He'd been in New Orleans for six weeks. Took a contract with a private firm downtown — corporate security consulting, the kind of work that used everything the Marshals had taught him without requiring him to chase anyone through a parade crowd. He had his own apartment on Magazine, ten minutes from the bar. His schedule, his clients, his mornings — none of them started in my kitchen. We'd figured that out early: two people with full lives didn't need to collapse into one. We needed to build a door between them and leave it open.
The door stayed open.
"Jenna." Huck materialized at my elbow with the empty Sazerac tray. "Table seven wants the bourbon flight."
"Which one?"
"The expensive one."
"Bless their hearts." I pulled four glasses and reached for the top shelf. The Blanton's caught the light and I thought about the last time I'd poured it — the morning in the bar with Dane, two fingers each, the sun through the front windows landing on the wood between us. It had tasted different that morning. Everything had.
I set up the flight and carried it out and came back to find Huck watching me with the expression he reserved for things he'd decided were amusing but beneath comment.
"What," I said.
"Nothing."
"Huck."
"You're humming." He turned back to the well. "You don't hum."
"I wasn't humming."
"You were humming. It was off-key."
"Go check the keg lines."
He went. I caught my reflection in the back mirror — dark hair loose tonight, the studded leather bracelet, red lipstick holding. I looked like myself. A woman who owned a bar and was having a good Thursday, which was exactly what I was.
The front door opened at nine-twelve. Close enough.
Dane came in the way he always came in: filling the doorframe first, then the room. He'd ditched the holster — he didn't wear it off the clock anymore, and the absence of it still caught me sometimes, the line of his shoulders unbroken under a gray pullover with the sleeves pushed to his forearms. Jeans, boots, the jaw. The gray eyes found me across the room before the door shut behind him.
He didn't wave. He just looked at me and the corner of his mouth moved, and the low curl in my stomach was the same one I'd felt the first morning he'd stood in my doorway and grinned and I'd blamed the coffee. I'd stopped blaming the coffee.
He crossed to the bar and took the stool at the end of the rail — his stool, the one the regulars had started leaving empty without being told. He leaned on the wood with both forearms and watched me like he had all night, which he did.
"You're late," I said.
"I'm early. I said nine-fifteen."
"You said nine."
"I said nineish. You edited the ish."
I poured him two fingers of Buffalo Trace without asking because I'd learned his order the first week and he'd never changed it. He picked up the glass and his thumb ran along the rim and he watched me work, and I let him, because the feeling of being watched by this man had gone from irritation to heat tosomething I carried around, steady and constant, a second pulse I'd stopped trying to ignore.
Huck passed behind me and gave Dane a nod. Dane nodded back. Three months of this and they'd developed a language made entirely of nods and silences, and I was fairly sure they were both satisfied with the arrangement.
"I talked to the landlord," I said, pulling a glass for a regular at the corner. "He's willing to negotiate on the space next door."
Dane reached into his back pocket and unfolded a napkin he'd already drawn on. "I sketched out the layout."
"Of course you did."
"Two exit points, sightlines to both rooms from a single position behind the bar, and a connecting arch wide enough for foot traffic but narrow enough to control." He smoothed the napkin on the counter. "Also the bathrooms are in the wrong place."
"The bathrooms are fine."
