I stood at the railing in my jacket and watched the water. For forty seconds, I thought about nothing. A miracle.
The door behind me opened.
Dominic came out the way he entered every room: silent, economical, and with no visible doubt that he belonged there. He stopped two paces from the railing.
He didn’t look at the water. He looked at me.
“You followed me up.”
“I escorted you up.”
The railing was cold under my hand. “That’s not the word.”
“It is the word on the timesheet.”
I laughed softly despite myself. “Mr.Graves.”
“Catalina.” He hadn’t used my first name before. The four syllables came out in the proper Spanish cadence. Correct. Not a guess. He had been listening.
Yesterday at lunch, when I took the embassy call and slipped into Spanish for two sentences without thinking, he had been listening. He had picked up the cadence and brought it to an eighth-floor balcony at one in the morning like that was a normal thing for a man to do.
I turned back toward the railing. The water seemed safer than his face. “You haven’t slept since Sunday.”
“How do you know that?”
“The aide told me.”
“The aide talks too much.”
“The aide is a saint, and you’re the reason she’s having a long week.”
He exhaled. Barely. For Dominic, that was practically slapstick. He took two steps forward and stopped beside me at the railing. A foot of distance. Less than protocol. More than touch. Apparently where we lived now.
He looked out over the water. The light beneath therailing caught the line of his jaw. The cedar smell of him was closer. So was the heat coming off his body, steady and impossible to ignore, like standing too close to a stove and pretending the stove wasn’t the problem.
“Tell me about the dinner tomorrow,” I said.
His eyes stayed on the water. “What about it?”
“Your job. The biggest threat.”
He was quiet for one beat. “The European cultural attaché.”
I turned my head. That hadn’t been on my list of expected answers. “The man with the cologne?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He watches you when you are not speaking.” A clean sentence. No hesitation. No extra explanation to make it softer.
My skin prickled. That wasn’t what I had meant by threat, and he knew it.
I had noticed the attaché watching too. In my notes, he was a possible access point, possible nuisance, which was the professional way to write man whose gaze made my back teeth itch. Dominic had filed him somewhere else.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes.”
