Page 19 of You, Only You

"We should." His voice was rough velvet, and he still didn't move.

Three seconds. Maybe five. Long enough for me to memorize the exact temperature of the air between his chest and my shoulder. Long enough to know that if I leaned back, even slightly, I'd be leaning into him, and some reckless, sleep-deprived, lo-mein-addled part of my brain wanted to do exactly that.

I stepped to the side. The cold rushed in like a punishment.

"First thing tomorrow," I said, not looking at him. "We'll call Bates first thing tomorrow."

A beat of silence. When I finally risked a glance at his face, he was staring at the spot where I'd been standing, his expression blank in a way that looked like effort. Then he blinked, and it was gone, smoothed over with careful neutrality.

"First thing tomorrow," he agreed.

I gathered my things poorly. Crammed the papers into my bag without organizing them. Put my laptop away without shutting it down. I needed air. I needed distance. I needed to be somewhere that didn't smell like him.

"Lindsey."

I stopped at the threshold, my hand on the cold metal of the door frame.

"The work you did tonight." His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual edge. "Finding that connection. Most forensic accountants would have missed it entirely."

I turned, and he was standing by the table with his hands in his pockets, and the fluorescent light was doing something to his face that made him look younger, less guarded, almost approachable. I wished it would stop.

"I'm not most forensic accountants," I said.

"No." A pause. "You're not."

I left before I could say something I'd regret. The night air hit my face, and I stood in the parking lot for a full minute, just breathing, staring up at a sky I couldn't see past the security lights.

We had proof. Real, actionable, put-Reeves-in-prison proof. Tomorrow, we'd call Bates and set everything in motion.

But as I drove away from the storage facility, I wasn't thinking about authorization codes or discretionary funds or the FBI. I was thinking about the half-inch between my finger and his hand on the table. About the way he'd said my name, just Lindsey, no formality, no distance, like he'd forgotten the rules we'd both been following.

About the fact that I'd stepped away. And that stepping away had felt like the hardest thing I'd done all week, harder than the shell companies, harder than the shipping manifests, harder than looking at photographs of trafficked teenagers.

This is a complication, I told myself. Not a development. Not a possibility. A complication. The kind I was supposed to be too smart for.

I'd always been too smart for things. Too smart to trust blindly, too smart to ignore red flags, too smart to let sentiment interfere with analysis. My whole life was built on being too smart, and it had kept me safe, and it had kept me alone, and I'd been fine with that trade.

I'd been fine with it until approximately forty-five minutes ago, when Will Steele stood behind me in a storage unit and I forgot how to breathe.

Tomorrow, when we called Bates and set this whole thing in motion, I was going to have to figure out what the hell I was going to do about it.

But tonight, driving through empty streets with the windows down because I needed cold air on my face, I let myself sit with the feeling instead of filing it. Just for the drive home. Just this once.

It felt like standing at the edge of something. Not a cliff, exactly. More like a door I hadn't known was there, and on the other side was a room I couldn't see into, and every rational instinct I had was saying don't open it.

My rational instincts had a perfect track record. They'd kept me safe for thirty-two years.

But safe, I was starting to realize, and alive were not the same thing.

6.Will

Imade the tail three blocks from Sterling & Steele. Dark sedan, two cars back, maintaining perfect distance through every turn. Professional. Which meant Reeves had stopped wondering who was looking at him and started looking back.

My hands stayed loose on the wheel. My breathing was even. Standard counter-surveillance protocol: maintain speed, vary the route, identify the vehicle, don't react. I counted the seconds between lane changes. I noted the tinted windows, the rental plates, the way they hung back just far enough to suggest training.

Not thugs. Operators. The kind of people who get paid to deliver messages without leaving fingerprints.

"Amateur move," I murmured to myself, watching them in my rearview mirror. "Letting me see you."