Darcy popped her neck from side to side.
“I found one place that wants a fuckingessayfrom me on my commitment to customer service,” she said darkly. “So I’ll work on that tomorrow.”
“An essay?”
“A cover letter. Same deal.” She paused. “I might ask you to look at it before I send it in. Just, you know. Spelling and stuff.”
Teagan nodded and held out the stack of paper menus to her. He usually went out for lunch but ordered somethingup to the office for dinner for himself and anyone else who was working late.
Darcy took the top menu—the Chinese restaurant in the lobby—and looked at it blankly for a few seconds. Then she passed it back to him.
“You pick. Just something not too heavy on mushrooms,” she asked, not sounding too interested.
“I could take you out to dinner,” he said, hopes rising again. Darcy back here in his office was good, but Darcy tucked into some cozy booth with him and a bowl of chana masala would be much better. “What would you like? Indian, maybe? There’s a good place near my condo.”
At that, Darcy perked up. “Your condo! That’s a good point. Do you have some time to go over that right now?”
“Time for... my condo?” he asked, confused.
“Yes. Where is it?”
“Midtown West.”
“I couldn’t find that on the map. Is it not in Manhattan?”
“Realtors invented Midtown West to sell condos,” he admitted. “It’s Hell’s Kitchen, really.”
Darcy nodded thoughtfully, then reached into her backpack. She pulled out a map, the giant foldout kind that newsstands sold to tourists to mark them as people who ought to be pickpocketed or robbed. She unfolded it over the conference room table and peremptorily gestured at Teagan to come stand next to her.
The map was covered in black pen marks, checks and crosses, and Darcy had drawn a thick, highlighted route from his office to Grand Central Station. The route was far from direct—it zigged and zagged circuitously around a number of blocks, nearly doubling the distance between the twodestinations. He couldn’t figure out what it was meant to capture.
“Show me on this map where your condo is?” Darcy asked, frowning at the center.
Teagan tapped 47th Street.
Darcy scanned the area. “Okay, I didn’t get that far north today. I’ll look tomorrow.”
“Look for what?”
She grinned, glancing over at him with just a quick flash of curving red lips.
“So, this is how you get to the train without passing any bars,” she said, tapping the thick black line with her finger. “There are a couple of restaurantshere”—she indicated a black check mark—“andherethat look like they have bars in them, but if you keep to the south side of the street, you won’t walk right by them. We’ll practice tonight on the way home.”
Teagan inhaled, his chest tightening until it felt like a vibrating string between his heart and his throat. She must have spent hours today methodically mapping the local watering holes. It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t help him if she were gone. She’d done it to keep him safe.
Teagan had always thought about love in terms of want and need. He’d been in love. He’d felt loved before. He’d seen it expressed in words and embraces and gifts. The austerity of Darcy’s kind of care had made it hard for him to recognize—it wasn’t a way he’d been loved before. But Darcy mapping his way home was a kind of love too, so tangible that he’d never be able to tell himself even on his worst day that he’d imagined it.
She squeaked when he reached out and roughly pulled herto him. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his nose against her scalp to breathe in the sweet smell of her hair.
“This is really good work,” he told her, because he didn’t know if she wanted to hear him sayI think I’m in love with you.He still had three months to show her.
“Well, thank you,” Darcy said, crushed against his chest, sounding a little flustered. “I’ll get to your condo tomorrow. And then we can talk about everywhere else you go.”
Nowhere without her, Teagan hoped, mentally resolving to spend twice as much time with the state parks department’s job board tomorrow.
nineteen
For all that Teagan was theoretically eager to get back to his typical social schedule of benefit luncheons, dinners, and balls, he made several attempts to abort the mission on the evening when Darcy finally cleared him to stress-test his sobriety under typical field conditions.
