I tried to force down a piece of toast and quit after two bites. The bathroom mirror was honest — dark circles, flat eyes, everything about my face saying I hadn’t slept. I showered, pulled my dark hair back, put on lipstick because I don’t leave home without it, and changed into jeans and my work boots.
Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Deliberate. Then the knock.
I checked the peephole. The headshot hadn’t done him justice.
I opened the door with the chain still on.
“Dane Gatlin,” he said through the gap. “Sloane Woodall hired me.”
I slid the chain and stepped back.
He filled the doorway. Tall, broad through the chest and shoulders, with a duffel over one shoulder and a holster visible under the open collar of a rolled-sleeve button-down. Brown hair, short but not military-tight. Strong jaw. Gray eyes that moved past me into the apartment, fast, automatic, reading the room before he’d been invited into it. Jeans, boots, hands that had never been soft.
He stepped inside and the apartment shrank around him. He dropped the duffel by the door.
And then he grinned.
It was a weapon, that grin, and he knew it. I could tell by how easily he wore it. My stomach flipped. I blamed the coffee.
“You practice that in the mirror?” I said.
“Naturally.” His gaze dropped to my mouth, then came back up without apology. “Red lipstick before ten a.m. You weren’t planning to hide.”
“It’s not for you.”
“Didn’t say it was.” The drawl was Southern but transplant-Southern, an accent that could’ve been Georgia or the Carolinas before it got sanded down by years somewhere else. Up close, it was worse. Warmer. “Sloane filled me in. You witnessed a shooting, the grand jury’s in a week, and the shooter saw your face. I’m here until you testify. That means I go where you go, I sleep where you sleep —”
“You sleep on the couch.”
“— and I need to see your workplace before tonight. How far’s the bar?”
“Two blocks. And I was heading there anyway.” I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door. “But the bar stays open this week. My staff depends on Mardi Gras tips and I’m not shutting them out of their best earning week because some asshole thinks I scare easy. That’s not negotiable.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t bristle. Those gray eyes watched me for a beat, recalculating, and then he nodded once.
“All right. Bar stays open. I’ll work around it.”
That was it. No argument. No pushback about how he knew best and I should listen. He just absorbed the hit and adjusted without losing a degree of that steady confidence.
I wanted to be relieved. Instead I was irritated, and I was honest enough to know why. I’d been braced for a fight. I’dwanted one. Fights I knew how to win. Whatever this was — this easy willingness to let me set the terms — left me with nothing to push against.
I locked the apartment behind us and we walked. The morning was warm and the Quarter was waking up slow, delivery trucks idling on Chartres, someone hosing down a sidewalk, the smell of beignets drifting from the corner. He kept pace a half step behind me and slightly to my right, and I realized he’d put himself between me and the street without saying a word about it.
I unlocked Proof and let us in. He stood just inside while I hit the lights, and I watched him take in the room: the long counter, the stage, the courtyard entrance, the hall to the stockroom. His eyes stopped on the back hallway.
“That go to the alley?”
“Stockroom first. Alley door’s at the end.”
He walked the hall without asking. I heard the deadbolt rattle, the sound of him testing it twice, and then he came back.
“That lock’s a problem.”
“I know. It’s been on my list.”
“It just moved to the top.” He glanced back down the hall. “I want a camera on that door. I’ll install it tomorrow. And I need your alarm code.”
I gave it to him. He didn’t write it down.
