The latch was worse than I'd guessed. Gave with thumb pressure. I stepped out onto the fire escape in jeans and nothing on my feet but cold metal. The drop-down ladder to street level was easy to reach from below. A man with intent could make the climb in under thirty seconds.
Back inside, I found the coffee maker. Old drip machine, glass carafe, nothing digital. The grounds were in the cabinet next to a row of bourbon bottles that would've made a distributor weep. I poured a cup and stood at the counter and thought about what I knew.
Jenna Darby. Thirty years old. Built a cocktail bar from a failed dive in four years. Sole eyewitness to a mob hit. Currently sleeping twelve feet from a man she hadn't wanted, didn't ask for, and had made that clear with a speech I could still hear word for word.
She wasn't scared. That was the thing I kept coming back to. I'd been doing close protection since I left the Marshals, and clients followed a pattern: fear first, then relief when I showed up, then resentment at the intrusion. Jenna had skipped the first two entirely and landed on the third, except it wasn't resentment. It was closer to a dare. She was running her life exactly as she'd been running it before a man put a bullet in someone's skull twenty feet from her stockroom door, and she was waiting for me to try to change that so she could show me just how unnecessary I was.
The lock clicked at seven-fifteen. Then her door, and footsteps down the hall. She came around the corner into the kitchen and paused half a beat when she saw me at the counter.
Two hours before she'd said she'd be up. I filed that away and said nothing.
She'd showered. Dark hair down, damp at the ends. Jeans, boots, a black top that wasn't trying to be anything except what it was. The red lipstick was on, same shade as yesterday, and I kept my mouth shut about it this time, which was the smartest thing I'd done since I took this assignment.
"You made coffee," she said.
"Figured it was my turn."
She poured herself a cup, leaned against the counter across from me, and looked at me over the rim. "What time did you get up?"
"Five."
"That's a disease, not a schedule." She took a sip. "You going to tell me about that window, or just stand there looking like you've got bad news?"
So she'd heard me. Of course she had.
"I wasn't trying to wake you up."
"You didn't. I've been up since six. You're not quiet, by the way. You think you are, but the floors in this building are ninety years old and you weigh two-twenty." She looked me up and down like she was estimating freight. Slow. Thorough. Taking her time about it. "Two-thirty."
"Two-fifteen."
"Sure." She took another sip, eyes still on me over the rim. "You always walk around other people's apartments half-dressed at dawn, or is that just the service I'm getting?"
I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. That was not half-dressed. But the way she said it -—dry, unbothered, like she was commenting on the weather while her gaze caught on myshoulders and stayed a beat too long -—sent a pulse of heat straight down my spine and into territory that had no business waking up at seven-fifteen in a client's kitchen.
The corner of her mouth pulled, and the lipstick caught the light, and I had the brief, unhelpful thought that her mouth was going to be a problem for me this week. I felt my cock stir against my thigh and turned back to the coffee maker like it needed my attention.
It had been a while. Five months, maybe six -—a woman in Charlotte after a corporate detail, someone whose name I remembered and whose face was already fading. That's how it worked. That's how I kept it. But standing in this kitchen with Jenna Darby looking at me like I was a riddle she hadn't decided to solve yet, I wasn't thinking about Charlotte. I was thinking about the damp ends of her hair and the black cotton sitting against her collarbones and the fact that twelve feet had never felt like less distance in my life.
"The latch pops with a screwdriver. Fire escape's accessible from the street. I need to replace the hardware and I need you to stay to the side when you're standing there. The angle from the sidewalk is easier head-on."
She pushed off the counter, walked to the kitchen window, stood directly in front of it, and took a slow, deliberate sip while looking me in the eyes.
"My apartment," she said. "My windows."
I should have been calculating the sight angle from the street. I should have been mapping the fire escape, the roofline, the building across the alley. Instead I was looking at her backlit by morning sun with her jaw set and her hips cocked and her whole body sayingmake me, and my dick was half-hard against my zipper and my professional assessment of the tactical situation had gone completely to hell.
I leaned against the counter and let it go, because she was planted in a target zone and the only thing I was going to accomplish by arguing was proving she could outlast me in a standoff, which she could, which she knew, which was written all over the look she was giving me.
She stepped six inches to the left without breaking eye contact and took another sip.
I bit the inside of my cheek and adjusted my stance against the counter and said nothing.
WE WALKED TO PROOFat ten. Same route, same pace: fast, purposeful, like the sidewalk was hers and the rest of the Quarter was borrowing it. I held my position a half step behind and to the right. She'd noticed the positioning yesterday. She'd chosen not to bring it up.
The Quarter was already loud for a Friday morning. A cleanup crew was hosing Bourbon Street while the first tourists wandered past with go-cups, and somebody had strung a new run of purple-and-gold beads across a second-floor railing overnight. The air smelled like coffee and bleach and the river underneath everything, that warm mud-and-salt current that never left no matter what else was cooking. A brass trio was setting up on the corner of St. Peter, and the trombone player ran a scale that bounced off the buildings and hung in the humidity.
Huck was already behind the bar, deep into inventory with a focus that treated small talk as a punishable offense. Wide through the shoulders and solid all the way down, the kind of stillness that came from a man who'd never needed to prove anything. Jenna had waved in my direction Thursday afternoon and said, "Dane. Security. The week." Huck had given me a nod that lasted a quarter of a second and gone back to countingbottles. This morning he looked up when I came in and held it. Three full seconds. He was deciding whether I was going to be a problem for Jenna, and the verdict wasn't in yet. I'd been sized up by cops, marshals, and military officers on three continents, and none of them had communicated as much information in a look as Huck Broussard did with three seconds of silence and an expression that saidI've been here four years and you're a Thursday.
