. Poured coffee. Added too much cream because I was stalling, and we both knew it. Finally, I set the spoon down and turned toward her, leaning one hip against the counter.

“I want to stay,” I blurted.

Lucia’s brows lifted a fraction. Not much. But for her, it might as well have been a gasp.

“In Philadelphia,” I said, because now that I’d started, everything was trying to rush out at once. “Not forever necessarily, I mean maybe forever, I don’t know, but not just for the wedding trip. I don’t want to go back to Texas right now.”

She sat back in her chair and folded one hand over the other atop the papers. “All right.”

That was it. No immediate shutdown. No, why would you say something so ridiculous? Just all right, in that calm, deadly competent voice of hers.

It opened the gate wider.

“I know it sounds sudden.”

“It sounds important,” she said.

I looked down into my coffee, then back up. “I’m tired, Lucia.”