Without surprise, Peabody took out her diary, plugged in the order. “Mavis isn’t going to like that.”
“She doesn’t have to know, does she.”
Eve veered around a glide-cart offering frozen fruit on a stick, then swung onto Tenth where automated jackhammers were tearing up the street again. Overhead, an ad blimp hawked a shoppers’ special at Bloomingdale’s. Preseason sale on winter coats in the men’s, women’s, and unisex department, twenty percent off. Such a deal.
She spotted the man in the trench coat shambling toward a trio of girls and sighed.
“Shit. There’s Clevis.”
“Clevis?”
“This is his turf,” Eve said simply as she pulled into a loading zone. “I used to do this drag when I was in uniform. He’s been around for years. Come on, Peabody, let’s spare the little children.”
She stepped onto the sidewalk, skirting a pair of men arguing over baseball. From the smell of them, she judged they’d been standing in the heat arguing for much too long. She shouted once, but the jackhammers swallowed her voice. Resigned, she picked up her pace and intercepted Clevis before he reached the unsuspecting, pink-cheeked girls.
“Hey, Clevis.”
He blinked at her through the pale lenses of sunscreens. His hair was sandy blond and curly around a face as innocent as a cherub’s. He was eighty, if he was a day. “Dallas. Hey, Dallas. I haven’t seen you in a big blue moon.” He flashed big white teeth as he sized up Peabody. “Who’s this?”
“Peabody, this is Clevis. Clevis, you aren’t going to bother those little girls, are you?”
“No, shit, uh-uh. I wasn’t going to bother them.” He wiggled his brows. “I was just going to show ’em, is all.”
“You don’t want to do that, Clevis. You ought to get inside, out of this heat.”
“I like it hot.” He wheezed out a chuckle. “There they go,” he said with a sigh, as the trio of girls ran laughing across the street. “Guess I won’t be able to show ’em today. I’ll show you.”
“Clevis, don’t—” Then Eve huffed out a breath. He’d already pulled his trench coat apart. Under it, he was naked but for a bright blue bow tied celebrationally around his withered cock. “Very nice, Clevis. That’s a good color for you. Matches your eyes.” She put a companionable hand on his shoulder. “Let’s take a ride, okay?”
“Okeedoke
e. Do you like blue, Peabody?”
Peabody nodded solemnly as she opened the back door of the unit, helped him inside. “Blue’s my favorite color.” She shut the door of the vehicle, met Eve’s laughing eyes. “Welcome back, Lieutenant.”
“It’s good to be back, Peabody. All in all, it’s good to be back.”
It was also good to be home. Eve drove through the high, iron gates that guarded the towering fortress. It was less of a shock now, to glide along the curving drive through those well-tended lawns and flowering trees toward the elegant stone and glass house where she now lived.
The contrast of where she worked and where she lived no longer seemed quite so jarring. It was quiet here—the kind of quiet in a massive city only the very rich could afford. She could hear birdsong, see the sky, smell the sweet aroma of freshly shorn grass. Minutes away, only minutes, was the teeming, noisy, sweating mass of New York.
Here, she supposed, was sanctuary. As much for Roarke as for herself.
Two lost souls. He’d once called them that. She wondered if they’d stopped being lost when they’d found each other.
She left her car at the front entrance, knowing its battered body and tasteless shape would offend Summerset, Roarke’s poker-backed butler. It was a simple matter to switch it to automatic, send it around the house and into the slot reserved for her unit in the garage, but she enjoyed her petty needling when it came to Summerset.
She opened the door and found him standing in the grand foyer with a sniff in his nose and a sneer on his lips.
“Lieutenant, your vehicle is unsightly.”
“Hey, it’s city property.” She reached down to pick up the fat, odd-eyed cat who’d come to greet her. “You don’t want it there, move it yourself.”
She heard a trill of laughter float down the hall, lifted a brow. “Company?”
“Indeed.” With his disapproving eye, Summerset scanned her wilted shirt and slacks, skimmed over the weapon harness still strapped to her side. “I suggest you bathe and change before meeting your guests.”
“I suggest you kiss my ass,” she said cheerfully and strolled by him.