Page 11 of Justice

And just like that she shuffled off toward her room, leaving me sitting in the sunlight with my pulse going like a rabbit’s, staring after a woman who had just seen clean through me with eyes that only got their sight back a month ago.

She couldn’t know. There was no way in this world she could know.

But she knew.

I was gathering my things to leave when the front door opened and the house filled up with them at once.

Justice. And two girls right behind him.

His presence filled the room and washed every bit of stagnant energy clean out of it. Soon as he stepped in, I felt it in my core, low and unwelcome. He had that thing you cannot buy and cannot fake, that quiet that makes a room straighten its back and lower its voice without knowing why it did.

Then the cologne reached me. Some niche, low-key expensive thing you had to be in the know to even recognize, nothing like the designer bottle you grab for your man at Christmas. This was rare. Back in my other life I’d have ordered a sample of it just to decide whether it was special enough to gift a man I loved. He wore a crisp white button-up open at the throat and a pair of gray slacks cut for him and him alone. Even covered head to toe, I could tell the man was built. Sleeves rolled to the forearm, all that muscle and vein and ink on display like an advertisement he wasn’t even running on purpose.

And Lord, the eyes. The mouth. The sexiest pair of eyes and lips God ever set in one face, and He had the nerve to put them in my path.

My body noticed him before my brain gave it permission to, and I hated my body a little for it. It just leaned toward him, the way a plant leans at a window, toward the one warm thing in the room.

And that right there was the danger of Justice Banks. Not the money. Not the quiet. It was that a man like him could make a woman forget she was running for her life. Make her set the bag down. Make her stay.

I picked the bag back up. Because let’s be so for real. I didn’t have a chance in hell with a man like that, and I didn’t want one.

“Miss Mercer.” A nod. Almost a smile, held back at the last second. “How was everything?”

“Perfect. Your grandmother’s resting. She’s amazing.”

“Thank you. Serenity texted, said she was running late. I know you’re off at six, so I figured I’d swing through and wait on her.” His voice moved over me slow and low. I made my face stay pleasant, blank, professional, its own quiet performance.

The older girl was already gone, drifting toward the basement stairs without so much as a glance at me. Beautiful, but cold with it. A coldness behind the face that didn’t quite reach the surface. I’d known a lot of teenage girls to go through a bitter phase. Some of them never grew out of it. Some of them, I’d learn, weren’t going through anything at all. They were just showing you exactly who they were.

“That’s Storie,” Justice said, and something crossed his face when he said the name, gone too fast to catch.

The little one, though. The little one planted herself right in front of me and looked up, unafraid, taking me in with big serious eyes.

“Are you Grandma’s new friend?”

“I am.” I crouched down to her level, down where a child lives, something I’d learned to do a lifetime ago. “My name’s Skye. What’s yours?”

“Dream.” She said it like the best secret in the world. “I’m six. I’m getting a pony.”

“A pony. Now that is serious business. And are you a princess? Because you sure look like a princess to me.”

She giggled, and my heart cracked straight down the middle.

Because there was a wildness in her joy, a way she threw her small body into being happy, and I knew that laugh. I had lived inside that laugh once. I had a little person who lit up exactly like this, from the feet up, holding nothing back. Golden. The name moved through me like a blade turned sideways. I kept my face soft and my eyes kind and did not let one single thing of what it cost me show. That was the discipline of my life now. Feel it all. Show none of it.

“Okay, Dream.” Justice’s voice, gentle on his baby girl in a manner it had not been on the other one. “Go on and spy on your sister for me. Let Miss Skye get on home.”

Dream skipped off, satisfied, and then it was the two of us in that front room with all that quiet between us.

“She likes you,” he said. “She don’t like everybody.”

“She’s easy to like back.” I got my bag on my shoulder. “You’ve got good girls.”

He didn’t answer right away, and a weight came up in his face that I recognized, because I carried the same size of it. Then he nodded. “Drive safe, Miss Mercer. Preciate you today.”

“Skye,” I said. “Just Skye.”

“Skye.” He said it slow, like he was tasting it, and Lord, I felt that low in my body, in a place I’d shut down and boarded over a long time ago.