Prince Charming

by CD Reiss

  When I see him laughing with my grandmother’s friends, I feel as if I’m alive for the first time since he walked out of the little hospital office. My face nearly cracks when I smile.

  And he’s not just sitting. No, nothing that simple for Keaton Bridge. His legs take up half the room. They’re the length of a shotgun. Nana puts a hand on his knee and pushes it because whatever he said is so damn funny, he needs to be pushed.

  I close the door, and Nana cries, “Well, she’s finally here!”

  I’m greeted with a chorus of my grandmother’s cronies.

  Keaton slaps his knees as if the whole conversation is finished, finally, and he can get on with his business.

  He looks up at me when he stands. “Are you ready?”

  “For?”

  They all laugh again as if they share a joke I’m not privy to. I don’t feel left out as much as I would like to know what I’m supposed to be ready for. I give him the side eye and he winks at me.

  “Did you know what they call cigarettes in England?” Carol says.

  Keaton snaps up his jacket and bows to my grandmother, then each of her friends. “I have much to learn.” He takes Grandma’s hand and kisses it in an obsequious, British, and charming way.

  Not shockingly, she loves it. She’s one batting eyelash away from full flirt.

  “Nana…” I hear the scold in my voice and swallow it.

  “Where did you find this one, Cassandra?” Molly asks. “Have you been hiding him?”

  “He does quite a fine job of hiding himself.”

  “All the best ones do,” Nana interjects. “Now you two just run along.”

  Keaton can take a cue. He holds the door open for me, and with Nana & Co smiling and waving, I have no choice but to step outside with him.

  I speak when we hear the dead bolt snap shut. “Don’t turn around. I happen to know for fact that she’s still looking out the window.”

  His hands are in his pockets. I suspect that’s a gentlemanly show. “She’s a very interesting lady.” He walks me to his car. “Have you ever talked to her? She has a few choice words for your grandfather. I pity the motherfucker.”

  Motherfucker is Nana’s pet name for my disappearing grandfather.

  I point at Keaton’s Lexus. “Did she see the car you drove up in? She’s from Detroit. She wouldn’t appreciate the Japanese make.”

  “She mentioned that.” He opens the passenger side door for me. “The factory’s in Tennessee.”

  He almost has me. I’m almost in the goddamn car. But I stop myself.

  “I didn’t agree to go anywhere with you. You can’t just show up here. One, people talk. I haven’t told them my source, but now you just appear on my couch, pretty as you please, and expect no one can put two and two together.”

  “Most people can’t.”

  “You’re not understanding me. I’m trying to protect you.”

  “Thank you, but I have this.”

  “And how did you know where I lived? Do you know that’s weird? You could have called, not that I ever gave you my number.”

  “Is this any worse than you pickpocketing me? Or tracking down my best friend’s girlfriend to get intel on me?”

  “My reasons are clear.”

  “So are mine. I couldn’t keep away. The more I learned about you, the more I wanted to see you again. And this morning, everything changed for me. So maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one with the problem. I figure there’s only one way to find out. I was going to suggest this over dinner, but since you’re such an insistent little git, I’ll bring it up now. I need to find out if this is my problem or your problem.”

  I blink at him. “Are you asking me out?”

  “Apparently. I also need my wallet.”

  “I was supposed to return it tomorrow night.”

  “I need it today.”

  “You could’ve just called.”

  “I’m hungry now, so I’m taking you to dinner.”

  “Something like that.”

  He touches my cheek with his thumb. It’s tender in the way I’ve never experienced. Sure, men have touched me before, and they have been gentle. It’s been fine. But his thumb on my cheek is more than the results matching the intention. It’s more than a simple touch. He has a complexity that is encapsulated in the place his thumb meets my cheek. He’s been charming, chivalrous, and deferential. Tenderness is the revelation of another plane in a stone that seems to have more facets than I can count.

  “I have never met a woman so deserving of everything being better than normal for her. And I’m sorry if my attempts to do better for you are actually worse. I’m breaking new ground with you”

  I don’t expect this. I’m not only surprised, I’m a little bit liquid right now. It’s the danger-dash-unknown-dash-taboo-dash-dash-dash. But more than any of that, it’s him. I like him. I like his confidence, but I also like the thread of unsurety that runs through it. I like his competence, and I also like the way he lets my grandmother tell him how to do puzzles.

  “I’m going to have to forgive you.” I take his wallet out of my bag. He holds out his hand for it. “After all, when a girl kisses a hacker, she shouldn’t be surprised when she’s hacked.” I place the wallet in his upturned palm, and we rest there with his long fingers curling to take my hand as well as the wallet. “Just leave me something to tell you over dinner.”

  He steps away, pulling the wallet with him. He runs his finger over the worn circle, checking for the cert kwon. It’s there as expected.

  “Thank you for that,” I say. “For letting Harper tell me.”

  He smiles and indicates that I should get in the car, which I do, letting him close the door and realizing I’ve hacked him as surely as he’s hacked me.

  22

  cassie

  He’s taken me to one of the the nicest restaurants in Doverton. It’s late, so we’re seated right away. And it’s a good thing too, because I’m starving. The host hands us menus and takes our drink order.

  “Red wine,” I say. “Just something dry is fine.”

  “Ginger ale,” Keaton says.

  The host spins off to fulfill the order. This is the second time I’ve seen Keaton order a drink, and it’s the second time he’s ordered something without alcohol.

  “Do you not to drink at all?”

  “Driving.” He smirks as if he knows this is half an answer. “And I still need my wits around you.”

  I’ve never been more flattered by a compliment. Once my mother went away and my grandmother started raising me, I was homecoming queen, captain of the cheerleading squad, and voted most likely to be on the cover of a magazine. I’ve been called a long-stemmed rose, a tall drink of water, and a handful of adjectives that all meant “attractive.”

  But this brilliant guy saying he needs to keep his wits around me is the nicest thing a man ever said to me. I smile into my water glass, trying to swallow my gushing satisfaction.

  He’s reading you.

  Obviously, he knows how to flatter me.

  The waitress is fresh out of high school, and tucks her hair behind her ear when she talks. She addresses Keaton as if I’m not there, mesmerized by him, rattling off specials and smiling like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I read the burgers are really good here,” I say just to get her attention. “I like mine rare. And I mean rare.”

  “Okay, and sir?”

  “She’ll have the filet mignon.”

  “Wait.” I hold up my hand.

  “You want a burger more than the filet?” he asks as if what I want is an issue.

  “Well, no. But it’s…” I run my hand over the length of the menu. I’m saying it’s at the bottom without saying it, which is code for it’s forty dollars.

  “Delicious!” the waitress chimes in.

  “Fine.” I hand over my menu.

  “What do you have without meat?” Keaton asks.

  “We have a chicken cacciatore that’s really nice.”

/>   I’m as surprised by his question as I am by her answer.

  “How about an eggplant parmesan?” he asks gamely.

  “Sure thing!” She pencils it in, asks a bunch of questions about sides and drinks, and takes off with the leather-bound menus under her arm.

  “So,” he says, folding his hands on the table and pressing the full weight of his gaze on me. I’m distracted by the arch of his eyebrows, how perfect and expressive they are. How they seem to hint at all the facets of the stone.

  “So,” I say. “How long were you hanging out with my grandmother?”

  He shrugs, holds his answer until the waitress is finished giving us our drinks. I suddenly wish I hadn’t ordered wine.

  “She has quite a story to tell,” he says. “Working her way up at the plant, taking care of her daughter all by herself.”

  “My great-grandmother was also a single mother. Grandma understood what it would take for her to make a life.”

  “You must come from a long line of extraordinary women.”

  “We don’t make it easy on ourselves.” I don’t want to talk about me or my mother, the kind of person she was, how she raised me, or how I wound up taking care of my grandmother. I want to talk about him. I want to see how many facets of this stone I can uncover over one dinner.

  I swirl my wine. A basket of bread and a bowl of butter appear between us. I wonder if I’m in over my head.

  “There are two reasons people become vegetarians,” I say. “They either believe in animal rights or they do it for health reasons. Which is yours?”

  “How binary of you.”

  “If you have a third reason, I’d love to hear it.”

  He regards me, the room, his bread, me again, for what seems like an hour, but is actually two Mississippis. He’s leisurely about it. I can see the wheels turning as he calculates what to tell me. I hope it’s everything.

  “I grew up in London, right in the middle of everything. Small row house with flowers in the windows. We had a cat to kill mice and a dog to keep the cat in line.” He pulls out his stirrer and finishes his ginger ale. “I had an extraordinarily ordinary childhood.”

  He waits, as if testing for what I already know, and I take a second to weigh the fact that he’s Alpha Wolf against how his hand felt under my skirt.

  “In the interests of full disclosure,” I cut in, “I’m still an FBI agent. So you might want to be careful about what you tell me.”

  Mr. Smirkypants is in full effect. “Tell me then, what do you think you know?”

  “I know the shape of a fat goose egg. Your UK records were completely fabricated.”

  “How so?”

  Does he not know?

  He knows. He has to know. He wants to know how I know, and I decide it’s a fair question.

  “Your school records are impeccably average for someone so smart. Your elementary school photo faces the wrong direction. Your birth announcement has the clearest edges I’ve ever seen in documents that predate digital inputting.”

  “You have a real nose for bullshit, don’t you?”

  I tip my glass toward him. We click, and I sip my wine.

  “So,” he says, leaning forward, “do you have a fact to share? Any theories? Wishes? Dreams? Who would I be if I could be anybody?”

  “Dreams and wishes aren’t things I waste a lot of time with. I do, however, have a hypothesis.”

  He leans forward even farther, as if he wants the table to fold away and disappear. As if, given the choice, he would twine his body into mine to hear what I had to say. “Spill it now.”

  Such is my desire to obey him that I nearly tip my glass. I blame his dead serious tone of voice, but the fact is, I’ve heard this tone before and not reacted this way.

  “If I put together your story about decamping to New Jersey, which is a known asylum state for the United Kingdom, and if I look back at what was going on then in the international community, it’s all pretty clear.”

  His left eye squints just a little. He’s not exactly smiling. But his dimples crease a little more, as if a smirk is waiting just behind his mouth.

  “I had to look it up,” I say. “NATO did have a sort of agent protection program during that time. You went dark. Your identity was wiped clean. A new one was created for you.”

  He leans back. I feared, even as I told him what I’d discovered, that he’d be angry, or afraid, or worried, or that he’d act aggressively in confirmation or denial. Instead, he seems pleased. Is he pleased that I’m so very wrong? Or that I have such a vivid imagination?

  It’s neither of those. He’s glad that I’m right. I can see it in his face, in his deepening dimples, in his relaxed smile and posture.

  “I still don’t know why,” I add. “I can’t find your father or your mother anywhere. I guess that should be a clue itself. But without something to go on, I’m not going to assume.”

  “Did you manage to uncover the reason we moved?”

  “Your dad was in MI6 and pissed off the wrong person.”

  It’s a shot in the dark, but he nods, finding my answer acceptable. “I’m going to tell you things I haven’t told too many people. I may live to regret it. But it may also relieve me of the burden of these ridiculous secrets.”

  Secrets are indeed a burden. I want to relieve him. I want to be that person he can tell things he won’t tell anybody else. The badge in my pocket weighs four hundred pounds at that moment. For the first time in my career, I wish I wasn’t a federal agent, and I make a promise I believe I can keep.

  “It’s between us,” I say, twisting two fingers in front of my lips and flicking my wrist as if I’m throwing away the key.

  With a short nod, he accepts my guarantee and puts his elbows on the table, getting close enough to me that he can speak softly. “I haven’t eaten meat since I was fifteen. Our last morning in London. Our last hours. My father was home, which was always my favorite time. He often took me out of school on a Friday for a weekend trip. We’d packed to go camping. We always brought Baron, a sheepdog and the sweetest animal you ever met. It was morning. Crack of dawn. We had a little alley behind the house with a car park. I open the door to start loading the boot. I stepped…” He stops and closes his eyes for a second, then opens them. “I’m not a squeamish man. We hunted and dressed deer and fowl. But this was different. You might not want to me to continue before dinner.”

  I lean forward on my elbows and hiss, “Finish the story or I’m going to give you something to be squeamish about.”

  He laughs softly then looks away as if checking the room, before turning back to me. “All right. I’m carrying my rucksack in my arms, so I can’t see where I’m stepping. Then…” He flattens his hand, palm down, and draws it horizontal across the space in front of his body. “I slide. My feet go out from under me and I’m arse over tits in Baron’s guts.”

  “Ugh. I’m sorry.”

  “I was quite fond of him.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “My father had…” He pauses, wheels clearly turning. “His job made him enemies.”

  “Was he a prosecutor or a spy or something?”

  “Yes and no. But to the meat of the question—”

  “Good pun.”

  “Thank you. Baron was special. His insides, however, looked exactly the same as packed meat, and I thought any animal could be Baron. I was put off it completely.”

  “Wow.” I say it with real awe, just as dinner arrives.

  “Wow, what?” He flips his napkin open and drapes it over his lap.

  “You really have a heart.” I push my knife into my steak and twist so I can see if the restaurant understands what rare means.

  “Maybe. Let’s let that be our secret.”

  My meat is deep pink inside. Just the way I like it. I look at him. He’s watching me with his dark blue eyes.

  I point my knife at my dinner. “Does this bother you?”

  “No. Does it bother you?”

  “Ac
tually, kind of. I feel sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Really.” He points his form at my plate. “Eat. You’re going to need energy.”

  “For what?”

  “Bon appetit, Agent.”

  23

  keaton

  Taylor knows Baron’s story, as do a few relatives I contacted when it was safe to do so. I don’t see the harm in telling her, and I like her. I like the way she bites into the bloody steak after I tell her I was swimming in dog guts one morning. I don’t tell her I was in those same clothes all the way to America, on an unregistered military flight. I don’t tell her that I didn’t want to take the clothes off because I didn’t want Baron to be gone forever. I don’t tell her I love dogs but can’t bear to get another.

  Maybe later.

  Right now, she’s wiping her mouth, looking away, eyes flicking to the exits out of habit. Her lashes brush her cheeks when she looks down at her food, strategizing the next bite. She’s gorgeous, but that’s a small part of her charm. The rest is inside her, and all I want to do is dig it out.

  “What?” she asks, noticing that I’m staring.

  “You came with me. To dinner. I thought you were going to hand me the wallet and send me on my way.”

  “I was hungry too.”

  “After everything I said, you could have eaten out of your own fridge.”

  She spears a green bean. “It had a ring of truth.”

  “Really?”

  “Because…” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t understand myself either. Why I feel like… I don’t know, like you take up more space in my mind than you should. Whenever I’m in a room with you, I feel like you press against the world. My world. My attention. That makes no real sense, but you make no sense.”

  I reach for her hand, but she pulls back.

  The effort required to tell her things she’s not ready to hear is monumental. Crime is folded into the fabric of society, sure. I could argue that, but it misses the point, because so is crime-fighting. Also, we’re past intellectual posturing.

  “Where is your mother?” I ask gently.