Chapter 4

Cillian’s POV

“Say it again,” Nell said. “The part about the keycard.”

We were parked at the end of a long, curved driveway in Lake Forest. Snow ticked against the windshield of her little blue hatchback. Ahead of us, the Fitzgerald house blazed with light, three stories of stone and glass and old money, with a fountain out front that had been turned off for the winter.

I turned off the engine. I’d insisted on driving. She’d insisted on paying for gas. We’d compromised by arguing the whole way.

“I do security consulting,” I said. It was the closest thing to the truth I had. “Freelance. The hotel gave me a temporary card for a walk-through last month.”

“For what?”

“They wanted someone to test the doors.”

“And that’s why you were in a photograph.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why there’s no Cal Dunne in the state of Illinois.”

“I don’t pay taxes under that name. It’s a work name.”

“A work name.”

“Lots of people have one.”

She watched me. She’d been doing that all week. It wasn’t the way Brendan watched me, like a man weighing a threat. It was slower. As if I were a page of small print, and she’d already found the mistake in the last line.

“Tell me one true thing,” she said.

“About what?”

“About anything. A thing you’d never say in front of a client.”

I thought about it. I could have said my name. I could have said my age, my address, the color of my father’s coffin. I could have said I hadn’t felt this nervous since my first board meeting, and that it was absurd, because all I was doing was walking into a house.

“I hate cilantro,” I said.

She blinked. Then she laughed. Real, helpless, a little startled. It rang through the car and lit up her whole face.

“That’s it?”

“It’s true.”

“It tastes like soap.”

“It tastes like a lie.”

“That’s very dramatic.”

“I’m a very dramatic bartender.”

Her laugh faded into a softer sound. She looked at her hands. “I’ve never been engaged,” she said. “Not really. I mean, I almost was.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“He told the whole room.”

“That’s what I mean. Nobody remembers the almost.” She tugged her left earlobe. She had a pretty dress on, dark green, plain, with a neckline that made it hard to look anywhere else. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Nell.”

“Yes?”

“You look...” I stopped. I had rehearsed a clever line. It was gone. “You look like a woman who’s going to win.”

Her mouth trembled. Then it firmed. “Thank you.”

I got out. I opened her door. She took my hand and didn’t let go.

~

Dinner was a long table under a chandelier the size of a small car. Twenty-two guests. Silver, crystal, a string quartet in the corner, and a fire that could have roasted a pig. Nell sat on my left. Brendan sat across from her, next to Aoife, with a glass of red wine and a look of tender concern.

Desmond stood first.

“To my daughter,” he said. “To the man who’s giving her a good life.” He raised his glass. “And to family.”

Everyone drank. Brendan rose next.

“I’d like to say a few words,” he said, with a hand on Aoife’s shoulder. “About love. About what makes it last.”

My spine went cold.

“When I was younger,” said Brendan, “I thought I knew. I planned a wedding once. Well.” He laughed. Everybody laughed, politely, uncertain. “Almost planned. Somebody in this room knows how that ends. Nell, you’ll forgive me. It’s a funny story.”

Nell’s hand went rigid in mine.

“It ended because I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t give her what she needed. Not because she wasn’t wonderful. She is. She’s just,” he tilted his head, warm and terrible, “the kind of person who loves planning more than being planned for. I think it’s why she’s so good at this. You should hear her on the phone with florists.”

A ripple of chuckles.

“To Nell,” he said. “Who is brave enough to try again.”

Silence.

I felt her pulse jump in her wrist like a trapped bird. Her lips were white. She was smiling, God help her, she was smiling with her whole face, and her eyes were shining with tears she refused to spill.

I had spent ten years on boards. I’d sat across from men who’d cut a thousand jobs before lunch. I had never once wanted to hit a man at a dinner table.

I stood.

Twenty-two faces turned.

“I’d like to say a few words too,” I said.

“Cal,” Nell whispered. “Don’t.”

“I won’t be long.” I raised my glass. My voice came out steady. “I’m not the kind of man who makes toasts. I fix doors. I stand in halls. But I met this woman at a funeral, and I want to tell you what she did.”

A few polite smiles. A few frowns.

“Someone’s grandmother fainted. Mid-eulogy. Everyone panicked. She was the only person who moved. She got the woman a glass of water, a chair, a fan, and a chair for the woman’s husband too, because he looked bad. She was working. It wasn’t her family. It wasn’t her funeral. She never asked for a thing.” I looked down at Nell. She was staring up at me, lips parted. “And then she went and fixed the flowers, because they’d been knocked over. And nobody thanked her. And she never noticed.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the fire.

“Someone said she loves planning more than being planned for. I think that’s wrong.” I turned my head and met Brendan’s eyes. “I think the people who plan everything for everyone else have just never met somebody who’d do it back. That’s all.”

I set down my glass.

“To Nell,” I said. “Who’s not almost anything.”

Somebody at the far end of the table said, “Hear, hear.” Someone else started clapping. Then more.

Aoife was crying, and clapping, and dabbing her eyes with a napkin. Brendan sat rigid, with a smile like a crack in ice.

Nell stood.

I don’t know who moved first. I think we both did. Her hand fisted in my shirt. Mine slid into her hair. She rose on her toes, and I bent, and my mouth found hers in front of twenty-two people and a string quartet.

Her lips were warm and shaking. She tasted like red wine and salt. For half a second she froze. Then she made a small sound in her throat, and her fingers tightened, and she kissed me back like she was starving.

The world dropped out.

I forgot the guests. I forgot the fire. I forgot my name, both of them.

When we came apart, she was breathless, her eyes huge. Around us, people were laughing. Somebody whistled.

“That,” she whispered, “was not on the index cards.”

“No.”

“Is that going on the bill?”

“It was free.”

“I don’t do free.”

“Neither do I.”

~

We didn’t make it home.

We made it to the car. We made it as far as the third stoplight on Sheridan Road, where she said my name and I pulled over without a word. We made it up four flights of stairs to her apartment in Wicker Park, tangled up, laughing, dropping our coats in the hall. She said, “Are you sure?” and I said, “Are you?” and we both said yes.

We’d each had one glass of wine, hours before. Neither of us was anything but sure. I knew who I was kissing.

I thought I did.

Her back hit the inside of her apartment door with a dull, solid thud, and the sound echoed like a starter pistol in the dark entryway.

I didn’t reach for a light switch. The glow from the streetlamps four floors below spilled through the high loft windows, slicing pale amber angles across the bare wooden floorboards and painting the slope of her throat in raw, shifting shadow.

Nell didn't drop her gaze. Her chest heaved against the bodice of that dark green dress, her breath catching fast and ragged in her throat. She looked at me with that same razor-sharp scrutiny she’d leveled at me all week—only now, the cool distance was scorched away, replaced by an electric, hungry defiance.

"No index cards," she whispered, her voice husky, shaking slightly at the edges. "No script. Just tell me you're not going to be gentle, Cal. I don't want gentle tonight."

"I haven't felt gentle since I saw you standing in the rain three weeks ago," I rasped.

I reached behind her, gripping the zipper at the nape of her neck, and pulled it down with one deliberate, unbroken motion. The dark green silk parted with a soft hiss, spilling off her shoulders to puddle in a rich heap around her heels. She stood before me in nothing but a scrap of matching lace, her ribs expanding with every shallow breath, her pale skin blooming with feverish heat.

I didn't give her time to hesitate. I caught her by the waist, lifting her clean off the floor. Her thighs wrapped around my hips instinctively, her heels digging into my lower back as I carried her through the dim apartment to the bedroom, falling with her onto the unmade mattress.

I collapsed forward, resting my full weight against her damp chest, our ragged breaths tangling together in the cool night air.

For long minutes, neither of us moved. She tangled her fingers weakly in my hair, her lips pressed softly against my jaw, both of us anchored in the warm, heavy silence of the bedroom—completely unaware of the storm waiting inside the small glowing screen across the room.

~

At three in the morning, I woke to a small blue light on the nightstand.

Her phone. It buzzed once against the wood, and lit her sleeping face. She lay curled on her side, one hand under her cheek. I looked at her for a long moment. She looked younger asleep. She looked like somebody who hadn’t been let down yet.

The screen glowed. The message preview slid across the top.

The text was from Desmond Fitzgerald. Triple your f*e. All I need is a look at the Doyle owner’s Friday nights. Your fiancé works in that building, doesn’t he?

I stopped breathing.

The woman asleep beside me had just been offered more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to spy on me.

And she would read it the second she woke.