Page 41 of The Maverick
The bourbon hit my tongue and I knew it before I'd swallowed.
"This the same as the plane?"
"Four Branches. Yeah."
"That's good bourbon."
"Owners are friends of ours. Four founders, one out of each branch of the service. We were early investors. They keep us stocked."
I made a small note in my head.Four Branches.Buy a case for the rental in Springdale,if I ever made it back.
I started to say something else.
The door burst open behind me.
I didn't turn fast. I came around in the chair just enough to see, and what I saw was a woman crossing the room towardLucas at speed with a clipboard in one hand and her phone in the other and her hair pulled back from her face the way women pulled it back when they were halfway through a thing and not finished yet.
Two strides into the room, she registered me.
She stopped.
I'd seen her face before. On a movie poster the size of a building in Times Square last year. On the cover of a magazine in a Dubai newsstand. On a tablet a corporal had been watching in the back of a Chinook outside Mosul.
The face I was looking at, in person, in a parlor in Charleston, on a random afternoon, belonged to Lexi Montgomery.
She gave me about half a second ofoh, then gave me the smile—the one that had built her career, gracious and easy and worth, I'd read somewhere, ninety million dollars per movie.
"I am so sorry," she said. "I didn't realize Lucas was in here with someone. I'm Lexi."
I was on my feet by then.
"Montgomery," I said, before she could finish.
She tilted her head.
"So, you've heard of me."
"Maybe. There was a low-budget thing a few years back. Guy and his dog. I think you played the dog."
She let out a laugh. The real one. The kind that cracked open across her face before she'd had time to school it.
"I like you."
"That's kind of you, ma'am."
"Don'tma'amme, you sound like a man who knows better."
"Yes, ma'am."
She turned the smile to Lucas.
"Sorry to interrupt. What time are we leaving for Paris?"
He set his bourbon on the side table. Reached for her wrist. Pulled her into his lap with the confidence of a man who did notask permission from his girl in front of company, but knew his girl.
She landed there like she'd landed there a hundred times.
I sipped my bourbon to give my face something to do.
