I go back outside and tap her window again. She lowers it, and the relief on her face lasts half a second before she replaces it with composure.
"It's clear. Come on."
She gets out, and I walk her to the front door with my hand on the small of her back and my body between her and the street. The contact is light and deliberate, and she doesn't pull away from it. She leans into it, just barely, just enough that my palm registers the warmth of her through her scrubs. The ache that's been living in my hands all day sharpens into something I'm going to have to deal with very soon.
Inside, she locks the door behind us, re-arms the alarm, and drops her keys on the counter. For a moment we stand in her living room, the evidence on her phone between us and the quiet of a house I just cleared for threats pressing against the warmth of a space she built for herself.
"Show me," I say.
She unlocks her phone and pulls up the photographs, and we stand close enough that our shoulders touch while she walks me through what she found. The calibration panel. The access log. The timestamp that puts someone in her building at an hour when the building should have been empty. Her voice is steady and clinical and underneath it is the heat of a woman who is furious on behalf of the people she's sworn to protect.
She lowers the phone and looks up at me. The evidence sits between us, and underneath it, everything else: the months of watching, the banter that stopped being safe somewhere around week three, my hand on her back thirty seconds ago and the way she leaned into it.
"Same time tomorrow," I say.
"Same time," she says.
The doors are locked. The alarm is armed. I should go... I don't.
4
IRELAND
The smell of coffee wakes me, and it's wrong.
My coffee is good. I buy good beans, I measure properly, and the result is reliably solid. But this is different. This smells like someone approached the process with the focus of a man who treats every task like lives depend on it, and the difference between my good and his deliberate is enough to pull me out of a bed I barely slept in.
Boone is in my kitchen.
The thought lands with a weight that has nothing to do with caffeine. He stayed. He slept on my couch with a blanket I pulled from the hall closet and a pillow I handed him while we stood at the bottom of the stairs, the space between us holding so much tension I could feel it in my teeth.
He took the pillow and said good night. I went upstairs and lay in my bed and listened to the quiet sounds of a man settling into the space below me. I did not sleep well. The reason has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that my body spent the entire night aware of exactly how many stairs separated us and exactly how little it would take to close the distance.
I pull on leggings and a sweater and go downstairs. He's standing at the counter with two mugs, his hair damp. He's in the same clothes from last night because he doesn't have others here, but the damp hair means he went upstairs and used the guest bathroom, which means he walked past my bedroom door while I was sleeping, and I didn't hear a single footstep.
The man moves through a house like a wraith, and the realization that he was that close to me in the dark without making a sound does something complicated to my nervous system.
The morning light through the kitchen window catches the scars across his knuckles and the steady way his hands hold the mugs. I stop on the last stair because the image of Boone Aldridge in my kitchen at 0630, backlit and broad-shouldered and holding coffee he made for me, is doing things to my cardiovascular system that I'm not prepared to process before caffeine. The man fills a room without trying, and my kitchen is not a large space.
He looks up. His eyes move over me once, quickly, taking in the leggings and the sweater and the hair I didn't bother taming, and whatever he finds makes his jaw tighten in the way I've learned means he's choosing not to say the thing he's thinking. The restraint is visible in his hands, the way his fingers tighten on the mug, and I want to know what the thing is badly enough that the wanting registers in my pulse.
"You found the good beans," I say.
"You were hiding them behind the decaf. I figured it was a security measure." He holds out the mug. "You're out of cream."
"There's half-and-half in the door."
"Found it. Used it. Not cream, but it’ll have to do. Your coffee situation is significantly better than mine."
"Everything about my situation is significantly better than yours. You own one towel."
The corner of his mouth lifts, and the warmth behind the reserve surfaces just enough that my pulse does something unprofessional. "I own two towels. The second one's in the wash."
"That's worse, Boone. That's actively worse."
I take the mug and let my fingers brush his during the handoff. The contact is brief and deliberate. I hold his gaze while it happens, and the way his breath catches, just barely, makes the heat climb my throat. "You might want to rethink your domestic standards if you're planning to spend time in civilized spaces."
Something shifts behind his eyes, and for half a second the reserve cracks and I can see exactly what he's thinking about spending time in my spaces. Then the control is back, and the almost-laugh surfaces with a warmth that makes me want to break it open the rest of the way.
