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A hesitant nod, the hint of a smile. “Okay. I can live with that.” She picked up the globe. “You want to visit Ossovia with me?”
He wanted arguments and slow dancing and getting her off in the Jacuzzi. He wanted long conversations about her ambitions and middle-of-the-night post-sex snacks. He wanted to collect all the clever goodness of her up and reflect it back to her, so she was never in doubt of her value. He wanted to love her honesty, truthfully, and be confident she loved him, too.
He wanted it endlessly.
“There has to be an us for that,” she said.
He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve. This was the moment his strategy might all fall apart. The last time he’d thought on his feet to protect Lenny, he’d fucked it up badly enough to see her hurt and to almost jeopardize the con. This time, he wasn’t acting out of fear but from the surety of love.
“I think there could be an us.”
On his forearm, Amelia had drawn a copy of her fire-breathing horse dragon, and she’d also drawn another figure. This one was a dolphin whale butterfly that sprayed water from a hole in the middle of its back. He pointed to the horse dragon. “This is me.”
“Obviously.”
Her amusement was a shot of pure courage. It got mixed up in his desire for her and flooded through his body like adrenaline on speed. “This is you. Or rather, this is how Amelia saw us in fantasy animal form. Neither of us are what you’d call ordinary. We don’t really fit with all the other animals. But we might fit together.”
“Did you use this kind of sophisticated selling technique on Cookie Jar?”
He laughed. “He was easier to con.”
Lenny’s delight fell away as quickly as it had come, and his confidence wobbled on the narrow ledge it walked. “Are you conning me?” she asked.
“No, but I am trying to win you.”
She flapped a hand. “Are you saying there’s a way for us to be together? Because I don’t like my current choices. My life backfired. It’s time to face facts, grow up. I’m not a trust-fund society princess anymore. I can’t be Lenore Bradshaw who uses her status and skills to do good in the world. All I can do is reinvent myself as someone else and start over.”
“What matters more to you, the status or doing good?”
She threw both arms out in frustration. “If it was the status, I wouldn’t be here in this rat trap office building that lets in office supply hawkers. I wouldn’t have accepted the dirty money Fin laundered through D4D you had to check was accounted for properly. I wouldn’t have needed to throw glassware or agreed to go vigilante on Cookie Jar with you, and I certainly wouldn’t be thinking about abandoning my dream because I’m a liability.”
You won big when you risked big. He’d always known it, but it’d never been so personal. “You don’t have to give up your dream. You just need to accept some bad influences and creative accounting. You could choose me.”
She took a step back from the table, and that distancing was a puncture in his lung, making it hard to get the next words out. “I’m in love with you, Lenny. You’re the best adventure I’ve ever had. You’re my last great collectable, the one thing I don’t want to live without. I’ve never felt more me than when I was helping you get what you wanted.”
She put a hand over her mouth and he rushed on. “If you want to pass D4D on to Fin and move to Florida, expect me to visit often. Hell, I’ll open a Sherwood Florida branch. And if you want to change your name, and you’re willing to accept some considered advice, I think you should wait a while and see if there’s any possibility you’d change it to Sherwood.”
She started in shock. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”
“No. I asked you to give us a chance to see if we can be scandalously good together. When I ask you to be my partner in crime forever, you won’t be confused about it. You’ll be happy with the way you reinvented your life. I’ll have a famous Ossovia green emerald in my pocket, and I’ll be on my knee with my heart in my hands hoping you’ll take it in yours.”
“Stop. Just stop.” She came around the table and grabbed the front of his shirt. “I’ve been wanting to touch you since you walked in. I can’t believe you’re really here, you had all those packages, and I didn’t trust myself not to lose all pride and beg you to fool me forever.”
Her eyes were bright. She stood on her toes and held on to his clothes with both hands.
He slipped his arms tentatively around her. It was like handling electricity, the hazard unpredictable. Anticipation burned through his veins, setting his senses alight, but everything he wanted could still blow up.
/> She yanked on his shirt. “I thought I had to do it all alone. Fix my family. Quit. Leave everything. Start new. I got it tattooed on my hip. I didn’t think you’d come for me because you’re too damn self-sacrificing. Too worried about what was right for me. Well, I decide that.” She yanked again, and he lowered his head so they were eye to eye. Hers held worlds he ached to explore.
“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I fell in love with you even when I knew it wasn’t smart. I got hurt because I didn’t want us to end, and I was too afraid to trust you.”
He put a hand to the back of her head and tightened his grip on her, afraid there was some twist he didn’t see coming that would turn him into the fool.
“You never lied. You kept our deal. And you always put me first. I don’t want my life derailed by other people’s mistakes. I don’t want to run and hide. And I don’t like my choices when they’re without you.”
It was too much to hope that between them they had a balanced ledger. “I’m always going to be a bad guy, Lenny. The kind of bad you’ve been trying to avoid.”
“We have the same ambition. We just came at it from opposite sides of the moral equation. I had trouble telling the difference between your kind of bad and the kind that put my dad and brother in prison. But I don’t anymore. Your kind of bad spits in the face of injustice and inequality. You do it for the right reasons and that’s—”
