Page 38

"Well." Remi had come in with her, and she caught it all, Dean's look, Lara's flinch away from it, before the door had even swung shut. "This is going to be interesting." Then a table across the room hollered her name and she was gone into the crowd, off to put a cousin in a headlock, leaving a Remi-shaped gap and the echo of a laugh.

Which left Lara scarlet, and Elena delighted, and the two of them at the bar.

"He's here," Elena said, beside her, pleasant as anything, steering them toward it.

"I noticed."

"You're not looking at him."

"I'm aware."

"You're working very hard at not looking at him."

"Elena." Lara found a gap at the bar and put both hands flat on it like it might keep her upright. "Drink. You promised me a drink."

"Two of whatever's cold," Elena told the bartender, and to Lara, lower: "He's still looking, you know."

"He is not."

"He absolutely is. He's doing the thing where a man stares at the side of your face and thinks he's being subtle about it." Elena accepted the bottles, slid one over. "It's very high school. I'm enjoying it enormously."

Lara did not look to check. That was a small private victory and she clung to it.

She was three sips in and almost level when the hand landed on her elbow.

"Now this," said a voice, warm and easy and pitched just for her, "is the best thing I've seen in this town all day."

He was good-looking and knew it, late thirties, a good shirt, a watch that had no business in Soluno, the polished gloss of a man passing through on somebody's money. Oil, probably, or the law that served it. He'd angled himself in close, closer than the crowd required, his hand still resting on her elbow like he'd set it down and forgotten to pick it back up.

"Let me buy you another one of those," he said. "What is that, you having a… here, let me…"

"I'm good, thanks." Lara smiled the pleasant smile, the auditor's smile, the one that gave away nothing. "I've barely started this one."

"Then the next one. I'm Grant." He didn't move his hand. "You don't sound like you're from out here either. Thank God. I was starting to think this whole county only made one kind of person."

"I work here," Lara said, which wasn't an answer, and she ought to have stepped back, she knew she ought to have stepped back, his hand was on her arm and he was standing close enough that she could smell expensive cologne over the beer and the wood of the place, and the polite thing, the easy thing, the get-his-hand-off-you thing was one clean step to the left.

She didn't take it.

And she knew exactly why she didn't, and she hated it with a pure clean hatred, because the reason was sitting in a booth at the back of the bar with a beer going warm in his hand, and some small ugly stubborn part of her wanted him to see this. Wanted him to watch a man stand too close to her and put a hand on her and not be able to do a single thing about it, because he was the one who kept saying she works in the office, he was the one who took his hand back like she was hot to the touch, he was the one who'd looked at her across a kitchen a hundred times now and never once closed the distance. Let him watch somebody else try. Let him feel it.

It was a small and petty and humiliating thing to want, and she wanted it anyway, and so she let Grant's hand stay on her elbow three seconds longer than she ever would have otherwise.

Then the room changed.

Nothing happened. That was the strange part, the part she'd turn over later. No sound, no movement she could point to. But the whole orientation of the place shifted by some fraction of a degree, the way a field full of animals will go still and turn all at once toward a thing they haven't seen yet but can feel coming, and the bartender's eyes flicked up over her shoulder, and Elena went very quiet beside her, and the back of Lara's neck prickled with the certain animal knowledge that something was crossing the room toward her.

She turned her head.

Dean was already halfway across the floor.

He wasn't hurrying. That was the thing that took the air out of her, he came through the crowded bar at an unhurried walk, no rush in him anywhere, and the crowd just opened, men shifting out of his path without quite seeming to decide to, the whole room making way for something it recognized. He'd left his beer behind. His eyes weren't on her. They were on the hand on her elbow, and his face was doing nothing at all, which on Dean Royston she had learned was the most dangerous thing it did.

She had time to think, with great clarity: oh no.

And then he was behind her.

He didn't crowd her. He stopped a half-step back, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him down the whole line of her spine, and he put one hand flat against the small of her back, warm, broad, certain, the whole weight of it settling there like it had every right, and he looked at Grant over her shoulder, and he said, in a voice she had never once heard him use, low and pleasant and absolutely without bottom: