I smile.
“I had to do something,” I say, my thumb tracing the line of her jaw, the skin warm beneath my touch, “before you started trying to figure out why A-B-C-D is happening. So I could remind you?—”
I lean in.
Close enough that my next words land against her lips.
“—that you’re not working, remember?”
She blinks.
The blush deepens—climbing from her cheeks to her ears to the bridge of her nose, the full-coverage flush of a woman who has just been kissed out of a tactical analysis and is recalibrating to the fact that she is in an elevator in a bookshop in a knitted dress on a date.
“Oh yeah,” she says.
Quietly.
The two smallest words in the English language, carrying the enormous, tender weight of a woman who forgot she was supposed to be resting and was reminded by a kiss.
I smirk.
The elevator arrives.
The doors open to the third floor, and the space that reveals itself is everything the ground floor promised, amplified. Fiction. From one end to the other. Floor-to-ceiling shelves organized by genre, the sections identified by hand-painted signs in the warm, whimsical typography of a bookshop thatconsiders its signage an art form. Romance. Mystery. Literary fiction. Science fiction. Fantasy. The spines running in unbroken rows of color and text, the sheer density of stories producing a visual and olfactory experience that is, for a woman like Hazel, the equivalent of walking into a cathedral.
She stares.
And I watch the investigator dissolve.
The analytical intensity that had seized her in the elevator receding like a tide, replaced by the luminous, wide-eyed, can’t-believe-this-is-real expression that she’d worn on the ground floor. Multiplied. Because this floor is entirely fiction. Entirely the books she reads and loves and dog-ears and highlights and keeps in a storage unit because they were too precious to leave where her former pack could reach them.
I tap her ass.
Lightly. A quick, playful contact—palm to the curve of her backside through the knitted dress—that carries zero aggression and maximum affection. The kind of touch that saysgoin the language of a man who understands that the woman beside him needs to be released into this space the way a horse needs to be released into an open field.
“Go read,” I tell her. “And don’t think about what we just heard. That’s an order from your off-duty detective.”
She smirks.
The expression carrying the warm, amused defiance of a woman who does not take orders but is willing to comply with this one because the alternative—three floors of books—is the most compelling argument anyone has ever made.
The investigation is already fading from her eyes. Replaced by the specific, focused hunger of a reader who has been given permission to explore and intends to exercise that permission with extreme prejudice.
“I’m going to make a phone call, okay?” I add.
“Okay,” she declares.
And she’s off.
Gone. Disappearing into the romance section with the velocity of a woman who has identified her objective and is eliminating every obstacle between herself and the shelves, which in this case means the obstacle is me and the elimination is walking away without looking back.
I watch her go.
The cream knitted dress. The icy blue ponytail. The constellation tattoos visible on her forearms as she reaches for the first spine that catches her eye. The way she pulls the book from the shelf and opens it with the specific, practiced motion of someone who has been doing this their entire life and considers it a form of breathing.
Beautiful.
Not the word I’d use in a report. Not the clinical, investigative vocabulary that I apply to evidence and case architecture and operational assessments. The other vocabulary. The one that I didn’t know I had until a woman with blue hair and amber eyes arrived in Sweetwater Falls and made me realize that thirty-eight years of professional excellence had not, in fact, taught me the words for the things that actually matter.
