“Unless you want to help?” He directs this at Gwyneth.
“I don’t suppose that’s under my list of additional duties.” She does a neat about-face, impressive in those heels, and vanishes into the office once again.
“Ah, Gwennie,” Mort says. “A real team player.” He goes to drop his umbrella into the stand but halts. His umbrella is shaking, clearly distressed.
“Where is she?” Mort asks.
I point toward the ceiling and my bedroom upstairs. “There was a squabble.”
A thump of protest comes from my bedroom. I raise my hands, palms skyward. “Or something more than a squabble.”
Mort’s umbrella continues to shudder—it is outrage itself—even after he drops it into the stand.
“I swear, it only acts up around yours.” He leans down, hands planted on his thighs. “Behave, or you won’t get to see Pansy’s umbrella at all.”
That does the trick, although a wave of petulance hits me. From upstairs comes a theatrical sigh.
Mort wraps his arm around my waist, and we head for the kitchen.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he says.
I shake my head. “No, tell me about Paris, or wherever you were.”
“Paris. Got it in one.”
“I just want to hear something…” I can’t quite articulate what. Something that has nothing to do with King’s End. Something that sounds like an adventure in a faraway land.
“Want to hear how I was mending fissures in the catacombs?”
Oh, yes. That will do nicely. “Got it in one,” I say.
Lunch is a terrible, trying experience. Gwyneth refuses to unmoor her hip from Henry’s. It’s almost like she doesn’t want him eating Mort’s sandwiches or drinking my tea, this last in particular.
Every time Henry utters some piece of polite small talk, Mort glances my way and rolls his eyes in a manner unbecoming a senior field agent. Every time Mort pontificates about a field assignment, Gwyneth looks as if she’s swallowed shards of glass. Gone is the dark fairy tale of the Paris Catacombs that sent delicious shivers up and down my spine. True, Mort has always bragged, but now his voice holds an aggressive, competitive edge that grates against my ears.
Then Mort spills his tea, and Gwyneth rolls her eyes at that. I’m down on the floor, sopping up what I can, when I glance up. A hint of a stealth smile lights Henry’s face, and he gives me a barely there, sexier-than-it-has-the-right-to-be wink.
He schools his expression so quickly, I’m not sure if I imagined the whole thing or not. Except for the tea. The rag is sodden in my hand. The rest has sunk into the carpet, which makes a squishy sound anytime someone walks across it.
I’m clearing the dishes and pouring more tea—grinding through these hostess duties keeps my mind and gaze from straying toward Henry—when Mort rubs his hands together.
“All right, then,” he says. “The infamous Camelot Lots. Charming place. You feel certain it’s transmuted into a level five hot spot?”
This last is directed at Henry rather than me.
“I do,” Henry says. “I’ve just drafted my initial report.” His laptop sits on the coffee table, although how he found the elbow room to type with Gwyneth attached to his hip is anyone’s guess.
“Enough evidence to call in a task force?” Mort asks.
Henry shakes his head. “We were ambushed almost immediately. There was no time to collect data or take any readings beyond what our umbrellas recorded.”
“Which was surprisingly little.”
Beneath Mort’s observation is an accusation that sends my heart fluttering.
“We were doing a bit of training in the cemetery beforehand and didn’t have our umbrellas activated.” Henry brushes this off with finesse, as if Mort couldn’t possibly understand what goes into mentoring a field agent. “No sense sending headquarters erroneous data. As I said, we were ambushed almost immediately. Adjusting the data settings was the last thing on our minds.”
Henry speaks as if this actually happened. In a sense, I guess it did. Sort of. We were in the cemetery. We were ambushed. We eventually made it to the housing development.
