“He talks about me?” My voice comes out high-pitched, because I don’t know whether he talks about what happened in the hallway or what happened bent over on the counter. Either way my cheeks burn hot in the company of this stranger. He’s wearing a wedding band and he doesn’t seem the least interested in me sexually, which only makes it more embarrassing somehow.
“You’re going to save the library.”
“Oh,” I say, relieved. “I’m not sure how, but that’s the plan.”
“Christopher’s going to lose his shit. It was his idea to raze the whole thing down. I think that’s the only way he knows how to make something successful.”
Is that what he’s trying to do with me, tear me down to my roots, to the muscle and bone, to build me into a woman he might actually trust? “That is weirdly insightful, stranger. Almost like you know Christopher really well, but I don’t know you.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Blue Eastman.”
“Your name is Blue.”
“Yes.”
“Like it says that on your birth certificate. Blue like the color.”
He laughs a little rusty, like he’s not used to doing it. “That’s right.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t really move on. Was Green in the running? If you had been born with green eyes, would you be named Green?”
“Probably.” He pauses, accepting a beer that the bartender sends his way. “Do you want anything? Sutton will be annoyed at me that I bought you a drink.”
“An old-fashioned,” I tell the bartender, a pretty young woman with strawberry-blonde curls and twinkling eyes. “And I’m paying for it.”
Blue takes a sip of beer and then considers the amber liquid. “My father had brown eyes. Black hair. My mother had dark skin and even darker hair.”
“Babies have blue eyes,” I whisper.
“Not in my family. At least that’s what my dad said, for all that he didn’t know shit about genetics either. So he named me Blue to punish my mother, to always remind her that he knew.”
“Wow. Did she actually…?”
“Until the day she died, she maintained that she had never cheated. Which either makes her a dedicated liar or very bad chooser of husbands.”
Love is a terrible monster. It seduces you like a siren, pulling you closer even though you know you’re going to be smashed to bits against the rocks.
“I’m sorry.” What a terrible way to grow up, knowing that every time your parents looked at you, they were thinking about an indiscretion that may never have happened. Finding the proof in your appearance. “No wonder you left and joined the army.”
“That obvious?”
“Pretty much. But what I don’t know is how you know Christopher. He’s not exactly the hoorah, my-biceps-are-bigger-than-yours type. I say that with complete respect, because your biceps are definitely bigger than mine. And also everyone else’s.”
“We’re… friends,” he says, the word almost foreign on his lips.
“I didn’t know he had friends.” Except for Sutton, though I wouldn’t have used the word friends. They’re business partners, sure. Enemies maybe.
Blue nods toward the group of armchairs in the corner where Hugo and Sutton are still talking. “The four of us. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but we sort of ironically, but not ironically, call ourselves the Thieves Club.”
“Is it because you steal jewelry at galas? I’m not judging. Anyone would consider it. There’s a ridiculous amount of diamonds in a single room.”
“It’s something Hugo said a long time ago. That every dollar earned was a dollar we took from someone else. Whether we returned a service for that money is beside the point. The amount of money in the world is finite.”
There’s a rush of air, and then Christopher is on the other side of me, having appeared like some kind of magician. The breath whooshes out of me for a solid five seconds, and when I breathe back in a gulp, the air comes flavored with him—crisp and dark and always so damned comforting when I shouldn’t be comforted by him.
“Until the government prints more,” he says, the educated economist inside him sounding like Daddy, which unnerves me and comforts me even more. Goddamn it.
Blue tips his glass of beer in greeting. “Though if we took those freshly minted dollars, we really would be the Thieves Club.”