Chapter Five
He could feel her deciding.
Not in any dramatic way—no trembling lip, no torn expression, nothing that would play well in a movie. It was smaller than that. The slight shift of weight in her stance, the way her fingers pressed flat against his chest and then softened, like she’d caught herself bracing and forced herself to stop.
She was going to say no. Her body was still angled toward him, her hand still warm through his shirt, but her focus had already drifted behind her own walls. Building the exit.
“You’re thinking too hard,” he said.
“I’m thinking the right amount.”
“You’re constructing a reason to say no.”
“I don’t need to construct one. I have plenty.”
“Name one.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Three answers cycled across her face and she discarded all of them, which told him more than any of them would have.
“See?” he said. “They’re not reasons. They’re reflexes.”
“Reflexes exist for a reason.”
“Sure. But not every situation is the one that taught you the reflex.”
Her expression tightened. He’d hit a nerve, and they both knew it. She didn’t step back, but her chin lifted a fraction. Holding ground.
“One dinner,” he said again. Quieter this time. “That’s it. No pressure, no expectations. Just food and conversation with someone who already knows you drink wine you don’t like and dance to music you can’t identify.”
“You can’t identify it, either.”
“Nobody can identify it. Which means we’ll have something to talk about.”
The song shifted underneath them. Something with more pulse, the bass rising. A few more people had drifted onto the floor, and the space around them was getting smaller. Her hand was still on his chest.
“What do you actually do?” she asked. “For work.”
The question landed differently than it had the first time, at the gala. Last week she’d asked, and he’d deflected, and she’d let him. Tonight she wasn’t letting him.
Fine. Time to get honest. “I work for a?—”
The fire alarm cut him off, hitting like a wall. A single sustained tone, ear-splitting and industrial, followed half a second later by the strobes kicking on along the ceiling in staggered white bursts.
The room froze. The music cut out. Conversations stopped mid-sentence, replaced by the disoriented silence of three hundred people trying to figure out whether this was real. A woman near the bar grabbed her husband’s arm. The DJ reached for his equipment. Someone on the dance floor beside them laughed nervously, still trying to figure out if it was a mistake.
Then the sprinklers opened up.
The water came down hard and cold. Not a mist, not a trickle. A full-pressure deluge that soaked everyone in under three seconds.
Fallon pulled back from him, her hand leaving his chest as she looked up at the ceiling. Cold water hit her face and she flinched, blinking hard against it. Around them, the room erupted. Glasses hit the floor. The DJ’s system shorted with a loud pop and the music died, leaving nothing but the alarm and the hiss of water and three hundred people trying to move in every direction at once.
Isaac’s body made the switch before his mind finished processing the sound.Party over. Work now.
He took Fallon’s arm and pulled her close enough to be heard over the alarm. “Get outside. Main entrance, straight ahead, don’t stop.” He pointed toward the front of the venue where the doors were already propped open, people flooding through.
“What about?—”
“I’ll find you. Go.” He knew chances were likely she would slip through his hands again, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to find out what was going on.
