by Cara McKenna
She frowned at that one.
“Or perhaps not . . . ?”
“I like you scruffy, but whatever makes you feel like a free man, go for it.”
“Would you set aside an hour for an early drink with me?”
“Up here?” she asked.
He nodded. “Give me until one, to reacquaint myself with hygiene and grooming. Just a small drink—I feel I deserve a toast.”
“That you do. I’ll grill you about your detention once you’re all freshened up. And how you even found those things to begin with.”
“And I’ll grill you about the news—I’ve somehow been left out of the loop, even though I was wrapped up in the middle of the case.”
“It’s a date.”
He waited for more—for Christ, I missed you. For a kiss so deep she’d taste the way he’d ached for her these past few hellish days, in his chest and skin and bones and blood.
“I’ll get something thrown together for lunch,” she said. “You’re probably starved.”
“That would be nice. The feds seemed to think I deserved mainly untoasted bagels and packets of light cream cheese.”
“Our tax dollars hard at work.”
I missed you so much. Say you missed me.
She turned her attention to the fridge.
Under the hot spray of the shower, Duncan assured himself, That’s simply how she is. And he liked her as she was—loved her as she was. So he’d just have to take the rose with the thorns, as they said. It wasn’t as though he was much better with these things.
Duncan lathered and scrubbed and rinsed, toweled himself, dressed in a button-up and fresh jeans—a sort of hybrid of his old and new selves. He styled his hair but left his nascent beard alone. He didn’t feel like himself anymore, so there was little urgency to look the part. He pulled on socks, then sat on the edge of the bed, holding his breath as he ripped the courier service’s plastic envelope open.
Inside, between sheets of bubble wrap, was a velvet box, long and slender as a remote control. He popped it open, turned it this way and that, watched the sun catch on innumerable, exquisite facets. Yes, he thought. This was right. Exactly right.
When he found Raina in the kitchen, there were easily ten bottles of champagne lined up on the table. She gestured at the selection like a spokesmodel.
“Goodness. I’m spoiled for choice.”
“I get sent samples all the time by distributors, but I don’t really like wine, so they just sit in the cupboard, waiting for something worth celebrating. And I’d say your exoneration more than qualifies.”
He picked a bottle and Raina washed a pair of dusty flutes while he opened it.
“I hope it pairs with grilled cheese,” she said, watching him pour. “That’s about all I’ve got the ingredients for.”
“Cheers.” He handed her a glass.
“To your freedom, Inspector Welch.”
They clinked, and he said, “Sit.”
He dragged the other chair around the table, close enough for their knees to brush. Astrid claimed his lap, but he dropped her back on the floor. After a deep drink that he barely tasted, he set his glass aside, then Raina’s, and took her hands in his.
She looked a fraction as nervous as Duncan felt. He cleared his throat.
“Being detained left me with quite a lot of time to think.”
“I’ll bet. Especially if you might have a job search ahead of you.”
“About that, but other things as well. More pressing things. Things I’ve had on my mind since before I even found those bones.”
“I’m sensing some sort of revelation.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” He reached into his breast pocket and drew out her present. It was a heavy thing—a bracelet of quarter-carat round diamonds, three dense rows, set in platinum.
Her eyes were gigantic, pinned to the dangling cuff. “Whoa. What the fuck?” Her chin jerked up. “Duncan?”
He’d pictured this exact item in his mind, as he’d sat in those depressing cinder block rooms at the BCSD, pictured giving it to her. He’d felt his throat ache and his heart race as he’d rehearsed words in his mind. And this was the least of the gestures he intended to make this morning.
“It’s a gift. Open your hand.” He had to do it for her, uncurling her fingers and laying the bracelet across her palm.
“A gift?”
“Yes, a gift. I want to spoil you.” I love you. He could think those words, but not quite seem to push them through his lips. He imagined if the bracelet had been better received, the words would’ve followed more easily.
“Spoil me?” she echoed.
He nodded.
A long, long pause. “You want to dress me up,” she corrected slowly.
Duncan’s heart went from pinwheel to boulder in a single beat. “No—”
“You still want to Pretty Woman me, don’t you?”
And he couldn’t help blanching, because once upon a time . . . yes, he had. Badly. He’d wanted to strip away what he’d seen as her cheap packaging and remake her as someone more . . . worthy. Worthy of him, he’d thought, as though he’d been anything special. He’d wanted to fix her exterior as he’d spent years doing with himself. He’d wanted her tattoos gone. Her clothes replaced. Yes, he’d wanted all that. And it shamed him to think it now.
He shook his head. “I like you just as you are. All I want is to treat you.”
She frowned but held her tongue.
“Tell me you like it.”
Raina studied it, draped along her palm like a snake, glimmering.
“Tell me.”
“What would I ever wear this with? I don’t own a single dress. Not even a skirt. I’d get mugged if I—”
“Stop. Tell me.”
She closed her hand with a sigh. “It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful, exquisite, expensive thing anyone’s ever tried to give me.”
“Tried to?”
She took his wrist, turned his hand over, and let the stones pool in his cupped palm. She closed his fingers gently. “I’m not a girl who takes diamonds from a man.”
He laughed, flustered. “It’s not a ring. It’s not a leash, either, or a promise of any sort, or some brand to mark you as mine. I’m not after your freedom, Raina. I’m just a man who wants to give a woman an extravagant, ridiculous gift. Because I spent two nights away from her and missed her. Because I want to delight her.”
Her fingertips rubbed his knuckles, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She let his hands go. “I appreciate the thought. But I don’t delight. I’d have thought you knew me well enough to realize that.”
Desperation fell over him, suffocating. “Take it, please.”
Finally those brown eyes met his. She shook her head, looking sad. “No.”
“I told you once, I’m not a man who begs, but again, I’ll demean myself for you. Please. All I want is to take your breath away, and this was the only way I could think to.”
She smiled, the gesture weak. “It’s very you, Duncan. But it’s not me.”
“Okay, then . . . I’m sorry it seems to have offended you.”
“I’m not offended. I’m sorry if I led you to believe that I’m something I’m not. Like the kind of woman who expects gifts like that one.”
“Not expects them, no. Forget the bracelet—it was only a preamble anyway.”
“A preamble? To what?”
He took a breath, let it out slowly. “I want to fund the improvements your father wanted to make to the bar.”
Silence. Dead silence.
Nervous, Duncan went on. “I don’t know how much it might cost. To add a kitchen, quite a lot, but perhaps that could come later. But to start, I thought fifty thousand could go quite a way to—”
“Stop.” She shook her head, eyes shut. “What o
n earth are you talking about?”
“All the things your father had wanted but hadn’t had the chance to do. I want to make those things a reality. To help the bar stay viable once the competition arrives.”
“Those were my father’s plans, not mine.”
“I assumed—”
“Yeah, I can tell you assumed. A lot. Listen, Duncan. That’s insanely generous—insanely. But you don’t know what I want. I don’t think you even know me, not like you think you do.”
“I don’t know you?” In a breath his desperation sharpened to something far more aggressive.
“I thought you did . . . I’ve never been with a guy before, and thought, ‘He gets me. He knows me, and there’s nothing he’d change about me.’”
“And there isn’t. And I do know you.”
“How can you, if that’s what you think I want—”
“I don’t know how to touch you,” he demanded, “to make you come in three minutes flat? I don’t know what your skin smells like, and how your voice sounds, first thing in the morning?”
She looked taken aback, as though he’d threatened or insulted her.
“I don’t know what the sadness in your eyes looks like,” he asked, “when you think of your father, and touch his things, and listen to his music?”
“You’ve never met my father.”
“And I’m not speaking as though I do. I’m speaking about you. And your feelings—lust and satisfaction and amusement.”
“What the fuck is this about?”
He considered it. “This is about you, and me. Perhaps I chose the wrong gift, perhaps I overstepped my bounds, but I do know you. I’ve memorized you. I’ve seen things in you I ache to experience, written all over your face. Longing. Attachment. Grief.”
“You want my grief? You’re more than welcome to it. Have at it.”
He glared at her tone. “I’ve grieved for one person in my entire pathetic, empty life. One person, whom I knew for a year. Your father cared for you for twenty times longer, and surely a thousand times deeper, than anyone’s ever cared for me. So yes, I want your fucking grief. That’s a pain you earn, and a pain you get gifted with. I want that pain.”
Her head was shaking, eyes hot. “No, you don’t. You have no fucking idea how bad this shit hurts.”
“No, I don’t. I want to. I’m asking you to let me close enough to risk feeling all that one day.” He stared at her hard, diamonds biting as his fist squeezed, anger tensing the whole of him. “What is this? What are we?”
Though she didn’t shrug, he saw apathy in her eyes. “Lovers,” she offered. “Friends?”
“Do you even like me?”
“Of course I do.”
Not enough to introduce me to your friends. “If I took my job back, if I were slated to stay here another two years . . . Would this continue? What precisely is the expiration date on your attentions?”
“There’s no way to know to how long these things last—why bother trying to guess?”
“These things?” he echoed.
“Yeah. These things. Our thing.”
Our thing. Again, his brain caught on the encapsulation inherent in the notion. Of them sharing some unique attachment, just between the two of them. Christ help him, he wanted to belong to someone. “Have I really misread this so badly, that I care this much, and you could be so ambivalent?”
“I’m not ambivalent—I’m freaked-out. You’re trying to buy yourself some spot in my life, when all you ever needed to do was ask if you could stay.”
“I’m not trying to do that at all.” Duncan paused. Frowned. All at once shame overcame him, because yes, that was precisely what he was trying to do.
Much as he’d changed in the past week, he still didn’t believe he was enough, on his own. He didn’t trust he was enough, just as he was. He didn’t trust what they had was enough. And yes, he’d tried to buy his place in her life; he just hadn’t realized it.
“It was meant to be a gesture,” he said softly, sadly. “It felt safer to hide behind it, rather than to simply tell you I’m in love with you.”
“Duncan . . .” She took his hand, gaze on their fingers. “This week has been . . .”
“No, it’s nothing to do with this week. Not the way you’re thinking.”
She met his eyes. “Everything’s been amplified—by the threats, and the case, by the lack of sleep. By too much adrenaline, and by the fucking sex. Hell, by you going off your meds, for all I know.”
His anger flashed. “I’ve never felt so lucid.”
“I believe that whatever you’re feeling for me, it’s intense. You love somebody, but she’s not me. You’ve never even seen me cry—how can you possibly think you love me?”
“You won’t talk me out of how I feel. Or out of the fact that I do know you, no matter how much that scares you.”
She let his hand go, heaving a silent sigh. “You think I’m afraid to be known?”
“I do.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been waiting my whole adult life to meet a man who saw me the way my dad did, and who wants me just as I am. I thought maybe you were that guy. The last man I’d have expected to take me at face value, but I really did think you got me.”
He was lost. Because he’d thought the same. Part of him still did . . . Only could he, really, if he’d misjudged this all so terribly?
“I can’t take your money, Duncan. And I can’t be the reason you stay in a town you hate. You keep your job, you stick around because of that? Great. But I can’t pursue this with all that pressure weighing on it. All that expectation. All I’ve ever wanted was independence. I can’t love somebody if I feel beholden to them.”
Duncan studied her mouth, scared of her eyes. “All I’ve ever wanted was to belong somewhere. To someone who wants me.”
“You know I want you. But not like this.” She nodded at his hand, and the bracelet it hid. “That’s a deposit, Duncan. Whether you want to admit it is or not.”
“I’m trying to treat you, not . . . not reserve you. Don’t project your tiresome baggage onto my intentions—I’ve enough of my own already.”
She sighed, twisting her hair into a chaotic bunch. “Listen. Even if you’re staying for another two years, I don’t know for sure that I am.”
His heart stopped. “What?”
“I’m selling the bar.”
“Since when?”
“Since I spent Thursday night feeling like I was good at something more than pouring beer and making change. You know, I thought with my dad’s things moved out, it’d feel like mine, this place. But it still doesn’t. It was always ours—his and mine, but without him, mine feels as good as empty, most days.”
“Your entire life is in this building,” Duncan said, not sure why he felt so hurt by her plans. Because he’d not been consulted about them? No, because I had no right to have been consulted about them. Because we were never anything that serious, not outside of my delusions. And because she was planning to throw away the thing he’d ached for so badly, for so many years—a home.
She took a deep breath. “You said it yourself, you don’t know what it’s like, missing someone this badly. Hurting this hard from the absence of a person. From memories of them.”
Anger simmered in him, and he dropped the bracelet back in his pocket. “Of course I don’t. You’ve lost more than I’ve ever even been offered. You’ve run from things I’ve never dared dream of having within my grasp.”
“What Miah wanted to give me, you mean.”
Not quite. “Loyalty, affection, acceptance. Does it even matter who gives it—a lover or a parent or a friend? Do you know what I have?”
“It’s not a contest—”
“I have a cat, Raina. A cat and maybe my tailor, my old dry cleaner, my shrink. That’s who’d mourn me if I disappeared tomo
rrow. Unless perhaps you’d like to admit that maybe you’d miss me, and for more than sustenance or income. For something human . . . ?”
A long pause. “Of course I’d miss you.”
“Would you mourn me? Would the lack of me ache in your bones, and echo in your bed? Would losing me take a part of you away for good, one you could never replace?”
She held his stare, though her eyes flicked uneasily between his.
When the pause grew sharp enough to cut, Duncan turned away. “That’s my answer, then.”
“Duncan—”
He shrugged her hand from his shoulder and headed for the guest room.
“You know I want you,” she called, her steps trailing his.
“As a fuck and a fencing partner,” Duncan clarified, hauling his suitcase from the closet. He began filling it, scooping his clothes from the dresser in armfuls. “And that money wasn’t a deposit, I want you to know. It was a thank-you, for all the ways you’ve changed me. I thought you’d be pleased, but I guess you’re right—I don’t know you after all. Because apparently you could give a shit about your father’s precious plans—”
She marched across the room and slapped him. Hard and neat, making fire bloom in his cheek. He blinked, eyes welling from the sting.
“I give way too big a shit about my father’s precious plans,” she hissed. “That bar is me. I’m Raina Harper. I own Benji’s. The place with my dead father’s name in neon over the front door, and his ashes on a shelf above my fucking head. And maybe I’ll get to breathe again if I finally put this place in my rearview. You want a piece of my grief? You buy it and run it your own goddamn self. Because I’m done with it.”
“And done with me, apparently.”
“That’s your shit, not mine. Don’t bother billing me for your therapy.”
He went still, so hurt and angry and lost he was petrified for a breath. Fuck you. That was what he wanted to say, but he’d lost control of himself so many times already over this woman. He calmed his breath. Turned, walked to the kitchen, and set his suitcase by the door. Raina didn’t move as he laced his shoes, collected his suits, his plastic-wrapped briefcase, Astrid’s bowls. Raina was standing in the kitchen when he came back up from a final trip to his car, not speaking as he wrestled his squirming cat into her carrier.
