Page 84 of The Dangerous Dance

"You're sure."

"Yes."

A pause. "I'll be there at seven."

"Nadia." I look at the window. "I told Declan. About us."

"How did he take it."

"He told me to handle it carefully." A pause. "And to handle you carefully."

Silence. Then: "That's more than I expected."

"He's more than people expect," I say. "Usually."

She is quiet for a moment. "I'll see you at seven."

"Seven," I say.

She hangs up.

I sit in the study with the evening coming in from the window and the specific quality of a day that has done what it needed to do, and I think about dinner at seven and a woman who said she wants to come and a brother who said handle it carefully and the three days I've given twelve men to make their decisions.

A lot can happen in three days.

In my experience, it usually does.

CHAPTER 25

Nadia

Gianna opens the door.

This is unexpected, because it's not her house, but she has the quality of someone who makes wherever she is her house within approximately four minutes of arriving, which I've gathered from Mackenzie and which is confirmed by the fact that she's wearing an apron and holding a wooden spoon and looking at me with the expression of someone who has been briefed and is deciding in real time how much of the briefing to act on.

She is beautiful in the specific way of people who don't require the information and have therefore stopped tracking it. Dark hair, bright eyes, the particular ease of someone who has been through enough that easy things are actually easy now. She looks at my face and then past me briefly and then back at me.

"You're Nadia," she says.

"Yes."

"I'm Gianna." She steps back from the door. "Come in. It smells better than it did an hour ago, which means it's almost ready."

I come in.

The compound in the evening has a different quality than the compound in the working day — warmer, less structured, the specific texture of a building that's been asked to be a home for a few hours. The smell from the kitchen is garlic and something slow-cooked and the particular warmth of a meal that someone started in the morning and has been tending since, which is a specific kind of care that I haven't been on the receiving end of in a long time.

"He's in the study," Gianna says, going back to the kitchen. "He was going to come out to meet you but Mackenzie made him sit down because apparently he keeps trying to do things and his face looks like—" She pauses. "Well. You'll see."

I see.

He's at the desk when I come to the study door, which means he was working rather than sitting down the way Mackenzie told him to, which is exactly what I would have expected. He looks up when I come in.

I stop in the doorway.

His face is the specific topography of a fight conducted without restraint between two men who know exactly where to apply pressure. The left side is worse — a cut above the cheekbone that's been closed but not cleanly, and the particular coloring that develops when something has been hit hard enough to leave evidence of how hard. His lip. His jaw.

He looks, overall, like someone ran an argument with their fists and the argument won.