Page 44 of The Lonely Road

When I finally get back to Wíitsin’s house, I sit on the porch for a while in the dark.

I’m more at peace with Wildflower Canyon than I’ve been since I arrived—about the work, about who I am in it, about the decision I made that scared me and turned out to be right.

About the other thing—the man with the blue eyes who has been occupying more space in my head than I’ve given him permission to—I am less settled.

CHAPTER 10

mason

I’ve been awake since five, which is not unusual—thinking about tonight since approximately five-oh-one, which definitely is.

I’ve thought about how tonight should go approximately forty-seven times, and not once—not once—have I thought about the Whitman case.

About what I’m supposed to be extracting.

About the shape of her strategy. The weak points in her argument. Anything Jessup is paying me to find.

This dinner isn’t about the job, which is a problem.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about whether she’ll like the restaurant I picked.

That’s the problem, right there, and I know it.

And since I don’t have an answer for why a man like me is behaving this way, I go for my morning run, hoping it will clear my head.

The canyon road in the early morning is dark.

In early spring here, it takes a while for the sun to clear the peaks. I don’t mind it. In fact, I like it. It’s quiet, peaceful, and very indifferent to whatever is happening inside one man’s chest at the butt crack of dawn.

Should I stay the night with her, I wonder.

Fucking hell, Brooks. You gotta get past this. You’re taking her out to dinner to pump her for information. And that’s about it.

I run harder.

It doesn’t help.

I come back to the inn, take a shower, and my mood gets worse because I’m getting excited about tonight, like a teenager taking his crush to prom.

I spend the morning doing survey work—the legitimate cover.

Feig needs revised load calculations for the arena access road.

So, I spend three hours on-site with a level and a measuring wheel, and my boots in the mud. The honest satisfaction of work that produces real numbers. I’m good at this, too. You can’t fake competence in the field, not to people who understand it, and Feig understands land even if he doesn’t understand much else.

By noon, I have three pages of notes for him.

I write them up at the Ridgeline, make a call to my investigator in Denver—I need a deeper look at Kaz Chase’s connection to Jessup, a variable I haven’t fully mapped—and then I look at the ceiling for a while.

The radiator ticks.

I didn’t break into her office on Sunday night.

I had planned to.

I’d discovered the loose window in the back during recon—I had the time, the tools, the expertise.

I even walked past her building twice on Sunday evening. Both times, I kept going.