Raising the Stakes

“What did you call me?”

“What did I…? Oh. Red. Sorry. It’s how I thought of you all last night. You know. Red.”

He reached over, tugged gently on the tendril of escaped hair. She pulled away but she smiled. Really smiled. He knew he’d won, and he knew, too, that the elation he felt was out of line with reality.

“Espresso,” she said softly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The coffee in the Reveille—it’s that little self-service place down past the elevators—the coffee’s awful, but the espresso is fine.”

?

?You’ve got it,” Gray said, and felt as if he’d just reached the summit of Mount Everest.

* * *

She said she had to do some things back in her office and she’d meet him in the little caf;aae in a few minutes.

He got there first, debated whether to plunk money into the coffee machine and have her espresso ready or wait until she arrived. Wait, he decided, and he chose a table near a big wooden tub of pansies and myrtle, chose a different table beside the window that overlooked the pool, and finally decided he was behaving like a kid on his first date, which was insane.

He was here for a purpose. He had a mission. There was nothing personal in meeting Dawn for coffee and besides, she wasn’t really the shy woman with the nice smile and the sexy mouth she didn’t seem to know was sexy he’d met yesterday. She was an assignment he’d undertaken because he had no choice. She was also the runaway wife of a man she’d let abuse her and the mother of a little boy she’d abandoned like a stack of old clothes…

“Hi.”

Gray stood up. Dawn was standing in the doorway. She looked demure and beautiful, and he knew it was time to admit the truth. She was nothing he’d anticipated and he was drawn to her even though he didn’t want to be. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled. Forget Chinese proverbs. She was a Chinese puzzle, boxes within boxes within boxes, and he hadn’t a clue how he’d figure out what that last box held, or if he wanted to find out.

“Hi,” he said, and motioned to the small table beside the window. “Is this okay?”

“Yes, it’s fine.”

“You said espresso, right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He held out a chair. She slipped into it. He dug a couple of bills from his wallet, fed them into the machine and it spewed two streams of black liquid into a pair of paper cups.

“Cream? Sugar?” He smiled again. It seemed as if he’d done a whole lot of smiling in the past hour or so. Had any of it been real? “The pink stuff?”

“Nothing. Just black, thank you.”

“Black it is.” He sat down across from her at the little table. “Well. Thanks for agreeing to have coffee with me.”

“You’re welcome.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry if I seemed, um, if I seemed—”

“No need to apologize.” He lifted the cup and took a sip. “You probably have guys hitting on you twenty-four hours a day.”

“Yes. No. I mean…” She took a breath. “What you did was very kind, Mr. Baron. But—”

“It’s Gray. And I only did what anyone would have done, in the same situation.”

“Not true. A whole bunch of cars just whizzed past. One man even shook his fist at me.”

“Well, of course he did. You’re supposed to pick a place to break down, Miss Carter. That’s the polite thing to do.”

She laughed. “The only place to break down is next to a service station.”

“Exactly what the guy who shook his fist at you must have thought.”