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I'm flattered that she's researched me, but more so I love the way she's looking at my hands. I have to admit, I do have lovely hands.
"Apparently you don't deal with paperwork, only the face and hands of the corpses. You spend hours under a lamp, on a stranger, doing work others can do for you."
Nobody has ever described what I do like that. Not my mother, who finds it disturbing. Not Constantine, who would rather be attacked by fire ants than come to the mortuary. And she didn't get all of that from a rumor. She's a doctor. She'd have caught the formalin on me the moment I handed her the coffee, and worked the rest out for herself. That smell gets into everything. What gets me is that she isn't disgusted. She's looking at me the way she'd read an X-ray, taking me apart to see how I work.
The wind pushes her scent at me again and I let the silence run longer than I should. I need a moment, because what I want to do is put her on the hood of my car and I'm running out of reasons not to.
"You're right, I'm a textbook narcissist," I say. "With a God complex. I'm genuinely flattered. Usually I just get a sociopath, which is lazy and clinically inaccurate. Impressive." Oh, I'm loving this game way more than I should.
"Do you think this is funny, Mr. Novak?"
A little funny, I suppose. A lot hot… My cock twitches, giving a solid salute as it responds to her voice, her words, her tone, her existence…
"I'm hilarious, but that's for another time. That was the best thing anyone's said to me in years and I want you to know I'm going to think about it in the shower later." I grin at her. "Say the bit about the shirts again. I liked the bit about the shirts."
"You are an actual child."
"And yet here you are, standing in the dark with me instead of getting in your car. Which one of us should be more worried about that?"
"You don't know a single thing about me."
That statement almost makes me laugh. Properly laugh, but if I tell her this it would blow the whole thing apart because I know even what brand of shampoo she likes to use and I know she can't sleep without the window open. I also know she was twelve minutes late to work on the fourteenth of March because she stopped to help a man whose dog had been hit, and I know the dog lived, because I checked.
She thinks I've had four days to patch up some information about her. Four days. Right.
Fuck me.
"You take your coffee ruined. You read at traffic lights, which will kill you before I do," I blurt out, because I can give her a few details and make them sound like I've done some homework and that's it. Still, I'll tell her enough to make it unnerving—"You haven't slept since Thursday and you weren't sleeping before then either, because you're on nights the first week of every month. Must be impossible to adjust, isn't it?"
An expression crosses her face that makes my stomach drop. She's scared, but not of me—she's scared of the fact that I know things about her that nobody's supposed to know, and she hasn't worked out yet whether she wants me to stop or keep going. She doesn't know the half of it…
Her lips are parted and her breathing has changed. She's looking at me wide-eyed, like I've walked into a forbidden room she forgot to lock, and I'm the last thing she'd ever expect to see there.
I would burn this whole city down to keep that look on her face.
"Four days," I lie, "and a very expensive researcher."
She believes me. Fucking hell. Because the alternative—her working out how long I've actually been watching her—would end this conversation and probably involve the police. Of course, there’s the fact she’s a Valmont, and it’s my business to know what my rivals and their families are doing. But that’s besides the point.
"You just met me."
"That's right," I say, hesitating and nearly fucking blow the whole thing, because she's standing three feet away telling me when we "met" while adding things up in her head and obviously coming short of a good answer.
The reality is, it's been seven years. Seven years of knowing her name, her face, her schedule, her coffee, the sound of her laugh through a restaurant window. Every little thing about her I've learned and archived in my mind. Tiny details a husband would know, the soul closest to her that's not living inside her. And she thinks it started on Thursday. The lie burns through my chest. "Come here."
"No."
So I approach her instead. I'm a masochist and want to be close to her. I walk slowly, cognizant of the fact that she's a woman alone with a man she doesn't trust on an isolated strip of land by a dark body of water. I give her every opportunity to step back.
She doesn't move. Doesn't step back. Hallelujah.
So I reach out for her left hand, and I swear to God she is holding her breath. She could pull away, but she doesn't. Her lips part slightly and my thoughts go somewhere they shouldn't.
"Don't you dare touch me."
"Bit late for that," I say, because her hand is already in mine and her pulse is hammering against my fingers.
Her ring finger is bare, for now. I run my thumb across it and the feel of her skin goes through me like a bullet. Intoxicating. I am so painfully hard right now. If she looks down, this conversation is going to take a very different turn.
