Page 73 of The Maverick
I stood there for a second and looked at her standing in front of me with her eyes closed and her chin tipped up just slightly because she was waiting for me to put my hands on her. The candlelight caught her earrings. Her mouth was soft. There was no fear in her face at all, and the absence of fear was, in its own way, the most thrilling thing she'd handed me yet, because it was hergift,it was her trust, it was her sayinghere, take this, you can't break it.
I wasn't going to break it.
I tied the silk over her eyes. Tested it gentle—two fingers along the edge to make sure it was snug without being tight, a slow pass of my hand in front of her face to make sure she really couldn't see. I told herstay with meand put her hand in the bend of my elbow.
We went.
I walked her out of the suite, down the carpeted hallway, into the elevator. The elevator dinged. We rode down. She held myarm and didn't speak. Whatever was happening inside her chest under that silk was happening in private, and I respected it.
The lobby was lit warm and low when the doors opened.
The staff was lined up in their unobtrusive way along our path. Sasha at the head. Two bellmen in their crisp jackets. The night manager. A waitress from the bar, who'd come around to look.
None of them said a thing—I'd asked Sasha to ask them not to. They smiled. They watched us go past. The smile I caught from Sasha as we crossed the marble told me that whatever staff scuttlebutt had spread through The Palmetto Rose in the last hour, they wereintoit, and any woman who showed up at the front desk asking for me in the future was going to have a long, complicated relationship with the staff before she even got to the elevator.
Sasha opened the front door for us.
The Charleston night came in. Fresh and clean and a little salt off the harbor.
The limo was at the curb.
Long black thing, idling soft, the driver standing at the back door with his hand on the handle. He was a man I hadn't seen before, but the suit and the bearing told me he was a Dominion Hall man. Of course, he was.
Sasha helped me get her down the front steps.Watch your step, sweetheart. There's a curb. Curb. Door.
Rebecca laughed once, quiet, against my shoulder—half nervous, half delighted, the laugh of a woman who'd put her trust in a man and was finding out, by feel, what that purchase had bought her.
I cupped the back of her head.
"Watch your head, baby."
I helped her duck into the car.
The leather sighed under her. I went around the other side. Got in. Nodded once at the driver. The door closed.
The limo eased away from the curb.
She didn't reach for the blindfold.
That was the thing that got me, sitting next to her in the soft dark with the harbor going past the windows on her side and the city lights sliding across the windows on mine. She didn't reach. She kept her hands in her lap. She trusted me to take it off her when I was ready, and that was a thing about her I had not expected to find tonight on top of the other things.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"Not far."
"Tommy?"
"Mm."
"Is it dangerous?"
"No, sweetheart. Not tonight."
I took her hand. Squeezed it once. She squeezed back.
The limo took us two miles north.
I'd picked the field on the map before I'd called Lucas. A clear stretch of grass behind the marina, owned by Dominion Hall, used for things that needed to happen close to the water without happening on the water. The driver eased the limo up onto the access road and stopped.
