“Maybe. Or my calculating getting you in—and out—of that nightgown tonight.”
“Slick operator.” She sat back, took a long breath as she watched people, watched traffic. Hurry, hurry by. “It’s a good city,” she said quietly. “It’s not pure and it’s not perfect. It has some nasty edges, some hard lines. But it’s a good city. We both chose it.”
“I’ve never asked you why, exactly. Why you did choose it.”
“Escape.” Her brows lifted as she frowned into her wine. “Maybe it is the wine for that to be the first thought. I guess it was a part of the motivation. It was big enough to swallow me if I needed it to. It’s fast, and I wanted fast, and the crowds. The work. I needed the work more than I needed to breathe back then.”
“That hasn’t changed overmuch.”
“Maybe not, but I’m breathing now.” She lifted her wine, sipped.
“So you are.”
“When I came here, I knew. I can’t explain why, but I knew. This is my place. Then there was Feeney. He saw something in me, and he lifted me out. He made me more than I ever thought I could be. This was my place, but if he’d transferred to Bumfuck, Idaho, I’d have gone with him.”
Had she ever thought of that before? Eve wondered. Ever realized or admitted that? She wasn’t sure.
“Why did you choose it?” she asked Roarke.
“I dreamed of New York when I was a boy. It seemed like a shiny gold ring, and I wanted my fingers around it. I wanted a lot of places, and did what I did to get them. But here’s where I wanted my base. That shiny gold ring. I didn’t want to be swallowed; I wanted to own. To own here.”
He looked around, as Eve had, to the crowds, the traffic, the rush. “Well, that’s saying something, isn’t it? Then I fell for it, like a man might fall for a fascinating and dangerous woman. And it became more than the owning—the proving to myself, and I suppose, a dead man—and became more about being.”
“And you brought Summerset here.”
“I did.”
She sipped her wine. “Fathers make a difference, and they don’t have to be blood to do it. We both found fathers, or they found us, however it worked. It made a difference.”
“And you’re thinking Alex Ricker lost his, the day he learned his father murdered his mother. And that made a difference.”
“You read me pretty well.”
“I do indeed. Let’s go home, get to work.”
She waited while he paid the check, then rose with him. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Roarke?” On the sidewalk she stopped, studied his face, then shrugged. “What the hell, it’s New York.” And threw her arms around him, took his mouth in a long, shimmering kiss. “For reading me well,” she said when she released him.
“I’m buying a bloody case of that wine.”
She laughed all the way to the car.
At home, she peeled off her jacket, tossed it on the sleep chair. In shirt-sleeves, she circled her murder board.
“You said you were going to work from home, too. To Caro,” Eve reminded him.
“So I am. But not before you tell me what you plan to do.”
“I’m thinking about asking you to contact your new best friend before getting started on your own stuff.”
“And why would I be doing that?”
It had to be the wine, she thought, because sometimes when he tal
ked—just the way that hint of Celtic music wove through the words—she wanted to drool. “Um.” She shook it off. “To tell him it’s important that both he and his PA stay in New York. And that I’d like to talk with each of them tomorrow.”