The Negotiator (Professionals 7)

“You know,” she told me as we both started chopping food, “this is Christopher’s favorite meal.”

Of course it was.

If I wasn’t completely mistaken, Cora had her heart set on me getting together with Christopher, becoming a mother figure to Alexander.

Which was sweet, if kind of ridiculous.

Did a part of me—even a large part of me—want to take a tour of his bedsheets?

Hell yes.

Did I want to move into his cave house, become a makeshift mother, cook him meals, and birth him babies?

The answer to that should have been simple: Hell no.

But all I felt was a sort of mild interest mixed with a bone-deep certainty that I was already starting to lose my mind a little bit.

Maybe I should set up an appointment with a shrink as soon as I got home instead of waiting for Quin to insist upon it.

SEVEN

Christopher

She settled in.

A little begrudgingly at first, then more easily. So much so that I was surprised. Especially considering that everything about Miller suggested she would go toe-to-toe with me every moment of every day in the hopes that I would cave. I wouldn’t, of course, but it was pleasant not to have to fight about it.

It had been four days since Alexander came home. And aside from the rebellious act of creating the world’s most ostentatious list—and then giving my brother the idea to create one as well—she had simply made herself at home.

She slept in late, something everyone seemed to work their schedules around. Yes, even me. I found I waited to go into the kitchen for my coffee until after I heard her moving around. Cora pushed breakfast later. Alexander got up earlier so they could banter over breakfast.

After breakfast, she and Alexander retreated to the sitting room to watch action movies, then she annoyed him by debunking many of the scenes for being so unrealistic, further proving her life had been very colorful, very dangerous.

In the afternoons, she could be found in the kitchen with Cora, an eager student who clearly thrived on the praise she got from the mother figure she’d claimed she’d never had.

In the evenings, Cora insisted we take our dinner in the dining room, a room that had been entirely ornamental until Miller came into our lives.

It felt—as was likely Cora’s intention—like a family coming together to share their evening meal, to talk over good food, to connect.

I couldn’t have anticipated how much I would begin to enjoy it. As someone who often ate on the go, it was nice to sit down, to slow down. On top of that, I got to reconnect with my brother, making me realize how much I had missed out on when he was away. I had to learn names of friends I didn’t know he had, about where they were from, what they were into. Miller, with her keen observation skills, managed to figure out that one of these friends was a bit more than a friend, further explaining Alexander’s somewhat hostile response to having no access to his cell phone for the time being. After a short talk in my office one night, though, about how his girlfriend was much safer if no one knew there was a connection to her, he seemed to come to terms with the arrangement.

Over those dinners, we also were privy to many interesting, dangerous, and even ludicrous stories from Miller’s past. About the men she worked with. One who cleaned crime scenes, one who tracked or disappeared people, one who lived in some place called the Pine Barrens illegally with killer dogs and baby goats. She told us about some men she had done negotiations with, about the antics she had cleaned up for Fenway.

She had lived more life by her early thirties than most would ever live.

She didn’t, I noticed, talk about her childhood, her young adulthood, anything at all before she started working for Quin. Hell, she didn’t even explain how she had come across someone like Quinton Baird in the first place.

As interesting as her other stories were, I found myself wanting to know those ones as well. I’d never been greedy for personal details people seemed unwilling to share. We all had our secrets. We were all entitled to them. But I wanted to know what her childhood had been like, what had helped shape her into the woman that sat across the table from me.

And, what’s more, I wanted her to stick around long enough to feel comfortable sharing those stories, those more intimate parts of herself.

I was choosing not to reconsider if she was right, if she would have been just as safe to have her team come get her and take her home.

There was one simple explanation for that.

I didn’t want her to go.

It was absurd, but true.

I was getting accustomed to seeing her around, to hearing her laugh, to seeing her hanging out with my brother, to knowing she’d had a hand in making the food I was eating.