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“I asked you first.”
“Maybe you should tell me what brought this on.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing K.T. Harris lying beside the pool up on that roof. And the way the light made her look so much like you. And how for a minute, it was you, in my head. I couldn’t breathe.”
Concerned, relieved, in love, she got up, sat on his lap, cuddled him in when he pressed his face to her shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m okay, we’re okay.” She kissed his hair, bright as her curtains. “It’s all okay.”
“It just made me think how much you mean to me, and I started to wonder if I was—if we were—wasting time. That maybe we should get married. I wanted to ask if you wanted me to ask. You have to know you’re it. You’re it for me, Peabody. The one.”
She eased back, cupped his face. “You’re it for me, Ian McNab. The one and only. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I do about you. It makes me happy. All of this makes me so happy—my dishes, your pub glasses. Our place.”
“Me, too.”
“We don’t want to get married now. That’s for grown-ups.”
She said it with a smile that brought one to his pretty green eyes.
“But one day, down the line?”
“Oh yeah. We’ll have a big, crazy wedding. A mag wedding. Get married, have kids.”
Now he grinned, patted her belly. “A little She- or He-Body.”
“When we’re grown-ups.” She kissed him with the sun playing through the curtains, made it count. “The best part, right now, is you’d ask if I wanted you to ask. I love that you’d do that.” She wrapped him up again. “I really love you for doing that. Ask me again, one day down the line.”
“You could ask me.”
“Uh-uh.” She drilled her finger playfully into his belly. “You.”
He dug his fingers into her ribs. “Why not you?”
“Because you started it.” She giggled her way into the kiss. “Crap,” she muttered when her com signaled.
She angled back, reached over to slide it across the table. “Text from Dallas. She says to meet her at the morgue.” She calculated the time, grinned. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”
She popped up to race him to the bedroom. Fifteen minutes with the guy who loved her enough to ask if she wanted him to ask?
Even better than a cherry Danish.
•••
Eve walked down the white tunnel of the morgue. She’d long ago gotten used to the smell of death coated with lemon-scented industrial cleaner. She’d stopped thinking that the men and women at Vending or heading to an office had recently lifted the internal organs out of a corpse, or were going to after the next hit of coffee.
She no longer wondered how many occupants resided in the cold drawers, or how many gallons of blood washed down the gullies of the tables on a daily basis.
But when she passed through the doors of the autopsy room and saw Harris on the slab, the resemblance to Peabody gave her a hard jolt.
Chief Medical Examiner Morris turned away from a comp screen. He wore a navy blue suit with razor-thin lines of silver. He’d twisted his ebony hair into a ladder of sleek tails at the back of his head.
Some sort of gritty, back-beating rock played at low volume, and a vending cup of coffee steamed away where he’d set it down on a steel tray.
His exotic eyes skimmed past Eve, then back. “I’d hoped Peabody would be with you.”
“She’s on her way.”
“It’s a... I’m not sure what to call it.” He walked to the body, naked on the slab, the Y incision tidily closed. “Really, the resemblance is only surface. And yet.”
“I know.”
