Page 6 of Undertow

“The health department rules are real,” Cara said, from behind the counter.

“Agent can stay in the back. He’s discreet.” Piper scratched behind the cat’s ears. The cat accepted this as its due.

He shot Cara a look. “You named him?”

“I named him,” Piper said. “Agent. Because he showed up undercover in the rain on a mission. Cara tried to veto it but the cat didn’t respond to anything else, so.” She set Agent on the counter, grabbed her apron strings, and untied them in one swift motion. “I need to check the proofing drawer.” She disappeared through the kitchen door with the energy of someone who’d been waiting for an exit line.

The kitchen door swung shut behind her.

Gabe looked at the cat. The cat looked at Gabe with calm appraisal — an animal used to quick assessments of new arrivals. It appeared to reach a favorable conclusion. It began to purr.

“Where’d he come from?” Gabe asked.

“Back door,” Cara said. “This morning.”

Gabe pulled out a stool at the counter and sat down. “You fed him?”

A pause. “He was hungry.”

“You’re keeping him,” Gabe said.

“I’m calling the shelter in the morning.”

“Cara.”

“There are excellent shelters in this county.”

He snorted. Couldn’t help it. “He has a name and a spot by your oven.”

She turned around. The look she gave him was the one she deployed when she found an argument technically defensible but knew she was losing. He’d learned to recognize it over months of morning coffee and whatever it was they were doing — the circling, the careful distance, the conversations that went right to the edge of something and then stopped.

“He can stay until I find him a good home,” she said with great dignity.

“Sure,” Gabe said.

“That is not me keeping him.”

“Absolutely not.”

Cara poured him a coffee without asking — black, no sugar, she’d memorized his order within a week — and slid it across the counter. Their fingers didn’t touch.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Harold’s rooster. Mrs. Sanderson’s wind chimes. Parking dispute that solved itself.” He wrapped his hands around the cup. “The mulch incident of last Tuesday remains the high point of the month.”

She smiled at that — a real one, not the professional warmth she turned on for customers. He felt it every time, a small shift in the room’s weather.

“I keep opening the chief position paperwork,” he said. He hadn’t meant to say that.

Her eyes came up to his. “And?”

“Then I close it.” He turned the coffee cup in his hands. “Price is patient about it. The council less so.”

She was quiet for a moment. Not the waiting kind of quiet, the thinking kind. “What’s making you hesitate?”

He could have given her half a dozen answers. That a permanent position meant a permanent decision. That he’d spent fifteen years as a federal agent and wasn’t sure what it meant to be something smaller. That his father had died with his integrity intact and a case unfinished and Gabe wasn’t sure Haven Cove was where he was supposed to finish things.

He gave her the true one. “Same thing that makes you hesitate, I think.”