The Spencer Family Job

(Author’s Note: I read that the writers of Leverage and the writers of Psych wanted to do a crossover episode where it was revealed that Eliot Spencer was Henry Spencer’s nephew and Shawn Spencer’s first cousin, and I cannot tell you how much I needed that crossover. Allegedly, it was derailed when James Roday as Shawn Spencer ad-libbed a line about Gus needing to get home to watch the Leverage finale. I don’t think that was an insurmountable problem, but it was the reason given for not doing the episode. So I wrote it myself.)

He’d been out of town more than a week, but he didn’t want to show up at her house unannounced. Maybe it was the gentleman in him; maybe it was the fact that he thought, given what he’d had to tell her, she might whack him with her one cast-iron pan before she decided to let him in. Or not let him in.

To his credit, not only had he not suggested she calm down and listen, he let her rage and cry and rage some more, trying to let her get it out of her system and/or get tired enough to listen, until his phone rang. And, of course and because the universe was a bastard, he’d immediately had to leave on Leverage business. His picture on where they stood, or did anything else, was fuzzy at best. If the rest of his team noticed he was surly (they did), they gave him his space and plenty of really bad guys to beat.

“Hi, Peaches,” he said when she answered the phone. She’d answered it on the fourth ring. He’d counted. Too many to look desperate, too few to make him feel like she was doing him a favor.

“You’re back from the Crystal Kingdom?” She hated that movie.

“I just got back to town, I thought I’d bring you dinner tonight. If you don’t have plans.”

There was a long silence while they both waited to see what she how she answered that. He owed her as much of an explanation as he could give her, but she didn’t know how to ask for one. As a show of good faith, he had invited her to stay at his place if she wanted; she was gone when he got home. Really, he hadn’t expected her to stay indefinitely. He didn’t know what he expected, just that he was disappointed to come back to the same empty place to which he always returned. She was a writer who hadn’t left a note; Eliot could not overlook the symbolism in that.

Rather than stay in his empty condo, he had wandered down to the river. It was a nice afternoon, there was a crowd of people walking and talking and doing normal human people things, like not killing warlords.

“I don’t,” she said finally. “Have plans, I mean.”

“Well, that’s…I mean, not that I–”

“Why don’t you come over and we’ll figure something out when you get here.”

It wasn’t the most enthusiastic invitation he’d ever received, but she hadn’t told him to go to hell.

They were picking at Chinese and half-heartedly watching a movie when his phone rang. If it was business again, he was going to toss the phone out or possibly through her picture window and be done with it. But the display said it was definitely not business.

“I gotta take this, Princess,” he said.

“Do you want me to pause the movie? I was going to get more drinks.”

“Yeah, I’ll have one,” he answered absently, his mind already on what this phone call was going to drop on him.

She rolled her eyes in annoyance before grabbing up both glasses. Devil trailed her to the kitchen; she was upset and distracted, and a smart dog could often parlay that into a baby cheese treat. Not that he would take advantage of her in this state. He had known when they shared a carton of vanilla ice cream that something was very wrong. He had done every furry comfort trick he knew, but she was still sad. She wasn’t even happy when Eliot returned, which made Devil very suspicious.

“Uncle Henry?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure, kid. I was just calling to check on you.”

“Now?! I mean—that’s…thanks, Uncle Henry. I’m fine.”

“Fine?” He just let it sit there. This was not a new game.

“Fine,” Eliot repeated. Eliot was not a new player.

“You’ve got a girl over,” Henry guessed. Game called on a technicality.

“Something like that,” he said, as nicely as possible. “What’s happening in Santa Barbara?”

“I get it, you want me to wrap this up. So here it is: Shawn and Juliet got engaged, and I’m having a little party for them down here at the house on Saturday the 15^th. I’d love to see you, and you’re welcome to bring your girl.”

“Friend,” Eliot added, hoping Ophelia was actually not listening while pretending to not listen. Or that she didn’t come back to dispute the statement that she was any sort of friend of his.

Henry considered for a long, long moment.

“It’s like that, huh? Congratulations, kid. Can’t wait to meet her.”

“Thanks, Uncle Henry. I’ll talk to you later.” But not too much later, because Henry wouldn’t be pawned off with an explanation that feeble.

She came back to the couch with a bowl of popcorn and two drinks and resumed her seat, pointedly not asking about his phone call. He got the feeling she was pointedly not asking about a lot of things, and there were a lot of things he definitely did not want to tell her still so in all there had been very little talking after he had arrived tonight. The odds they were just going to kiss and make up, he felt, decreased with every minute that passed.

“That was my Uncle Henry,” he volunteered. Her expression was unreadable. Not because she didn’t have a number of thoughts and questions; he felt like they had all log-jammed in her throat and if she opened her mouth, they might come spilling out in no particular or coherent order. “Retired officer. He lives in Santa Barbara.”

“On your mom’s side? Or your dad’s?” she asked neutrally. Not because she wasn’t interested; he rarely talked about any of his family. But she also couldn’t be sure now he wasn’t talking in some sort of code she didn’t understand.

“He’s my dad’s brother,” Eliot clarified. “He’s about the only person I still talk to besides my sister. Anyway, his son got engaged and he’s having a party in a couple of weeks.”

“What’s his name?”

“Henry,” Eliot repeated. He felt, rather than saw, her stare. When he looked, her expression was, if anything, more annoyed. “Oh, his son’s name. I get it. His son’s name is Shawn.”

She waited to see if he volunteered anything else. He was suddenly unsure how to interpret her silence. Honestly, he’d undergone torture that was more straightforward. At the same time, he realized he was pretty much the only one to blame, as he was the one who’d taken the contract killing job after telling her he wasn’t a killer.

“How old is he? Older than you? Younger?” Honestly. This felt like an interrogation rather than a conversation about an event in his family. This was like forcing a really slow student to see the point they had just, themselves, made.

“He’s younger than me. Four years or so, I think. He’s always been kind of a twerp, and he was a real pain in Henry’s ass growing up. But he’s been dating a detective in San Francisco, so maybe he’s different now.”

“Well, congratulations to your cousin and his detective,” she said with something like a smile.

“That’s why I had to take the call,” he finished lamely. “You never know with family.”

“Yeah. I get that.”

He set his drink back on the table. Mostly because he felt like it would frost over if he held onto it much longer. Tonight had been rough.

“But we can talk about it later,” he said as he slid his arm around her shoulder.

Very late that night, when he wasn’t asleep and neither was she, he propped himself up on one elbow and put his other arm around her.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Bedknobs and Broomsticks never adequately explained Roddy McDowell’s character or purpose and the whole story line could have been cut,” she answered. He’d met professionals who were less good at evasion than she was.

“About Santa Barbara,” he sighed.

She turned over to face him.

“What about it?”

“Do you want to go to Uncle Henry’s party?” he asked. Impatiently. Because there was being mad and then there was just being childish and he could unders–

“You realize this is the first time you’ve said any of those words out loud together to me, right?”

“No, it’s not.”

She sat up, pulling the sheet with her.

“It is too!”

“Ophelia, I asked you downstairs whether you…”

He turned and looked at the door, as if he could see through it, down the stairs, and into the living room three hours ago.

“Whether I…,” she prompted when the silence stretched out too long.

“I meant to,” he said. She waited. And waited.

“Meant to…?”

“Are you going to keep repeating the last thing I said?”

“Depends on whether or not you’re going to keep stopping your sentences in the middle,” she answered. “Because I’m in no position to guess the endings right now.”

She was in a position to guess at whatever she liked, because she was having to guess at a lot. What she meant was she was in no state to guess the endings because that would lead her to a lot more questions, and since most of them were about whether or not she was competent enough to live on her own and make decisions and god forbid determine the future of anyone who wasn’t her, but especially the kids she taught…

She was feeling uncharitable and unkind and like an idiot and even though she couldn’t think what possible questions she could have asked that would have headed off this mess, she knew there was something more she could have done. She was certain. She was also certain that being somewhat afraid of your boyfriend because you knew he had killed someone was unhealthy for everyone involved and whatever their relationship was right now.

He sat up too, kissed her on the shoulder, then scooped her up, sheet and all, to pull her into his lap.

“Look,” he said softly. “I’m not even going to try to apologize for what I did or what I told you. I can’t. It’s what I do, and it’s what I’ve done. I should have been more careful to keep you away from it. But I was stupid and I didn’t.”

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand before looking up at the ceiling.

“And I can’t make up for that either. I understand if it’s a deal breaker for you.”

“You want to break up in the middle of the night on a Thursday?! Are you kidding me with this?” Since it was her house, she didn’t bother to keep her voice down. Devil barked from downstairs, just in case she needed some furry moral support. He kept his arms around her, not to hold her in place (exactly), but he now knew from experience that if she stood up on the bed to yell at him some more, she’d fall off the edge of it again and neither of them needed to deal with that right now.

“No, Ophelia. I want you to come to Santa Barbara with me in two weeks.”

The sky was just barely beginning to lighten before she spoke again.

“That’s all you had to say.”

It wasn’t forgiveness, but she hadn’t told him where he could shove the idea of a family barbecue either.

He hit the Leverage offices early the next morning.

“Hardison, I need a plane,” he announced.

“Where and how fast? And do you need a new set of ID to go with it?” He wasn’t sure what was the matter with Eliot, except that it had to do with Ophelia. For the first time in their history, Hardison was afraid he’d get punched in the mouth for asking. Like, actually punched in the mouth, not just Eliot saying he’d like to. It was obvious from the havoc he had wreaked on their job that he either wanted or needed to punch a lot of something, and this job hadn’t gotten it out of his system.

“Two weeks from today, and for Santa Barbara. I don’t need new IDs, what kind of question even is that?”

“Just doing my job,” Hardison muttered. “Let me see what I can find.”

He typed for a few minutes while neither of them spoke.

“How many people?” he asked.

“Are you leaving town because of Ophelia?” Parker asked. “Did you get in a fight with her? You’re not still mad about that Faire thing, are you? Did you two have a fight and she threatened to expose your secrets?” Parker didn’t know what was going on either. What was worse, she didn’t know whose side she was on. On the one hand, Eliot was her teammate and she trusted him with her actual life. On the other, Ophelia was her friend, which was a fairly new and novel and pleasant experience for Parker. When Parker had consulted Sophie, who knew more than she wanted to discuss but not nearly enough, Sophie had advised her to sit back and wait it out.

“Parker, I—”

He turned on his heel and left the Leverage offices without bothering to finish whatever he was about to say. Parker turned to Hardison.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said.

“Concern,” he advised. “It’s concern.”

“Eliot,” she asked. “What did you do?”

As fate would have it, she was seated next to him on the flight home. He knew it wasn’t fate and so did she, so he didn’t bother to argue about it. She couldn’t make him be happy, though.

“Can you not?”

“No, I can’t,” Sophie answered. “Because you are obviously upset, which is not like you. And you need to talk to someone about it, and even though you’re on the job, you could still talk to Ophelia if you wanted to. But you aren’t talking to Ophelia even though you need to talk to someone because you ripped a car door off with your bare hands and it’s not healthy for you to carry that sort of rage.”

“I can’t talk to Ophelia because it is Ophelia,” he snapped. She would have been offended, except that gently handling men who had stepped in it up to their elbows was one of her specialties.

“Oh,” she said casually. Far too casually for Eliot. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Is she seeing someone else?”

“No.”

“She caught you seeing someone else?”

“No.”

“You killed Berednikov because you owed someone a favor and came home in such terrible shape she found out?”

“How the hell do you even know that?” If she was going to keep knowing things, it was going to be difficult to keep this conversation at a volume that everyone else on the plane couldn’t hear. He had a lot of rights and privileges as an air marshal. Throwing everyone off the plane at altitude, or even just one woman who was smugly correct about everything so far, was unfortunately not one of them.

“We’re not talking about me here. We’re not talking about you, remember? Because it’s Ophelia’s fault.”

“She’s…furious.”

“A reasonable response, I think. What did you tell her?”

“Not much. We were still fighting when you called about this.”

She nodded and sipped her tea, giving him space to continue.

“Does everyone else know?”

“Hardison does,” she acknowledged. “He brought it to me.”

She did not address the fact that he had taken that job and left town without telling anyone where he was going or why, nor did she remind him how mad he’d been about that behavior in his teammates before. Kicking a man while he was down wasn’t her style, and he was in real pain. Besides, it was true and it would still be true later when she needed it.

“Did he tell Parker?”

“Do you care?”

He had to think about that for a while.

“You do care, and you think because you’ve disappointed Ophelia you’ve disappointed Parker as well.”

“She has no reason to—” he blustered. Then he stopped. “It’s not even that she’s disappointed,” he admitted. “She looked at me like I was a killer. And I don’t know how to convince her that I’m not.”

“Eliot,” she said gently. “I want you to really think about what you just said.”

“I’m not a murderer, Soph,” he hissed. “You know how terrible he was. He killed kids!”

“Are you going to tell her everything?”

“I can’t do that without dragging all of you into this. She thinks you’re an actress and Parker’s a spy and Hardison’s just her boyfriend who owns a bar and does IT consultations.”

“I appreciate that you’re concerned about us in all this,” Sophie said, tamping down the sarcasm as best she could. “But you have to tell her something. Unless you’re tired of her.”

She had never seen Eliot look at anyone the way he looked at her then. He looked like someone had killed his puppy. Or his girlfriend.

“I see.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to fix this with her.”

“You have two options,” she said.

“Just two?”

“Just two once you get past the option of telling the truth or lying. I don’t recommend lying to her about what she’s already seen.”

“No, I can’t do that to her.”

“Do you want me to talk to her?”

“I gotta do this myself Sophie. You know I do.”

“Yes, I do. I just wanted to make sure you knew. Now listen carefully, because I have a plan.”

Ophelia, like many of her students, arranged her schedule so she had either no Friday classes or not many Friday classes. She never scheduled office hours on Fridays but assured her students they could reach her if it was an emergency. After the one monumentally inconvenient meeting she was compelled to attend that day, she posted a note on her door and her email that she would deal with any business the following Monday, everyone should have a good weekend, and she was unavailable. Any attempt at contact that required a response would result in a failed test grade, and anyone who didn’t like that could raise it to whatever authority they wanted.

So when she got to her Jeep and saw a note on the windshield, the only feeling she could summon was dismay. When unfolded, the note had a string of numbers but nothing else. No explanation. No signature. Just numbers. But she was familiar with how maps worked, and specifically with how her GPS worked. With a deep, deep sigh, she entered the coordinates and followed them blindly, no idea what she’d find when she got there. She almost didn’t care, either.

Her thoughts had been chasing each other in circles for more than a week; she was going through life like a zombie. She was so far removed from her reality that she had forgotten to give her students the quiz she had promised. Her concerned students, all three classes, held an emergency meeting in the library to discuss whether or not they needed to have an intervention for her, or whether they needed to alert someone else in the department.

When she opened her next class with a discussion about mourning instead of the promised discussion about how science fiction television had advanced medical technology, they knew something was wrong. But as much as she liked her students, she didn’t confide in them; she was there to teach, not to potentially expose them to a killer or even discuss the disastrous results of her love life with them. Everyone around her could see that she was just going through the motions of life; nobody knew what to do about it. Then Eliot had left without saying goodbye this morning; she wasn’t even sure when he left. Just that he was gone. Again.

The coordinates led her to a dam on the outskirts of town. She supposed it was scenic, with several waterfalls and trees and, honestly, cement. But beyond that, it meant nothing. Eliot was leaning on the rails looking at the waterfall.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said.

“I didn’t know if you were being held hostage.”

“You thought I was being held hostage and you came anyway?” It came out rougher than he meant. She immediately started to cry.

He put his arms around her. “I’m sorry, Princess. That’s not what I meant.”

She cried for a long time. He waited. His shirt got soaked.

“Do you trust me?” he asked. He understood that look just fine. “Never mind. That was a bad question. I take it back. Will you come with me? It’s not far.”

He led her to a trail in the woods that meandered down by the river, finally stopping at a quilt and a basket. It was the quilt she’d slept under after she put him back together, right before everything came crashing down. Because on top of everything else, he had to deal with this too. He’d finally remembered what had been nagging at him about it, and while he didn’t believe in superstition, he was positive she did. Once he’d reached that conclusion, it was easy to figure out what had happened. It was easy to convince himself, anyway, especially after he violently shuttered the memory of the conversation where she had introduced the idea espoused by one of her favorite figures in history: you are the easiest person to fool.

“Have some water,” he offered. She needed it. This was not, he was sure, the first time she’d cried today. “Have a seat.”

He handed her the bottle with the top already off.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked. He’d have felt better if she punched him in the face or shouted or even cried some more. Her quiet resignation to the idea made him want to step in front of a train.

“No. I promise.”

She didn’t say anything. He took that as the only sign he was going to get that he should continue.

“You were right about everything you asked me on our first date,” he said. She looked across at him, truly frightened. “Nope, you weren’t. I wasn’t sent there to kill you and I didn’t have a gun in the car. I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t like guns but I know how to use them.”

“It was just…everything else you lied about,” she said. He was amazed that she didn’t even sound bitter. Just tired. “You do kill people for money.”

“Not money,” he said. “I don’t kill for money. I’m not a hit man. I kill very bad people the world is better off not having.”

“You would call this extra-judiciary killing, then,” she observed. “I think the word you’re looking for is assassination.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s probably closer,” he admitted.

“Next you’re going to tell me how courts don’t work?”

“Not like they should,” he started.

“Who was it?”

Sophie had counted on her derailing his narrative. He hadn’t believed she would, but also recognized that Sophie knew people better than he did. Even Ophelia.

“You wouldn’t know him.”

“Eliot, whether or not I knew him wasn’t my question. Who did you kill?”

“Nikolai Berednikov,” he answered. “He was Slovenian. He was a warlord.”

“What did he do?”

“Arms trading. Gun running. Terrorist training. He was involved in some nuclear stuff, but I don’t think he was at the point where he could get a bomb.”

She brushed away tears impatiently.

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“Then I don’t understand what you’re asking,” he said.

“Lots of people do all those things. Do you plan to kill them too?” Her approach to this was, in his opinion, coldly academic. Which beat screaming and shouting and throwing things, but only by the narrowest of margins. If she’d been angry, he could have been angry too, which was a much better feeling than whatever all this was. He wondered if this was how Parker felt all the time.

He ran a hand over his face. He had been prepared for a difficult discussion. He had not been prepared for her inconsolable disappointment.

“I…”

“What did he do, now, that made you think killing him was the right move. And don’t tell me it was a favor to your friend. I spent a week with him; I don’t think he’d hesitate to kill someone for a minor inconvenience. He didn’t come to you because this guy cut him off in traffic.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Berednikov,” she said shakily, barely bothering to hide the rage she’d been battling for more than a week now.

“I was a Ranger in the army,” he began. “We dealt with Berednikov’s men in some operations I can’t tell you about because they’re still classified. He killed seven of my men then bombed an orphanage. It was…,” he stood up and walked closer to the riverbank. “It was a disaster. So we bombed his headquarters, because the intelligence said he was there. He wasn’t. He put the word out that he knew who we were, and he’d get the rest of us. And he has been. He’s been tracking the rest of my unit across the world and killing us off one at a time.”

“Did he know where you were?”

“What?” He had been thinking about how the river here was so similar to the creek in his dream, so was mentally absent for her question.

“Did he know where you were?” she repeated.

“He didn’t,” Eliot answered. “It wasn’t because everyone else was careless, either. He has spies everywhere. He’s been in prison for war crimes for years, but he was about to be transferred. Quinn found out that he was going to be moved to a different prison, and there was a plan in place to break him out. It was detailed. It was credible. I couldn’t let him get to everyone else, even if it meant he killed me. I had to get rid of him. They were my men, and it was my job not to let them get killed.”

He turned back to face her.

“I couldn’t tell you this,” he said. “I couldn’t put all this on you on a first date, because the odds were high that you wouldn’t want a second date with me anyway. There was no need to make it worse and tell you a bunch of stuff that was too dangerous for you to know.”

“Is he the only one?” She cut straight to the beating heart of the matter.

“No.” He didn’t even pretend to misunderstand.

There it was. There was the answer that might decide their fate. Small bombs did the most damage.

“How do you live like this?”

He shrugged.

“You get used to it,” he said. “You stay low. You use a lot of aliases. You get to them first.”

“You don’t get attached,” she said, finally.

“You try not to. But then you meet someone who wrecks your entire plan.”

He came back to sit down across from her, reaching for her hands. She didn’t draw them back.

“I knew when I saw you the first time that you were different,” he said. “I don’t know how. I still don’t know how. I can’t explain it to anyone, even when I want to. If I was more like you, I’d think you cast a spell on me.”

She didn’t interrupt, which he thought pretty well ruled out magic. He felt like she’d tell him, at this point, if she had otherworldly powers. Given her current mood, she’d probably demonstrate them in a less than kind manner. Not that he would feel worse as a toad.

“The work I do is dangerous, and it’s hard, but it’s rewarding. I help people get justice who can’t get it any other way. And I don’t do it by killing people. But this man, Phee, killed men I loved. I couldn’t walk away from this. I had to do it for their families. I had to do it for you.”

He’d seen her mad. He’d never seen her angry.

“Don’t you dare try to pin this on me,” she said. She sounded like a trapped animal. “Don’t you dare try to get that blood on my hands, Eliot Spencer.”

“I had to do it for you,” he continued, “so I would be the man you thought I was: the man who does the job he has to do, even when he hates it. Because you think I’m the hero. You think I’m the man who fights his way back for the sake of his own soul.”

He let go of her hands, even though she still hadn’t tried to pull away.

“My great-grandmother made this quilt,” he said, apparently at random. She fleetingly wondered if he had lost his mind, and what her options might be if he had. “It’s the only thing I have that was hers. It’s…the legend in our family says she was something like a doctor or a healer, maybe she was a little bit of a witch.” He paused for a minute. “Do you know anything about it?”

She studied it for a moment, since she was here anyway and couldn’t outrun him. She flipped up the corner nearest her to examine it a little further, even though she didn’t understand the point of this game at all.

“Based on the colors and the patterns, I’d say it’s from the early to mid-1860s,” she said. “There’s no machine stitching, except in this one place where someone made a repair.” She tapped a small place near her feet. “But even that looks like it was done prior to the turn of the century. The rest of this stitch pattern was hand-sewn. It disappeared almost completely with the advent of electric machines.”

He nodded without explaining why he had asked.

“When I came home in the rain, you took care of me, which is something I know you hated. You hated it so much you haven’t even mentioned it. I was wet and I was freezing and I was bleeding and you saved my life. And when I woke up, you were so cold your lips were blue. I was afraid I had killed you by dragging you into a situation you never knew existed. So I got this out of a trunk where it’s been…forever. I knew you’d be warm, and I knew you’d be safe.”

He handed her another open bottle of water, which she drank in its entirety without comment.

“Why do we have ghost stories, Ophelia?”

“What?” She was not up to abrupt shifts in conversations right now.

“When I left, you said I had to come back because you never told me why we have ghost stories. Tell me.”

“We have ghost stories in America because of the Civil War. It was the first time, really, that people didn’t die at home. The ghosts in early American stories were soldiers who didn’t come back, and their families didn’t know where they were or how to find them. Or about places where soldiers died that weren’t their homes. That’s why so many of them are about haunted hospitals. If people died from a disease or in childbirth or of just old age, everyone knew what happened to them. They got to say goodbye and have a funeral and bury something. They could grieve. It’s hard to grieve a man you’ll never find again.”

Ordinarily, he thought, she would have made the connection right away. She was far smarter than he had anticipated, which was a blessing and a curse. It was a testament to how upset she was that she didn’t now see what was right in front of her.

“Why did you ask me that?” She was more puzzled than angry now, but he recognized that mishandling this any further would shift that balance in a hurry.

“Because I came home, Ophelia. That was all you wanted.”

“How…,” she didn’t protest his statement. Didn’t argue that he was wrong. He watched her work her way through it while trying to stay detached from it. He watched her fail.

“How did I know?” he finished for her. She nodded warily.

“You don’t want to argue with any of that, Ophelia?” It wasn’t a test.

“No.” If he wasn’t looking at her, he wouldn’t have heard her at all.

“This is a wedding quilt. I had your dream. All you’ve ever wanted is a home.”

Any normal person would have called him a lunatic and run for her life. She didn’t even move.

He waited, now, to see how she would proceed. Because now it was up to her.

She swallowed hard before asking the question.

“Will we always be running away?” He felt faint with relief.

“Never, I promise,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

“You know I am.”

“Yeah. I do. But I know something else, too.”

“That this is crazy and one of us must be delirious?”

“I know that you’re home,” he said.

They sat by the river the rest of the afternoon, his arms around her while he unwound the rest of the untrue things he told her. She didn’t often interrupt with questions, but when she did, he gave her the entire answer. He even told her about Parker, which honestly clarified a lot for them both.

“She showed up in my classroom, same as you, with a completely new name while you were gone,” Ophelia said. “And she doesn’t seem to like Quinn very much at all.”

“She doesn’t like most people,” he said. “But you’re right, she definitely doesn’t like Quinn.”

“Did you make her pretend to like me?”

“Princess, I don’t make Parker do anything she doesn’t want to do. And she really wouldn’t have pretended to like you no matter what I asked her to do once she found out how many things Hardison likes that you like too.”

“Would she have killed me?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s never killed anyone, but she might have annoyed some people to death. She’s a thief, not a killer. And she really does like you.”

“How on earth can you possibly know that?” He was obscurely glad she was this concerned about Parker; the thief didn’t really have a lot of girlfriends, so Ophelia’s genuine feelings for her were nice.

“She asked yesterday if I was going out of town because of you,” he said. “And she didn’t offer me any tips for escaping.”

“Does she know about all this?”

“I don’t think she does, she just knows something is wrong between us and she blames me. Hardison said she was concerned, which is new for her.”

“What do you mean, you’re going out of town?” she asked, suddenly realizing what he’d said about Parker.

“To Santa Barbara,” he reminded her. “In two weeks.”

“That was real? All that about your uncle and his son and the engagement party? You weren’t making that up?”

“Not a word,” he said, realizing that this was going to be their life for a while. But it would be their life, not his life and her life. “If you still want to go—and I really want you to come with me—Hardison found a plane and a great hotel. We can go for the weekend and watch Shawn and his dad snipe at each other and eat a lot of meat and go to the beach. Just you and me. And Devil, if you want him to go too.” He hadn’t actually planned to take her dog, but would rearrange in the likely case she wouldn’t leave him behind.

“He stays with his groomer if I go out of town,” she shrugged. “She thinks I don’t know, but I do.”

“The groomer kidnaps your dog and you’re okay with that?” He counted himself as lucky that she was too distracted to point out that he had kidnapped her dog when they were far less acquainted than Ophelia and the groomer.

“Eh, she has a couple of shepherds herself, and Devil really likes her and them. It’s like a camp out for him. As long as he’s taken care of, I’m really happier with him being at her place than in a kennel while I’m away. It’s just hard to find someone to dog-sit a dog like him. He’s scary if you don’t know him.”

Eliot took a moment to consider the idea that she drew scary things into her life fairly often for someone who claimed to live a quiet life teaching history and eating takeout.

He didn’t push her for an answer on Santa Barbara again that day, just let her take her own time to think about it. In truth, he didn’t push her for an answer on a lot of things; he had watched her dig her heels in over being told what to do too many times (although rarely by him, because he wasn’t an idiot)(sometimes) to pull that himself. He could only imagine how it had gone for Quinn. Almost, he felt sorry for the guy. But not real sorry.

A while later, he urged her awake reluctantly. He doubted she’d been sleeping much lately.

“Come on, Princess. We need to go before it gets dark and Devil calls the police on me.”

“Why did you choose here?” she asked sleepily.

“I…I watched a friend change his whole life over there once,” he said, gesturing at the dam. “It meant a lot watching him make that choice. So I borrowed some of his courage.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” she said. He turned from where he was folding the quilt to look at her.

“Which part?”

“The part where you need to borrow courage from anyone,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s true.”

He smiled back at her.

“You think I’ve been this brave every day of my life?” He dropped the quilt on top of the basket and came to put his arms around her. “I haven’t.”

“Name a day,” she said, interested.

“Today. I didn’t know if you’d come. I didn’t know if you’d stay. I didn’t know if you’d say you never wanted to see me again.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “But it’s my fault, okay?” She nodded against him.

He handed her the quilt before picking up the basket, then offered her his hand for the walk back to the parking lot. He shut the trunk of his car after dropping the basket inside it.

“Here,” she said, offering him the quilt. “Do you want to put this in with it?”

“Keep it,” he said softly. “It’s yours now.”

“But it was your great-grandmother’s–,” she started to protest, still holding it out to him.

“And then it was mine and I’m giving it to you. Take it home and sleep under it and know that you’re safe.”

She held it against her for a moment, softly stroking the fold where it hung over her arm.

“I’ve heard of these, you know,” she said.

“I’m sure you have. That’s why you’re the best person to have it.”

“Just because I believe in ghosts doesn’t mean I believe in every American superstition or tradition or old-wives tale,” she said stubbornly.

He kissed her on the cheek.

“I never thought you believed all of them,” he answered, knowing full well she believed every last one of them except the story about the maniac’s hook on the car door. “Let me follow you to your house.”

“Then what?”

He had no idea what she meant.

“I…what?”

“Will you stay? Or do you want me to dream about the man I’m going to marry by myself?”

He pulled her as close as the folded quilt would allow.

“I knew you believed that one,” he whispered. “See you at home.”

They were sitting on her back patio Saturday evening, taking turns throwing a tennis ball for Devil. Eliot was throwing the tennis ball; Ophelia was flipping through a novel looking for something to discuss with her class. She started to read something out loud to him, as she had been all afternoon, when she stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“Go on,” he said, trying to find a part of the ball that wasn’t soggy.

“I don’t need to go on, though, do I?” she said quietly.

Devil stopped halfway to the ball to trot back; he put on paw on Ophelia’s lap and stared balefully at Eliot.

“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked. “I’ve never read that and you think it’s interesting. Why wouldn’t I want you to go on?”

“Because nothing I say to you will ever be a surprise,” she said, sounding both surprised and disappointed. “You know everything from Hardison’s research.”

“I…”

“My real age, my real weight, my real credit score,” she continued. “How much I paid for this house. I can literally never do anything that will surprise you.”

“Uh, that just did,” he pointed out. She had; he had expected this conversation Friday night.

She closed the book without marking the page. Devil glared at Eliot as she stood up and paced the length of the patio.

“There’s not a move I can make that you can’t see coming for a hundred miles! I bet you even know where my parents are right now!”

“Ophelia, I was here when you came in with the postcard from Tenerife,” he reminded her. “We both know where your parents are.”

Her pace was picking up speed; she would be jogging the patio in a minute. He timed her next pass so he could snatch her into his chair before she Energizer Bunny-d herself into a state.

“I’m sure he appreciates that you think he’s some sort of god,” Eliot said, “but you could not be more wrong.”

“I don’t—”

“Hardison’s research told me a lot of stuff, but all it gave me were facts,” he said, not letting her get a word in. She needed to breathe for a few minutes. “He couldn’t tell me that you would read things to me to make me laugh, or that your relationship with garlic bread is legally considered marriage in 18 countries, or how much you love your dog.” Devil smiled, pleased. “He couldn’t tell me that you have enough clothes to outfit an army, or that you can open any book in the world and walk right in and take me with you.” She rested her head on his shoulder; he wrapped his arms tighter around her.

“You’re just doing that to make me feel better,” she said. He thought she might be going for an accusation, but her heart wasn’t entirely in it.

“You know me well enough by now to know this is not, at all, how I go about making you feel good or better or anything else,” he said, kissing her on the temple. She blushed. He smiled. “If I just wanted to make you feel better, I’d send the dog inside and tell him there was unattended cheese on the counter.”

Devil dashed inside through the dog door.

“He did tell me that,” Eliot admitted. “Just in case Devil was an attack dog.”

“That’s cheating.”

“Maybe it is, but it’s all I have. Hardison found out a lot of facts, but none of us are just facts, Ophelia. Right?”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

“Then I’ll tell you something else Hardison didn’t know,” he offered, his voice dropping lower. “He had no idea you were part fairy. And neither did I. And even if he’d told me, I wouldn’t have believed him.”

“I’m not sure why you believe that now.”

“Because on days like this, when you stand in the sun, I can just barely see your wings. When you’re happy, I can hear the little breeze coming off them. And when you’re mad, you sound like a tornado.”

Maybe, she thought, he’d hit his head on something.

“Nothing in the world could have told me how you feel when we’re like this, or what my name tastes like in your mouth, or how you kiss.”

“How I what?”

“That when you kiss me, parts of my soul that I thought had turned to ash come back to life,” he said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

She kissed him softly, experimentally, to see if she could tell, then drew away from him reluctantly.

“If there’s not unattended cheese in the kitchen, you know he knows how to open the fridge,” she reminded him instead. His pocket buzzed; he barely caught her before she fell off his lap.

“Hardison and Parker want to know if we’d like to meet them for dinner,” he said. “Not at the bar.”

“Is that important?” Clearly it was, or he wouldn’t have mentioned it. She was just feeling too fuzzy to figure out why.

“One of them wants to meet on neutral ground,” he answered. “For your benefit. So you won’t feel ambushed. What do you want me to say?”

“Do they always take this much trouble not to spook your girlfriends?”

“This would absolutely be the first time,” he answered truthfully. She didn’t ask any follow-up questions; he didn’t know whether he was relieved or worried. They’d never known about any of his girlfriends.

“Tell them sure,” she said, rising.

“Are you going to change?”

“I’m going to give Devil some cheese then change,” she answered. “Let me know what I need to wear.”

He figured that was as close as he’d get to an invitation to see her with some or all of her clothes off and reacted appropriately. They had a couple of hours, anyway.

She didn’t comment when they pulled into a parking space at a locally-owned Italian restaurant, and Eliot knew better than to mention it. Of course it was a restaurant with breadsticks, she didn’t say. Because Hardison, at least, knew what she preferred because he could see where she was spending her money, she didn’t continue.

“In case you’re wondering if I get the irony, I do,” he assured her.

He couldn’t decipher the look she turned on him, deciding it couldn’t be a bad look as she closed the door gently. Instead of slamming it so hard the window broke out.

They were barely in the restaurant when Parker flung herself around Ophelia. Eliot paused for a moment to make sure a cat fight wasn’t about to break out before finding Hardison at their table.

“She okay?” Hardison asked. He sounded genuinely worried.

“No,” Eliot admitted. “She’s a mess. I don’t know the last time she got more than two hours of sleep, and she’s jumpy as hell.”

“You got a plan?”

“Sort of,” he said. “We’re going to my uncle’s place in Santa Barbara next weekend.”

“You think the antidote to a completely freaked out girlfriend is to take her to meet your family, do I have that right? Because I think Disneyland might be a better idea. Or Alaska. Or San Lorenzo.”

“It’s all I got,” Eliot shrugged. “Anything else and she’s just likely to think I’ve kidnapped her. Not in a fun way.”

“Have you learned anything from this?”

“She won’t be more freaked out if I punch you,” Eliot promised. “And, congratulations, she thinks you’re spying on her. You shouldn’t worry about that at all tonight.”

In the foyer, Parker stepped back to check Ophelia over.

“I’m glad you stayed,” Parker said.

“I’m glad you trust me,” Ophelia answered.

Parker wrapped her arm around the other girl’s waist to lead her back to their table.

“He wouldn’t kill you, you know,” she advised. “He’d never kill someone he loves.”

“You’re just saying that—”

“And I know he loves you because he let us meet you,” Parker continued. “He never lets us meet his girlfriends.”

Ophelia raised an eyebrow at her.

“Not that he’s had that many,” Parker amended. “I mean, not that we count or anything. Because that would be weird. How’s your dog?”

Ophelia let it go because it was just easier, and this was the kind of thing knowing wouldn’t fix.

All three of them made the effort to keep dinner conversation light and to keep Ophelia entertained. She appreciated the effort, because a stressful meal might be the thing that finally did her in this week. They parted nearly two hours later. Parker pointed out that Ophelia was holding his hand when they left, so maybe she was going to be okay.

“I hope they are,” Hardison said. “Because her students are worried. Like, really worried.”

“How do you know that?” Parker asked.

“I found out the document system her classes use,” he shrugged. “They’ve been talking about her a lot. They’re worried something’s real bad wrong.”

“Have any of them guessed what it is?”

“About half,” he said. “And the split between her male students and her female students who have a good idea about the problem is about 50-50. There’s a small contingent that thinks she’s been replaced by a body snatcher and she’s a pod professor. I mean, they’ve provided a lot of evidence. If I didn’t know, I would at least hear them out.”

Eliot thought it was very fortunate for Hardison that Hardison waited until he was out of punching distance to pass that information along.

Sunday night found him watching a football game on her tv while she prepared her lessons for that week. Her freshman class had a definite outline she had to follow, but it was more or less the same from year to year. Her upper level classes were more discussions, but she liked to have a variety of things for her students to discuss. She hadn’t indicated she knew there was a game on or that Eliot was watching.

“Do you want me to make you lunch for tomorrow?” Eliot asked when the game broke for halftime.

“Huh?” she answered. She had been following Francis Marion’s troops through the swamp and had no idea if he had been talking for a while or had just begun. “I’m sorry, I was in the swamp. What was that?”

He smiled, glad she was able to get lost in something besides her head for a while, even if he had no idea what swamp she meant.

“I asked did you want me to make you lunch for work tomorrow. So you don’t have to throw something together in the morning or eat with the students.”

“That would be great,” she smiled. “I would appreciate it.”

“My pleasure, princess,” he answered. He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. “Let’s go see what we have to work with, Devil.” Devil had been helping Ophelia work by laying half on her books and half on her feet. Whenever she needed a book out from under him, he’d whine to let her know that moving was an imposition, but he’d still move.

She was back in the swamp when he returned to the living room, never indicating she had heard him either in the kitchen or when he came back to the game. The fourth quarter had just started when she closed all her books and turned off her typewriter. She yawned and rubbed her eyes.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“I’ve got three quarters in this stupid game, so I’m going to see how it ends. I’ll be up in a little bit.”

About fifty different expressions crossed her face before she finally settled on confused. But not, he was glad to notice, angry or resistant.

“You…will?”

“Unless you want me to leave?”

“Oh…no. I just…will my alarm bother you?” He could see that wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but she hadn’t figured out a polite way to ask whether the actual fuck they had decided to move in together, either. But the alternative was asking if he felt his place was too unsafe to stay in now that Quinn had found him, and she just didn’t have the capacity for the question or the answer right now.

“Not at all, Princess. Don’t worry about me.”

Like I do anything else lately, she thought as she headed up the stairs.

He knew she hadn’t been sleeping, and also knew she couldn’t go on like that without getting hurt. Maybe if he stayed with her so she could see there was no immediate danger to either of them, she would relax enough to go to sleep. And since she had as much as admitted that she wanted to marry him, staying at her place couldn’t possibly be objectionable. He didn’t have a lot of experience with college students, but if any of what Hardison said was true, her job could be in jeopardy because of him. He didn’t care if she never worked another day, but since she enjoyed teaching it seemed cruel to suggest she should stop and worse to let her get fired over the lies he’d told her.

“Or this could backfire everywhere,” he assured Devil. “Could go either way.”

He had been right: when he pulled her against him in bed, her sleep went from fitful to deep. The next morning, he wasn’t sure she had even moved. Far from disturbing him, she slept through the alarm. He woke her up a few minutes later, just to make sure she actually got out of bed.

When she appeared downstairs, she grabbed Devil’s leash.

“Just time for a short walk this morning, Fuzzy,” she said. Devil barely looked up from his bowl.

“We already took a walk,” Eliot said. “You’ve got time.”

“Oh,” she said weakly. “Thank you.”

“I made some eggs and toast. You want some?”

“Is Devil eating eggs?”

“Not a lot,” Eliot said. “But he said he was starving, and I think he was mad he didn’t get any of the Italian from the other night. Have some tea.” He offered her a glass, which she took gratefully. “Is he not supposed to have eggs?”

“I just wanted to make sure he didn’t take yours,” she said as he slid a plate in front of her. She wasn’t really a breakfast person, unless it was pancakes. But she didn’t leave a lot of time the way her alarm was set, and he had been reluctant to wake her up, even if he did enjoy cooking for her. She ate a thoughtful forkful of eggs, then another. “What are you doing today?”

“I thought I’d take you to work,” he said. “Then I have to go get a haircut.”

She wasn’t sure he’d had his hair cut the entire time they’d been dating. Or for quite some time prior to that. Not that she was complaining, because she thought long hair suited him. And, she told herself, while his looks weren’t his very best feature, cutting his hair wasn’t likely to diminish them either. Not that she was just interested in him for his looks (and even if she had been, a haircut wouldn’t be a major change.). That would be shallow. That jumbled train-wreck of a thought process was one of the most coherent she’d had in days, so it was a miracle she was even still alive.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I need to get it done before we go to Uncle Henry’s,” he said. “It’s kind of his thing.”

“You don’t have to take me to work,” she demurred.

“I know, but I’d like to. I might need to bring your Jeep over later, because I have some stuff to do this afternoon, and I don’t want you to have to wait for me.”

But her attention was somewhere else. Devil came to stand by her chair, just in case breakfast proved to be more than she could handle. A crafty dog never knew. A concerned dog, to be sure, but a dog who didn’t want to let food go to waste either.

“Anything I can help with?”

“Nope, just need to get some things to pack for next weekend,” he said. Like a suitcase. He rarely traveled with luggage, but this might be a good time to start. She would definitely think it was strange if he didn’t, which was the last thing he wanted right now. This trip was not supposed to be stressful for her. “Are you sure that’s what you wanted to ask?”

“It wasn’t, but it was the less weird thing to ask.”

“Do you want to ask me the weird thing now?” he braced himself, no idea what was on her mind.

“I’ve arranged an extra credit class on Saturday for my seniors,” she said. “There’s an artist in town who specializes in Victorian mourning jewelry.”

“Go on.” Yeah . He couldn’t have guessed the conversation would go in that direction.

“Anyway, she uses hair in them. If you’re getting your hair cut anyway,” she looked up, then seemed to realize what she had said. “But never mind. It was just a thought. I have to go brush my teeth.”

He dropped her off in front of her building with more of a kiss than she’d been expecting, not that she minded that either.

“Talk to you later, Dr. Peaches,” he grinned.

“Talk to you later, Jones,” she answered. He left and drove straight to the Leverage office to get Hardison, the person who had the most pieces of the story and the person who wanted those details the least. He definitely didn’t want to get involved in whatever came next.

“I can drive her Jeep over!” Parker volunteered.

“No!” was the simultaneous response from the rest of her team.

“Why not? I was a car thief, you know! And friends let friends drive their cars.”

“Because this is Ophelia’s Jeep, Parker. She’ll need to use it again and we’ve all seen how you drive,” Sophie answered from behind her paper. She read the London Times in the paper format every morning because it drove Hardison mad.

“I think she’s going out with an off-road group next month,” Eliot offered. “I’ll see if she wants to take you along, okay? Then you can drive the Jeep if she wants to let you.”

Hardison began making a list of all the ways that could go wrong, because he would need it later when Eliot had to find a mechanic.

“Besides, her Jeep can’t keep—” Hardison shook his head. “Her Jeep shouldn’t be able to keep up with you. It’s not fast.” Hardison shook his head again. “It’s not that fast?” Eliot ventured.

“She could drive it up the side of this building if she wanted to,” Hardison answered, “and nothing about it is stock. Why do you need to take her Jeep to her?”

“I drove her to work this morning but I won’t be able to pick her up. Can we get a move on? I got things to do today.”

They departed for Ophelia’s place in Eliot’s Challenger. Parker and Sophie stayed behind. Parker pouted. Sophie continued reading her paper after she sent a text to Ophelia to make sure she was all right.

“What’s the problem really?” Hardison asked. “Because this seems like a pretty weak excuse to get me in a car.”

“No excuse, man. She needs to get home without hitchhiking. But I needed to talk to you anyway. I need some land and a builder.”

Hardison knew there had been more than just some automotive ferrying behind Eliot’s request.

“Go ahead,” he sighed as he opened his notes app. “Be specific.”

Neither of them had firsthand experience with the particular sort of hell presented by university parking, but they eventually found a spot within sight of her building. Eliot made sure the doors were locked, then gazed around the parking lot. Hardison was on the phone in the car, doing whatever it was he did on the phone.

“Hey, kid!” Eliot shouted, spotting one of her students. “You got a minute?”

“Dr. Abernathy?” the kid asked as the color drained out of his face. “Am I in trouble? I wasn’t going to skip Dr. Mason’s class, I promise. I’m early, in fact. I was just going to get a drink and maybe some—”

“Kid, relax,” Eliot ordered. “It’s Connor, right? You’re Connor?”

Connor gulped and nodded.

“Yeah, Ophelia’s talked about you; said you were one of her smartest students.” She hadn’t, because she didn’t discuss her students outside of class unless they did something amazingly dumb. Nevertheless, Connor didn’t know that. Some of the color returned to his face. “I need a favor, can you do that?”

“Yes, Dr. Abernathy!”

“You don’t have to—great. That’s great. I’ve got her keys here, can you make sure she gets them? I brought her Jeep over but she left her set of keys at home. It’s super important she gets these. Can you handle it?”

“Yes sir!”

Eliot rubbed a hand across his face.

“Let me ask you something else: is she going to get a ticket for parking here? Do I need to move this?”

For the first time since the conversation had started, Connor relaxed a little. If Dr. Abernathy was afraid Dr. Mason might get a ticket, he wasn’t here to kill Connor or probably anyone else. Several of her students were certain that Dr. Wes Abernathy was an alias, and that he was a spy. Nobody had a compelling theory about why anyone would want to spy on Dr. Mason, which didn’t stop any of them from working on it. One student thought maybe she had stumbled across something in the research for her latest book and the government was watching her, but that idea had only gained traction with what Connor considered the more gullible students.

“She’ll be fine,” Connor said. “The girl who patrols this lot is my girlfriend. I mean, maybe not technically girlfriend, but we’ve hooked up a few times and then next week we’re supposed to go out to—”

“Connor! Focus!”

“Yes sir!”

“Can you tell her exactly where it is? I don’t want her to have to wander around looking for it. Do you know where we are?”

“Yes sir! I do! I mean, I can! I can bring her out here myself, sir!”

Eliot smiled. Sort of.

“That’ll do. Thanks kid, I owe you one.”

Connor sprinted for the History building.

“What did you say to him?” Hardison asked as he watched Connor’s receding form in the rearview mirror.

“I just asked if he could make sure Ophelia got her keys and knew where to look for her car,” Eliot said. “I didn’t threaten him.”

“You sure? Because history nerds don’t run that fast.”

“Did you find me anything?” Eliot changed the subject as he drove out of the parking lot.

“Yeah, this one guy I’ve had my eye on,” Hardison began.

“Dr. Mason! Dr. Mason!”

Ophelia came out from behind her desk and into the hall to see who was Paul Revere-ing her.

“Connor? Are you all right?” He looked like he had been chased into the building by angry bears.

“I have your keys!” he announced. Three more professors stuck their heads out, just in case this was about to get interesting.

“Why don’t you come in,” she offered. Three dejected professors went back to what they had been doing.

He collapsed into her guest chair before standing bolt upright to thrust her keys at her.

“I saw Dr. Abernathy in the parking lot,” he said, although it was less a sentence and more just a mishmash of loud sounds. “And he told me to give you these, and to make sure you got to your car okay. Is he a spy? Is he with the government? Are you? Is there an agent in the history department and you’ve tracked them to here and you get to take down a secret cell right here on campus? Is he helping you? Are you two a crime-fighting team?”

She took her keys and bit down on her first real smile in days, covering her face with one hand. Connor was a good student, but he was a tad too invested in the Wes Abernathy fanfiction her students thought she hadn’t read. On the one hand, Eliot would probably rather have people looking into Dr. Wes Abernathy than looking into Eliot Spencer. Especially if those people would rather do anything than their actual homework. Besides, this would give Hardison something else to do too. On the other hand, she felt like Eliot would be more shocked by student fan fiction than anything she could possibly say to him. Melanie, to pick a random example, had planted the idea that spies were sexy, which sent half the writers off on a tangent that even made her blush. She frequently printed copies for both herself and Ophelia to discuss over afternoon tea while critiquing both the writing and the suggestions.

“Connor,” she said seriously, “you know I couldn’t discuss any of that even if it were true. Dr. Abernathy is just a trusted colleague who occasionally…assists me on certain assignments. I mean: research projects. Okay?”

Connor, stunned, nodded.

“Can I get you a drink or anything before class starts?”

“No ma’am,” he answered, his voice now a near-whisper.

“If you’re certain. I’ll see you in class.” He was dismissed, and a little disappointed. “And, Connor?”

He looked back, his expression adorably hopeful. “Yes ma’am?”

“I can’t do anything about it, of course, but I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention this incident? Or that you saw Dr. Abernathy.” Eliot would have been impressed with her ability to convey air quotes without moving her hands.

“I swear, Dr. Mason!” Connor bolted out of the office so fast, he nearly left rubber marks on the linoleum.

<Jones>: Did that kid give you your keys?

<Peaches>: He did. Thanks babe.

<Peaches>: He thinks you’re a spy.

<Peaches>: He thinks we’re a crime fighting duo.

<Peaches>: I expect all three of my classes will know before tomorrow.

<Jones>: Do you want to be part of a crime fighting duo? I have some thoughts on a costume.

<Peaches>: Now you have my attention. See you later, Jones.

She had not anticipated that Eliot would be at her house when she got home, nor that it would smell so good, nor that Devil would be almost beside himself with doggy glee. She had barely put down her typewriter when the jubilant dog clamped his teeth around her wrist (gently, because he was a good dog) and dragged her to the kitchen, where Eliot was chopping vegetables. He had a kitchen towel slung over his shoulder, and a serving platter of things he had already chopped at his elbow.

“Yum! What smells so good?” she asked as she slid her arms around his waist.

“Brisket. I thought we’d have tacos for dinner. It’s still got a couple of hours, can you wait that long?” He held up a piece of chopped red pepper, which she nibbled directly out of his fingers.

“I think so. You weren’t joking about a haircut, were you?” She ruffled the much shorter hair at his neck.

He cleaned his knife and set it to the side before turning in her arms.

“Do you hate it?”

“I like it,” she said. He thought she was just being nice until her follow-up. “It’s very O’Connell from the Mummy.”

He laughed and pulled her closer.

“You’re more of a fan of adventure movies than you let on,” he teased.

“I would be lying if I didn’t mention I’m also a big fan of explorers,” she laughed.

“Hold that thought,” he said abruptly.

“What?”

“We’re gonna talk more about exploring after I put up this plate of cheese and vegetables so the counter shark doesn’t get them,” he explained. He tossed a cheese treat to Devil, who had followed the progress of the plate full of easily edible yummy things with dismay. “Sorry dude, I know you wouldn’t mean to, but that’s dinner. Do not pull the crock pot off the counter.”

Devil tried his best to look shocked at the accusation while he snorked down an entire treat without chewing it. Eliot was not convinced. He held up a second treat.

“Scout’s honor?”

Devil held up one paw solemnly.

“Did you teach him that,” Ophelia asked. She had been watching the exchange from the counter.

“A dog’s only as good as his word,” Eliot explained. “We just had a talk about what his word might mean.”

“And now you’ve got the dog telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help him dog?” Devil barked in response, which made her laugh.

“Dude, this would be a great time to be outside, wouldn’t it?” Devil gave Eliot one look before he dashed out the dog door like a furry missile.

“Did you teach him that too? When did you have all this time?”

“You’re changing the subject,” he said. “We were talking about your explorer kink.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a kink, exactly,” she stuttered.

“Are you sure? Because I have explored, just, a ton of places. You want to hear about them?”

The best part about dinner in the crock pot was that it could generally wait. On the other hand, having an impatient dog in the house meant it couldn’t wait too long. He sat at the bottom of the stairs barking his “there is a murderer in the house and someone with thumbs needs to deal with it” bark until they came out. He felt like a taco was the least they owed him.

The next morning, he had biscuits waiting for her. Eliot, not Devil.

“Am I dying?” she asked. “You can tell me.”

“I like to make you breakfast, okay? This way you get to eat and I get to see you early in the day and I get to cook for you and you get to enjoy it and Devil gets the leftovers. Everyone wins.”

She exchanged a look with Devil, who thought breakfast with Eliot was awesome because it meant Devil got bacon, sometimes with cheese. Eliot thought between the two of them, the race was on for the highest cholesterol level in the house.

“But you’d tell me if you thought I had something terminal?”

“Absolutely, princess.” He went to his jacket at the door. “I saved this for you. For your class.”

He handed her a box that she didn’t need to open.

“Most people would think this is deeply strange.”

“Most people wouldn’t think your brain is a fun place to explore.”

He picked up Hardison at the Leverage office.

“We gotta stop meeting like this,” Hardison said. “Parker is starting to talk.”

“Just tell me which way to go. And when it comes to Parker, you know how to talk back to her better than anyone.”

“I’m just saying that if you keep this up, she’s going to call Ophelia and start asking questions you would prefer she didn’t.”

“Then come up with something to tell her.”

They stood on the one paved cul-de-sac in the area that was supposed to be a planned subdivision.

“So what happened here?” Eliot asked.

“The developer bribed a number of people to jump his hook-ups ahead of other, better planned neighborhoods, which wouldn’t be a real issue except that he immediately defaulted on his construction loans on two other developments. Problem was he’d taken money from a lot of people who thought they were going to get houses. They aren’t, and now he’s up to his ass in class-action suits. I offered to take this off his hands for the price he paid for the land, which was nothing because as you can see it’s in the middle of nowhere and undeveloped. Too far from town to sell as a suburb; not quite far enough away to build country houses. Not the kind people pay a lot of money for, anyway.”

Eliot nodded.

“Does it have utilities?”

“Power, sewer, cable, city water. He was big in the pay-off business.”

“And now you own all of it?”

“Yup.”

“Great,” Eliot said. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Put these three places on the market for me. I’ll take this instead of money. I need a good builder.”

“Always a pleasure, man.” Hardison treated real estate deals like good rolls in Monopoly, but that was fine. Eliot was trading away two good downtown properties and one piece of land on the water; Hardison was getting more than compensated. “What about her place?”

“What about her place?”

“Never mind. Let’s get out of here before the banjos start.”

He didn’t mention that to Ophelia the next Saturday when they flew to Santa Barbara to meet his family.

They stood on the porch while Eliot knocked on the door. He had called to tell Uncle Henry they were in town, and he had invited them to stop by on their way to the hotel.

“Uncle Henry,” Eliot started.

“Hey kid!” Henry grabbed him in a bear hug. “Great to see you! Still going for the hippie look, I see.”

Ophelia choked on a laugh.

“Look, I got a haircut,” Eliot challenged.

“Come in the house, kid, and stop acting like I’m going to shoot your girlfriend.”

“I’m not acting—”

“Yes, you are. You’re standing in front of her in case I start shooting out the door. Get in here.”

He backed up so they could come inside.

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were, and I bet you do it all the time. Henry Spencer,” he said, reaching past Eliot to shake her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Ophelia Mason,” she answered. “It’s nice to meet you too, Mr. Spencer.”

“I don’t—,” Eliot tried to interrupt.

“He does this all the time, doesn’t he? Call me Henry. Mr. Spencer is his dad.”

“He really does,” Ophelia said with a smile.

“No I don’t! Where?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “Your place, my place, my office, every restaurant we go to. I think the only reason you let me walk through the gate first at the Faire was that I had Parker with me and it was a big open archway.”

“See?” Henry said. “Beer?”

“Please,” Eliot said.

“No, thank you.”

“Water?”

“That would be great.”

Henry went back to the kitchen. Eliot turned to Ophelia.

“Why didn’t you say something before now?”

“What am I going to say, Eliot? First, I think it’s charming. Second, now I know why, and third, there’s no possible way to say ‘please stop doing this extremely protective thing that’s probably subconscious for you which harms nobody and that I kinda like’ without sounding like a psychopath.”

Now she knew he had a legitimate reason to worry whether someone might be waiting on the other side of the door with a weapon, he silently interpreted.

“I…”

“How was your trip?”

Not nearly long enough, Eliot thought. Three hours of no outside interference in a private plane hadn’t been nearly enough.

“Great! I’ve never been to Santa Barbara,” Ophelia said. “It’s very pretty.”

“Georgia?”

“Savannah.”

“How does everyone keep doing that?” Eliot asked.

“You’ve never been here?” Henry asked. “I could swear I’ve seen you before.”

“Never have,” she answered. “And I like to think if I’d been here, there wouldn’t have needed to be police involvement.”

“Have you been on TV?”

“Just local,” she said. “I think I just have one of those faces.”

“Uncle Henry, she’s not a steak,” Eliot warned him. “Tell us about Shawn’s girlfriend.”

“Juliet? Great girl, really got her head in the game. And she’s pretty too. Used to be a detective here in Santa Barbara, but when the police chief got an offer to move to San Francisco, she took Juliet with her. So Shawn and Gus—that’s his best friend—moved their business up there too.”

“He has a business?” Eliot seemed skeptical. The kid he remembered did not have a head for business.

“It’s…,” Henry started. “It’s…I mean, it’s complicated. You know Shawn.”

“Is he also a detective?” Ophelia asked.

“He runs a psychic detective agency,” Henry blurted. It was hard to say which of them was more surprised.

“Your son is psychic? That’s so cool!” Ophelia enthused. Eliot tried not to turn and stare. He tried to keep his expression completely blank, because there was no way Shawn wasn’t running a scam, which he knew and Henry undoubtedly knew and Ophelia didn’t need to know right now.

“It’s…,” Henry tried again. “I mean, he solves a lot of cases. He makes it work.”

Eliot had no words. None he wanted to say right now, anyway.

“And he proposed with Granny’s ring,” Henry said to Eliot.

“Why?” Eliot asked, which struck Ophelia as a weird and also misplaced question. “It’s cursed.”

Henry made a face.

“It’s not cursed, exactly. It’s just…”

“You have a cursed ring in your family, and it didn’t occur to you to tell me before now?” Ophelia asked.

“Just out of curiosity, why would you care? And it isn’t cursed,” Henry repeated.

“I teach history and I specialize in American traditions and folklore,” Ophelia explained. “Cursed family items are fascinating.”

“It is too cursed,” Eliot argued. “You should know that better than anyone.”

“Maddie and I did not get divorced because of a ring,” Henry asserted.

“Bet it didn’t hurt, though,” Eliot shot back. “Granny was a witch.”

Henry tried to rescue the conversation by pointing at Ophelia’s bracelet. “Is that a family piece?”

“I took my seniors to a local jeweler who makes Victorian mourning jewelry,” Ophelia said. “We got to make a piece, so I made this one.” Henry nodded, not understanding at all.

They stayed another half hour before Eliot had enough and said they needed to go check in to their hotel.

“Can we bring anything tomorrow?” Ophelia asked on their way out. Eliot grinned; she couldn’t help herself.

“Not a thing, I’ve got it all covered,” Henry said. “Nice to meet you, Miss Mason.”

“Dr. Mason,” Eliot corrected.

“Miss Mason is fine,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Dr. Mason is my mother. And my father.”

“See you later, kid.”

They were on the veranda of their luxurious and private suite when Eliot’s phone rang. It was Henry. Ophelia was in the hammock, stretched out like a cat in a sunbeam. Eliot stepped inside to take the call so she wouldn’t be disturbed.

“Think of something we could bring after all?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, kid. I called to see if you wanted to go to dinner. My treat. It occurred to me you two don’t know anyone in town. No need to hang out at the hotel by yourselves.”

“Yeah, Henry. That’d be a fate worse than death,” Eliot murmured, watching Ophelia out the window. She looked more content than he’d seen her in weeks.

“I get it, kid. She’s cute. Not your type.”

“She’s really not, but I’m not her type either. We’re making it work.”

“Dinner, then?”

“I’ll meet you. She may have some research to do, so don’t be disappointed if she doesn’t show up.”

After a few more minutes of discussing directions, they hung up.

“Everything okay?” she asked when he returned to the veranda. He put one foot on the edge of the hammock to rock it slowly, settling back into the surprisingly comfortable porch chair.

“Henry called to see if we wanted to meet him for dinner.”

“You told him yes, right?”

“I told him I’d meet him. I told him you might be busy, so you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“That would be unbelievably rude of me,” she said sleepily. “I’d love to go. Did he pick a local place?”

Eliot stared at the ocean for a moment, collecting his thoughts. There wasn’t going to be a good way to say this.

“Jones?”

“Captain Andy’s House of Fish,” he sighed.

“I am definitely going,” she chuckled. “Dress is not formal, right?”

“I think what you’re wearing will be fine. I think if you wanted to change into short shorts and a bikini top, that would be fine too.”

“I literally cannot wait.”

She changed out of what she wore on the plane, because of course she did. They were going to be gone barely more than three days; Eliot thought she was very considerate to have only packed one suitcase and a carry-on. On the other hand, he thought it was sweet she was trying to impress Henry on his behalf, which wasn’t necessary and which was probably also a done deal.

“Is this okay?” She was now in a denim dress and her new favorite sweater. Eliot thought it looked like Devil had been chewing on the ends, but that could have been part of the appeal for her. In any case, she did indeed look pretty. Probably too pretty for a night of fried fish and family, but he appreciated that she liked dressing up for him.

“It’s great,” he said. “Probably the nicest thing anyone there will be wearing.”

He groaned when they pulled into the parking lot. She laughed out loud.

“It’s a neon fish in a raincoat,” he protested. “And a captain’s hat.”

“I don’t understand how this isn’t the funniest thing you’ve seen all week.”

“You don’t even like fish,” he pointed out. “You thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I knew you were,” she said. “And part of this place is a pier over the actual ocean. I’m certain they have seafood. I’ll live.”

He kissed the inside of her wrist before getting out of the car. That gesture was not going to be sufficient, he could already tell.

Henry was already seated in a booth, wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt. Eliot could not believe this was happening. A quick glance around told him that, indeed, Ophelia was overdressed. He slid into the booth first, grimacing at Henry’s knowing glance. He’d done it again. If he’d been thinking, he would have sat to the outside.

The waitress handed them plastic menus; a sign of quality, Eliot knew. Then she took drink orders. Henry and Eliot ordered a beer.

“Do you have sweet tea,” Ophelia asked hopefully.

“We have hot tea,” the waitress answered with a look.

“Water, please.”

“Come on, kid. Have a drink.”

“And a margarita,” she added. “Frozen.”

“Captain’s sized? It’s an extra $2, but you get a crab-shaped bendy straw.”

“No, thank you. Regular size is fine.”

The waitress rolled her eyes and left. Eliot sympathized.

“I’m glad you could make it, Ophelia. Eliot said you might be busy.”

“I would not have missed this for the world,” she answered with a sincere smile. Eliot and Henry both felt certain her statement would have passed a lie detector test without even a blip. “Thank you so much for asking.”

“He said you might be doing research. Are you a scientist?”

“I’m a writer,” she said. “I mean, really I’m a professor. But I’m working on a novel.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. But I had some trouble sleeping a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m 150 pages ahead of where my editor wanted me to be. It was no trouble to take a break tonight.”

He glanced at Eliot, who didn’t move a muscle. He was not a new player at this game either; to flinch was to lose.

“What’s it called,” Henry asked.

“Blitzkrieg Bop,” she answered. “It’s about—”

“I knew I knew you!” Henry boomed. Not that anyone in the restaurant was likely to hear over the already considerable noise. “You’re OJ Mason! You write the Ballroom Blitz series!” He turned to Eliot. “How could you leave that out?! Have you read them?”

Eliot turned red. Ophelia stared.

“You’ve read them?” Ophelia asked, which nearly caused Henry to fall out of the booth in shock. He looked taken aback.

“Read them? I love them! Listen, will you sign my copies at the house?”

Eliot drank most of his beer.

“Uncle Henry—”

“I’d be glad to,” she promised. “It’s so nice to meet a fan.”

“I mean, I’ll pay you,” Henry offered. “I would really appreciate it.”

“Oh, now,” she chuckled. “I wouldn’t charge you for an autograph.”

“You don’t do that at your events?”

“You have events?”

She chose to answer Henry’s question. There was an underlying tension at the table she felt was better off not poked right now. Plus, she could barely see into the chaos that was the kitchen and knew that this particular dinner was taxing Eliot to his absolute limit; food was his thing. This was his actual nightmare, she was completely sure. His actual nightmare was much worse than she could imagine, probably, but he would have agreed that this was definitely in his top ten.

“Never. I mean, we sell the books, but I don’t charge more to sign them. I’m not Dan Brown.”

To Eliot’s continued horror, Henry leaned out of the booth and waved frantically to someone behind them. He definitely should have let her sit down first.

“Jimmy! Jimmy! Come down here!” he shouted. A man in a captain’s hat and an equally loud shirt insufficiently covered by a blue blazer appeared from somewhere. He had a machine-engraved nametag instead of a hand-written one, which spoke to his status, Eliot guessed.

“Jimmy,” Henry started excitedly. “Guess who this is!”

The man glanced at Ophelia then back at Henry.

“It’s OJ Mason! She’s my nephew’s girlfriend! Can you believe it? Right here in Santa Barbara!”

Both Eliot and Ophelia braced themselves for the inevitable “Who?” It never came. Indeed, Jimmy turned back to look at her rapturously.

“You’re OJ Mason?” he whispered reverently. “Right here in my restaurant?” He turned back to Henry. “You should have called! I would have found you a better table.”

One that would almost certainly have been in another restaurant, Eliot thought. The quick glance he exchanged with Ophelia confirmed she had the same thought.

Jimmy turned back to Ophelia, who was reconsidering the life choices that had led her to this moment. No matter what sort of events she had, it was clear to Eliot that she rarely got such an enthusiastic reception from two grown men dressed like…that.

“Miss Mason, it’s such an honor,” he began.

“Dr. Mason,” Eliot said quietly. She bumped her knee against his affectionately.

“Do you have a few minutes? I hate to interrupt your dinner, but would you mind coming to my office while I call my wife? She’s an even bigger fan than I am, and she’ll leave me if she finds out you were here and I didn’t call.” He extended a hand, obviously not all that concerned about interrupting their dinner.

“I don’t mind at all,” she said. “Will you please order me the shrimp scampi, Eliot? Please excuse me Henry, I’ll just be a minute.”

Henry beamed at her while Eliot nodded. Jimmy grabbed her enthusiastically by the arm and led her away, babbling excited questions at her. Henry waited until they rounded a corner and could no longer be seen, then leaned forward and jabbed Eliot in the chest with a finger. With anyone else, Eliot would have ripped his finger off and thrown it to the seagulls. With Uncle Henry, he gritted his teeth and took it.

“You haven’t read her books,” he accused. He was disappointed. “You’re dating an author, and you haven’t even cracked one open.”

“Look, Uncle Henry, she’s the first girl I’ve ever dated who came with a required reading list. And not of her books; that’s just the books I need to read to know what she’s talking about half the time,” he answered defensively.

“You had her investigated before you ever even went out with her, and the fact that she’s writing her fifth novel just caught you so off guard the entire restaurant knows it,” Henry continued.

The waitress refilled their beers. She refilled them out of the same pitcher. They had ordered two different beers.

“What happened to her?” she asked indifferently. Not that it was weird she was gone; people left dates here all the time. Usually it was the plastic menu that did them in, but she was willing to admit it might have been the older guy’s shirt.

“She’s talking to Jimmy,” Henry said. “She’ll be right back.”

“Will she want that refilled?”

“Definitely,” Eliot said. He went ahead and finished off her margarita so the waitress wouldn’t have to come back twice. Yeah. That was it.

“You two ready to order?”

With any luck at all, Eliot thought, Henry would forget and leave it alone. The waitress left. Henry resumed exactly where he left off, because Eliot was not that lucky.

“And I’ve got $50 that says the reason she ‘had trouble sleeping’ a couple of weeks ago,” goddamn it with the air quotes, “is because of something you did she found out about.”

Eliot, suddenly very uncomfortable, rubbed the back of his neck only to remember he’d gotten a haircut for this massacre too.

“And furthermore,” Henry continued unabated, “you think that because you’re all dark and broody and have a mysterious past, you bring more to the table than she does because you think she’s just a history professor.”

“I don’t think–,” Eliot wasn’t sure why he bothered starting the sentence.

“Kid, not only does she bring more to the table, but she owns the chairs, the china, and the crystal too. And it’s all real. By the way, if you’re under the impression I don’t know about that crew you’re running around with, you’re wrong. If Nate Ford ever steps foot in this country again, they’ll put him under a jail somewhere.”

Eliot’s pulse roared in his ears.

“I’m not—”

“You need to break up with her.”

Henry sat back and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What?” Eliot was blown away. He felt like he’d been punched. That wasn’t true; he’d been punched before. This was much worse.

“You are in over your head with this girl,” Henry said. “I don’t know how you convinced a girl like her that you do honest work, but you need to break up with her before she gets hurt.”

Eliot’s mouth opened and closed several times before anything came out.

“I’m not going to break up with her,” he snapped. Henry was not fazed; all the Spencers had a temper. “I’m going to marry her!”

“Well, that is just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Henry retorted. “She’s a lot more than just a pretty face, and needs someone who can really appreciate her, not someone who’s likely to get arrested just because it’s Tuesday. You need to let her go before she gets caught up in something dumb that you did. Like that Ford business.”

Eliot put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. His next sentence came out very low, sliding under the noise of the crowded, greasy restaurant. He chose his words carefully, for maximum impact.

“I gave her Nana’s quilt,” he stated.

“Oh. Shit.”

“Yeah. So that’s the end of that. Okay?”

They heard Jimmy approaching the table well before they saw him; Eliot could only guess that, since he was still asking questions, Ophelia must have returned with him. He thought her slightly dazed. Sure enough, she put a hand on the table to steady herself.

“Here!” she interrupted, because it didn’t seem like Jimmy was going to stop talking any time soon. “Let me give you a couple of bookplates!” She pulled two and a pen from her purse. “Is your wife’s name spelled L-Y-D-I-A?”

“She will be so happy,” Jimmy enthused, not answering her question. She looked to Henry, who nodded. She was bad with names, so she could be wrong and the woman’s name was Anna Beth.

On one bookplate, she wrote “Jimmy, thanks for a wonderful dinner! OJ Mason”, and on the other “To Lydia, Stay Naughty! OJ Mason”.

“There you go!” she said. “Thank you so much for stopping by! It’s always so nice to meet a fan!” Behind her, Henry made a shooing gesture at Jimmy, who was obviously not going to leave of his own accord. He gave her one more hug that nearly knocked her over before rushing off with his treasure in his hand.

“Stay naughty?” Eliot whispered. “I thought you were just going to call her.”

“Oh,” Ophelia stumbled. “It’s from the books.”

“The Naughty Nina,” Henry offered. “Was that a real plane?”

“One of my characters stole it in the first book and crashed it, but something got messed up between drafts at the print house and it ended up in the story again after I had written it out,” she explained for Eliot’s benefit. “I wanted to retract the edition and fix it, but my editor and my agent both advised leaving it in to see what happened. And the fans went berserk for it, so now it always shows up in really unlikely places whenever they need it. It’s a running gag. And yes, it’s a real plane,” she said to Henry, who grinned. “It was my grandfather’s plane, and it was named after—”

“Your grandmother,” Eliot finished. A lot of things had just snapped into place for him, including the pin-up posters in her office. Those were her grandmother, the gossip columnist. The war correspondent. The example she tried to live up to.

“Yes,” she answered, with a soft smile just for him.

“Will there be another one after this?” Henry asked. He didn’t look at Eliot.

“Yes,” she said. “I had a six-book contract. So number 5 will be Blitzkrieg Bop, which should wrap up most of the loose ends. I think book 6 is going to be short stories and a novella, but they’re all things that got cut from previous books. Except the novella,” she continued. “That was my original pitch, so we’re going to call it a prologue and release it.”

“That’s amazing,” Henry said. “Can you tell me how it’s going to end?”

“I could only do that if I knew myself,” she laughed. She gulped about half a margarita, which made Eliot’s head hurt from the sympathetic brain freeze. “But I’ll try to keep you posted.”

“I wish you had a blog,” Henry lamented.

“You really don’t have a blog?” Eliot asked.

“I really don’t,” she shrugged. “I had one for a while when I was at another university, but it got to be a problem. Student boundary issues,” she explained to Eliot. He nodded; she had mentioned that before.

“But tell me more about this cursed ring,” she said, definitely changing the subject. “Everything. Don’t leave out any details.”

Henry was a good storyteller, so they enjoyed the night if not the meal. Eliot thought they would have been better off eating orange mac and cheese out of a box, and the box if he got right down to it, than whatever came out of the kitchen here, but he enjoyed watching Ophelia drink and relax and laugh. They parted with Henry to walk on the boardwalk, but not before Henry gave Ophelia an enthusiastic hug and solicited her promise she would not forget to sign his books.

“I’ll make that for you again when we get home,” Eliot said. “So you can see what it’s supposed to taste like.”

“How was yours?” she asked, barely getting the question out before she started to laugh.

“I should have known to order something else when they spelled Remoulade wrong,” he admitted. “It was…I mean, it tasted like crab.”

“That was crab?”

“It was something.” He glared at two people until they vacated the bench, then urged Ophelia to sit down. “I’m really sorry, Princess.”

“What for?” she asked. She slipped her heels off and turned to put her feet in his lap. He started rubbing her ankles before he even thought about it. “I mean, it wasn’t a place either of us would have chosen, but the food wasn’t that bad. And your uncle’s fun.”

“I should have at least looked at your books before now, and I never did. It’s a big part of your life that I totally ignored. And even when it was all in front of me, I didn’t realize your grandma was your pin-up girl, which is another important thing.”

“I—,” she started.

“I mean, I know I told you Hardison just turned up a lot of facts, but they were still important facts about you and I didn’t do anything with them.”

“But—”

“Henry said you deserve better and, you know? I just assumed that you’d want to go out with me. Sophie even said that the first time I asked you out and I got mad at her.”

“Listen—”

“It never occurred to me that I should be so lucky that you really did want to date me. Until now, I mean. And…damn. Why on earth do you put up with me obviously taking you for granted like that?”

She put her feet back in her shoes and stood up, offering him both of her hands. While it was a discussion worth having, it wasn’t worth having this close to his family right after his uncle had already handed him his head. This, she felt, was a problem that could be fixed, but not right now. Right now, it was a pleasant night and they were on the beach and two people in love could probably come to some sort of understanding.

“What?”

“The hammock at the hotel is built for two people,” she offered.

Very late that night, listening to the surf crash down on the beach, he readjusted carefully so as not to suddenly unbalance the hammock. But his foot had started to go numb.

“You’re too forgiving,” he murmured into her ear.

“You’ll figure out how not to take advantage of that,” she answered.

Forgiven and forgotten, he thought. And warned against his own nature. She was right.

“You named the books in your series after punk songs and named the whole series after a song by Sweet?” he asked. It was much closer to dawn.

“Are you more or less shocked if I tell you the series was named after a song by Tia Carerra?”

The next day was…chaotic. There was a word.

Shawn was not, in Eliot’s opinion, less of a twerp as an adult than he had been as a kid.

With one finger to his temple, he looked at Ophelia and said “I’m sensing that my dad has already started the process to adopt you, even though you clearly don’t need to be adopted, and that my cousin is trying to figure out which thing in the house is the best weapon.”

“It’s the fish with the giant sword on its face,” Eliot informed him. “Cut it out. I know you’re not psychic.” Just to make his point, he narrowed his eyes at Shawn.

Ophelia turned to Juliet to offer her congratulations rather than get caught in the middle of what was surely old family business. The detective seemed relieved to miss out on part of it too.

When Eliot and Henry got in a fight at the grill, Ophelia went inside to find a stack of her books on the kitchen table. Not only was Henry a fan, he was a super fan. He had first editions of all her books, in both paper and hardback, plus the fliers bookstores had put up with the arrival of each book, and a polo shirt with the Naughty Nina embroidered on it, which was not licensed. She pulled a sharpie from her bag and sat down to sign with a happy sigh.

Almost 45 minutes later, she was still signing because it hadn’t taken her long at all to notice that Henry had put notes in his books, and then to find a second set of notes. While most of them were issues she had resolved in later books, there were a couple of items that caught her interest and that could possibly be wrapped up in London Calling, which was set as the title for book 6. She set the pen to the side and rubbed her fingers together when a shadow blocked the door.

“Who are you?” a booming voice asked.

“Who are you?” she returned. “I have a sharpie and I’m not afraid to use it.”

The shadow stepped into the room. It belonged to a man who was roughly the size of a refrigerator.

“I’m Juliet’s brother Ewan,” he said.

“I’m Ophelia Mason,” she answered. “I’m here with Shawn’s cousin Eliot.”

“Eliot Spencer is out there?”

“You know him?”

“No,” Ewan said hurriedly. “Nice to meet you.” He vanished quickly for such a big guy.

Henry came into the kitchen with Eliot, still arguing over what constituted an appropriate meat rub, and also arguing about how there were almost no vegetables at a cookout.

“Thanks, Ophelia!” Henry said as he picked up one of his books to examine her signature. “I made you some sweet tea. It’s in the refrigerator.”

“Oh, thank you Henry! I appreciate that!”

Henry flashed a smile at Eliot who nodded in acknowledgment.

“I can whip up some corn casserole,” she offered. “It’s no trouble.”

“Not a chance, kiddo,” Henry answered, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “We’ve got this covered.”

He walked back out with a double handful of spice jars.

“He does not have this covered,” Eliot said. She stood and put one hand on his elbow.

“Did you meet Juliet’s brother?” she asked quietly, not sure if he was still in the house or where he might have gone.

“No. Why?” She was clearly troubled by something, and he didn’t think it was the stack of books on the table. Although the sheer number of them troubled him. As if the number of them wasn’t disturbing enough, there was also a giant cardboard standee that had obviously started its life in a bookstore. If his uncle, who had never met her, had that many books and was such a fan, he couldn’t imagine what her fans with access were like.

“Because he asked if you were here by name,” she said. “You can’t miss him. He’s enormous.”

“He asked about me?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “And he didn’t exactly say not to tell you I saw him, but I got the feeling he wished I hadn’t.”

“How enormous?”

“Like he could be a tank,” she answered.

He looked out the window; nobody in Henry’s yard matched her description.

“Be careful, okay?”

“I’ll be fine, Princess. You coming back out?”

“As soon as I get a glass of tea,” she promised.

The next time he saw her, he called her over to meet his Aunt Maddie, who had already had an earful from Henry about her. Upon consideration, she found their guest quite charming, and not at all like the woman she expected Eliot to be dating. For one thing, she had no obvious tattoos. For another, her bottle green skirt and tailored top had clearly started life as an outfit, and her bag coordinated with her shoes.

“Dr. Mason!” she exclaimed. Eliot could have hugged her. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you!”

“Thank you so much for the invitation. Memphis?”

“Savannah,” Maddie confirmed. They walked away chatting about, for all Eliot knew, old friends.

“Do they know each other?” Eliot asked. Henry shrugged and opened another beer.

“Southern society is pretty small. Anything is possible, kid.”

Eliot glanced around the yard again.

“Did I hear someone say Juliet’s brother was here?”

“I never can tell about that guy,” Henry admitted. “I know he’s her big brother and she really looked up to him, but he seems like pretty bad news. Or at least he has every time I’ve seen him. But then, her entire damn family belongs on a funny farm. The brother is the least of her problems.”

Eliot finally had to give up on the idea he might get at the grill. Henry was far too cagey and had too much experience to let that happen. He went looking for Ophelia, eventually finding her playing Trivial Pursuit on the porch with Shawn, Juliet, and Gus. It seemed to have morphed from a regular game into something bordering on a full-tackle game, but Eliot was reasonably sure Ophelia could hold her own against either Gus or Shawn. Or, probably, Gus and Shawn.

Ophelia and Juliet were ahead four pieces to two when Eliot joined them. Shawn knew a lot of weird stuff, he guessed, but he also guessed the alleged psychic was no match for Ophelia. Hardison hadn’t asked her to be on his nerd trivia team to be nice. The hacker played to win; he had told Eliot that Ophelia was his ultimate phone-a-friend. At some point, they had instituted a three-card rule for pie piece questions, because Shawn and Gus were huddled over three cards trying (and failing) to discretely guess which question she might get wrong. Since the category was history, Eliot thought they were up the creek and Ophelia held the paddle. Not in a way they were likely to enjoy.

“Who made the famous speech regarding fighting Nazis in—”

“Winston Churchill,” Ophelia answered.

“We didn’t get to finish the question,” Gus protested.

“It was the finest hour speech, right? That was Winston Churchill. June 1940. Lasted slightly more than half an hour.”

Gus and Shawn stared at the back of the card while Juliet whooped and reached for the pie piece.

“And Team O’Hara expands their lead to 3!” she exclaimed.

Eliot chuckled.

“Team O’Hara?” he asked. “Scarlett was from Atlanta, Peaches.”

“O’Hara is Juliet’s last name,” she explained as Juliet beamed a smile up at him. It clearly did not bother her to be beating the pants off her fiancée on his own front porch. “We thought it worked out great.”

Eliot had his hand on her shoulder, which was how she was able to feel him go extremely still. Like, animal stalking prey still.

“O’Hara?” he repeated. Juliet nodded enthusiastically as she slapped Shawn’s hand away from their piece.

“Did I hear that your brother is here?”

Now it was Juliet’s turn to freeze in place. If Ophelia hadn’t been so curious about Eliot’s reaction, she would have missed Juliet’s. The detective shook it off, pasting on the most insincere smile Ophelia had ever seen. Ophelia shot a look at Gus, who wanted no part of it.

“You know,” Juliet said slowly, “I’m not sure if he was going to be able to make it. I’m never sure if he’s in the country or not.”

Shawn blinked at her in surprise, but for once didn’t offer anything.

“That’s too bad,” Eliot answered. He didn’t elaborate. “Can I refill that for you?” He gestured at Ophelia’s glass.

“You absolutely can,” she answered.

“I cannot believe you got my dad to make sweet tea,” Shawn observed. “What do you have that I don’t?”

“A series of popular books and a day job,” Eliot muttered as he walked away.

“Beginner’s luck,” Ophelia offered.

“Beginner’s luck is that he doesn’t throw you out on the sidewalk and shoot at your tires,” Shawn answered. “This is…I cannot with this right now.”

“It probably helped that I’m here with your cousin,” she said. “Are you going to roll again or concede defeat to the clearly superior team?”

“Is he that scary all the time?” Gus asked.

“Yes.” Shawn and Ophelia answered together, which did nothing to make Gus feel better.

Everyone was lining up for food when Ophelia found Eliot and her glass again.

“Can I see the car keys really fast?” she asked.

“You’re not letting Shawn drive it, right?” Eliot responded, even while he searched his pockets for them. He wasn’t a fan of cargo shorts for exactly this reason, but it was hot and everyone was wearing them.

“No. Why on earth would I do that? Anyway, he’s gonna notice, but I’d appreciate it if you don’t say anything to Henry.” She opened the top of her purse to show him a paperback tucked inside. “I took one of his paperbacks. This is the British printing that had some staggering typeset issues, and the only way to get it was to order it through Amazon UK. Since he went to all that trouble to get it before the British publisher pulled it, I thought I could take it home and annotate it for him. I wouldn’t normally, but it seems like he’d really be excited about it. Anyway, I want to put it in the car before it gets bent up. It’s a first edition, and he was pretty proud of it.”

He kissed her on the cheek before handing over the keys.

“I won’t tell, Princess,” he promised. “That’s really sweet.”

“Well, if anyone ever asks, lie and tell them I didn’t. I don’t want the expectation to get out.”

“Want me to start you a plate?”

“I absolutely do.”

“Two ribs? Or four?”

“Two, and something green,” she said. He thought her optimism about the vegetables lasting until they got to the bowls adorable.

When the party started to break up, Eliot found Henry to tell him they’d stop back by, but they were taking a walk up the beach. Much to Ophelia’s delight, there were vendor tents everywhere. She spent more time than Eliot believed possible poking into tents and exclaiming over things. True to form, she bought several small pieces of art by local artists. A leather merchant caught her attention. While she ambled through the tent, Eliot went ahead to the next one. He wasn’t all that big on buying from hippies, but it was a nice day and Ophelia was having a good time.

He stopped to examine a display full of rings.

“Do you make these?” he asked the girl behind the table. She nodded and reached for a set of keys.

“Do you do any other designs?” Ophelia asked. The biker at the table nodded and came over.

“What did you have in mind?” he asked, his voice sounding like it came from the pits of hell.

“It’s for my boyfriend,” she said. “I wore this costume one time and, well, you probably don’t want to hear about it, but he was really impressed with it.” Contrary to her assertion, the biker would have been glad to listen for the rest of the afternoon. But beggars could not always be choosers, and he wanted to make the sale more than he wanted to freak out a random girl at the beach. She pulled out her phone and scrolled to Parker’s picture from the Faire. “I wonder if you could paint something like these?”

The biker reached for her phone with what she normally would have described as a paw, lowering his sunglasses for a moment to get a better view.

“I can do that. It’ll take me maybe 20 minutes and some time to dry. Will you be around for a while?”

“That’s so exciting! Yes, we should be here for a while. Maybe I can pick it up on my way back through? But I can pay you now,” she offered. He nodded and swiped her card. She left happy and caught up to Eliot two tents closer to the pier.

“Ice cream?” he offered. “I really didn’t think Henry would have an all-meat buffet for lunch. I thought for sure he’d have corn on the cob or something.”

“Ice cream yes,” she answered. “Maybe we should look for a place with salads for dinner.”

“You don’t want to take another stab at Captain Andy’s?” he chuckled, squeezing her hand.

“I’d hate for the novelty to wear off, although I was intrigued by the concept of a crab-shaped bendy straw.”

“I think the hotel has a restaurant.”

She stopped in the middle of the boardwalk to look at him, letting foot traffic flow around them for a minute.

“Do you think that means they have room service?”

“I like the way you think,” he answered. “But any restaurant has room service if you pick up the plate and take it with you.”

A couple of hours later, they worked their way back towards Henry’s place. Ophelia darted into the leather tent to pick up her purchase, exclaiming briefly over it.

“I love it!” she assured the man. “Thank you!”

“If your boyfriend doesn’t like it,” the biker offered, “get a new boyfriend.”

Ophelia usually shared her purchases with him, so he thought it was a little odd she hadn’t mentioned this one. She enjoyed shopping, loved a good bargain, and was generally very excitable when it came to hand crafted goods. He, on the other hand, rarely shared that he had bought anything until he presented it. He guessed he would see it later or he wouldn’t, but he was puzzled most of the way back to Henry’s house.

Henry and Maddie were sitting on the porch and invited them to sit down.

“If they ask about the House of Fish again,” Eliot murmured, “I’m going to need you to fake an illness.”

“Not a problem,” she whispered.

“How much longer are you in town, kid?” Henry asked.

“We’re flying back Monday,” Eliot answered.

“You don’t have to teach?” Maddie seemed surprised.

“I took leave, but I left some discussion questions for my Homefront classes on Monday. They won’t have me there to mediate, but I think they’ll be okay. They’re mostly seniors.”

“You trust a bunch of college kids to just show up to a class you won’t be in,” Henry said skeptically.

“It’s not that I don’t care,” she said. “It’s just that they’re seniors and won’t miss that much even if they don’t show up for one Monday class. But, they’ll need to brainstorm to answer the questions, one of them might be on the final, and I’ve got people in two different classes who are dating each other. It’s a fight to the death to see who gets the higher grade. They’ll be fine.”

“Her students really, really like her,” Eliot put in. “A lot.”

“It’s amazing how they act when you indulge their opinions,” she smiled. “But I have three really good classes this year too.”

“Anyway,” Maddie cut in. “We would like you to meet us for brunch tomorrow.”

“Captain Andy’s has a brunch?” Eliot asked. Ophelia thought the question was more than fair.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Henry!”

“What? What’s wrong with Captain Andy’s?”

“Nothing if you love heartburn. You took guests there? You took family there?” Maddie turned to Ophelia. “I am so sorry. I had no idea.”

“It was quaint,” Ophelia answered. Maddie nodded, leading Eliot to believe they were talking in Southern Lady code. Much like “bless your heart” often meant “you are an absolute dumbass”, he suspected “quaint” meant “to be absolutely avoided”. He couldn’t disagree with the assessment.

“I mean to a place where they serve brunch and everything isn’t fried,” Maddie offered. “With fresh seafood.”

“Maddie,” Henry said, obviously frustrated. “Don’t even think about dragging them to Manolo’s. They won’t like it—”

“Henry, if they ate at Captain Andy’s and lived, they’ll love Manolo’s,” she snapped. “Now, hush. You’re just mad because you have to wear a tie.”

“It’s completely unnecessary to wear a tie to eat shrimp cocktail,” he complained.

“We’d love it, Aunt Maddie,” Eliot said. He hadn’t brought a tie. He’d think of something. “Name the time.”

“Eleven am,” she smiled. “And we look forward to seeing you. Our treat, since going to Captain Andy’s could have landed you in the emergency room.”

They were still arguing when Eliot and Ophelia escaped. She opened her phone to google Manolo’s, to see what their brunch crowd wore.

“Do you have something to wear?” he asked. “Or do we need to find a dress shop or something?”

Watching her try on pretty clothes for a while wouldn’t hurt either of them. She could indulge her love of clothes, and he could indulge his love of watching her twirl around for him. Sure, he’d dated models, but what she brought to the process wasn’t the same; his ego wasn’t quite big enough to believe a smile counted as her reward, but she obviously prided herself on the ability to get him to produce one. And also: clothes were definitely her reward. His smile was the icing. Unless the clothes were on sale.

“I’m good,” she answered. Of course she was prepared. He suspected if they got invited to the local high school prom, she’d be prepared for that too. “Did you pack a sports coat and a tie?”

“A coat, yeah. I’ll do something about a tie in the morning.”

They spent the remainder of the afternoon on the beach in front of their suite, relaxing in the sun. Eliot had brought Henry’s paperback in with him; the beach wouldn’t hurt it, he was sure. She seemed embarrassed.

“You don’t have to read that,” she said. She had brought her Kindle to the beach; they were well into a book about a lady Egyptologist the she loved and he liked immensely so far. It was a fact that would have surprised anyone who had ever met him.

He looked at her over his sunglasses. She sounded…nervous? Really?

“But I can, right? Or is there some reason I shouldn’t.”

Her gaze turned extremely shifty.

“Not shouldn’t, exactly…”

He waited.

“Look,” she said seriously. “There’s a big difference between readers in the abstract sense and readers who are sitting next to you.”

“You’re afraid I’ll hate it?” If she hadn’t been so serious about it, this conversation would have been hilarious. “Are you kidding me right now?”

“I just know that up until right this minute, there was the possibility you tried to read one of them and it wasn’t your thing. I mean, it happens. Every book isn’t meant for every reader. It’s not a problem. But if you’re sitting right there reading it and decide you don’t like it, that’s a lot worse than some random troll on Amazon not liking it.”

“I…”

“I get why Henry was upset you hadn’t read them, but at the same time you have to agree that I haven’t been exactly throwing my books out in front of you at every turn. Because I know Hardison must have turned them up in whatever he gave you. Right?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “His file had an appendix.”

“So they’ve been available to you this entire time,” she continued. He thought she’d never missed a point more completely, then decided not to draw her attention to it since she was at least missing it in his favor. “When you never asked about them, I just assumed you either don’t read fiction or you had tried them and they weren’t your thing. And now we’re both going to get the opportunity, together, to find out if they’re your thing. Today. On this beach.”

“You have to occasionally run into people who know who you are,” Eliot pointed out. “Henry said you have events and your picture is on the cover.”

“Those are strangers,” she said adamantly. “If they like it, it’s easy to tell. If they read it and don’t like it, they ask if I know Diana Gabaldon.”

“Who?”

“Don’t.”

He grinned at her.

“Ophelia, I’m going to read your book and there’s kinda nothing you can do about it.”

“Fine,” she huffed, but she smiled. “Be literate. Fine. Go ahead. Ruin your eyes reading in direct sunlight.”

He was hooked from the second page. In fact, he was so enthralled, he didn’t notice when she dozed off. He was halfway through the book when the sun set.

“Wake up, Princess,” he said gently. “Time to check out the room service menu.”

She wrapped the towel around herself and grabbed up her sandals. Eliot hadn’t exactly counted, but he thought she had packed six pairs of shoes for a three-day trip.

He held up the book so she could see it over his shoulder.

“You’re not even going to ask what I think?”

“Nope.”

He turned and walked backwards.

“You’re not even a little curious?” He stopped to wait for her. She stopped right in front of him, her face millimeters from his.

“Wildly curious,” she murmured, then had the audacity to lick his upper lip. “And I’m not asking. If you really want me to know, you’ll tell me.”

She walked past him into the room while he pondered why she was so infuriatingly right. He wasn’t less annoyed when she took a shower and emerged from the bathroom dressed in a different outfit, ready for dinner.

This time, dinner on the pier included a menu that was not plastic and on which all the words were spelled correctly. And nothing was fried to within an inch of its life. More importantly, for Eliot, he wasn’t having to compete for her attention with two men his father’s age. They were nearly finished with their (far better) meal when she reintroduced a topic from earlier in the day.

“Did you ever meet Juliet’s brother?” she asked. “I got the feeling she hoped you didn’t.”

“I didn’t meet him,” Eliot said. “I didn’t even see him. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t want me to, either.”

“Do you know him?”

“No, but I’ve heard of him,” Eliot admitted. He would prefer not to talk about this, but she’d know he was hiding something and her vivid imagination wouldn’t do him any favors later. So here he was. “He is a really bad guy. He escaped custody here for something he’d done involving a murder. He runs around like he’s on the A-team, when the truth is he’s just dangerous and undisciplined. He’s the kind of guy who thinks being 6 feet tall is a personality.”

She nodded. Six feet tall seemed like a pretty accurate assessment.

“I’m not sure I get, exactly, why he would want to avoid you,” she said. “Because you’re retired, right? I mean, you couldn’t hand him over to someone, could you?”

He smiled and refilled her wine glass. It was white; she seemed okay with it. She seemed okay with the idea of not considering he could easily beat a guy, 6 foot or not, into a pulp. It clearly didn’t occur to her how much he might enjoy it; family reunions were stressful.

“I don’t have a lot of legal options, Princess. But I know plenty of people who do. How was your pasta?” He knew plenty of people who had options that were somewhat less than legal and who lived to exercise those options, too.

“It was good. Yours is better,” she answered simply. He smiled. Since she was not given to idle flattery, and definitely had opinions on pasta, this was almost the highest praise she could give.

“I got you something,” they both said.

“You first,” Ophelia offered.

“Not a chance,” he said. “You first.”

She pulled a flat box out of her bag (he had counted three bags so far) and handed it to him across the table. The biker had done great work; the bracelet was several leather pieces that, when wrapped around a wrist, formed a picture on the top. He had managed to replicate her translucent copper wings with impressive style. Eliot had never dreamed such a product existed.

“You said you always saw them,” she offered. “Anyway, I—” He leaned across the table to kiss her as he snapped it on carefully, shaking it down to a comfortable position on his arm.

“I love it, Princess. I can’t believe you found this.” He reached for her hand, planting a kiss in her palm.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” he said. “I’m glad you remembered.” He really did like it; her capacity for thoughtful gifts seemed to be limitless. He also liked that she didn’t mind indulging his daydream.

He signed the ticket for dinner before offering her a hand. They walked past the restaurant towards the end of the pier, stopping at the far rail. They were alone. She stepped out of her shoes again; it wasn’t that they were uncomfortably high, he had discovered. She just preferred to be barefoot. She rested her elbows on the top rail. He leaned back against it, facing the glittering windows of the hotel.

Then he found he had no idea how to start this conversation. It had seemed fairly straightforward in his head earlier; now he felt like he’d left his speech notes in his other suit. Plus his mouth had gone dry. He wished they’d brought the wine with them.

“You know I was serious, right?” he started. It was the wrong place to start, but he couldn’t remember the speech he’d been thinking about for days.

“About what?” she asked absently.

“That’s not what I meant,” he backtracked, inadvertently capturing her full attention.

She put a hand to his cheek.

“You all right, Jones?” She had never known him to be at a loss for words. She wasn’t feeling up to saying he could tell her anything, but felt like he would regardless if that’s what he’d set out to do. She couldn’t imagine what could throw him so off balance.

He put his hand over hers, turning his face into it again. Her hand was cool, which was nice because he had started to sweat, even standing out in the breeze over the water.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I just…,”. He didn’t know how people did this with an audience. He was alone with the woman he loved best in the world and couldn’t even start the sentence to try to convey that to her; he felt like a teenager asking the pretty girl to a dance, except with hugely different consequences.

“I know the last couple of weeks have been rough for you,” he began again. “And I know it’s been my fault. I can’t ask you to forget that. I should have told you that I loved you the first time I barged into your house and you gave me part of your dinner. I’ve loved you since you made me dress up like a pirate then acted like it was exactly the kind of thing you would have picked. I’ve loved you since you came out of the woods with wings like you did it every day. I’ve wanted to marry you since you changed out of a perfectly good outfit and into a dress at my place because you wanted to look nice to eat a meal I cooked for you. I want to marry you because I’ve never met anyone like you, and if you leave I never will again.”

He pulled her hand away from his face and slipped the ring on he’d found at the street vendor. The silver ring wrapped around her finger to form the head and tail of a wolf, with blue stones for the eyes. She stared at it. He waited. His heart sank, which was a phrase he’d never understood before.

“Ophelia?” he prompted. “You can take all the time you want to think—”

Later, he’d be glad the rail on the pier was more than waist high, because that was the only thing that kept them both from falling into the water when she flung her arms around him. Later, he’d show her the bruise from where he hit it and laugh when she covered her face, completely mortified. Later, he’d tell her how heart-stopping that moment had been for him. He rested his forehead against hers, taking the moment to concede that he was wildly in love with her and that despite what he’d done, she loved him too.

“I’ll buy you a nicer one later,” he said. “But I didn’t want to ask with nothing.”

“No. This is perfect. I wouldn’t want anything else.”

“Princess, I’m not sure this wasn’t made from a beer can,” he argued injudiciously.

“I don’t care. No backsies.” He smiled, and at close range her knees went weak.

“That was yes, right?” He needed to be clear on this point, even if it was just a technicality. “You want to get married? To me?”

“Yes! I can’t wait to marry you.”

Having cleared that up to his satisfaction, or all the satisfaction he was likely to get on this pier, he returned to the previous subject.

“You don’t understand,” he tried again. “If Parker sees this ring, she’ll go insane. And then she’ll do something like steal the Hope Diamond again and try to have it set and we both know that’s way too big for your hand.”

“Again?”

“Forget I said it. Story’s too long. Night’s too short.”

“Look, Eliot: I like Parker. But I love you, and you picked this for me. Whether it’s a beer can or it’s platinum doesn’t matter.” She meant it; he could feel her heart pounding against her ribcage.

“Then I’ll pick better for our anniversary.” The people sitting closest to the windows in the restaurant tactfully pretended they didn’t see the way she kissed him.

Upon further consideration, he wished they’d asked to meet Aunt Maddie at noon. One hour wasn’t forever, but it was long enough. On the other hand, another 10 minutes would have had him convinced that they didn’t need to leave the hotel today or maybe tomorrow either.

He pulled slacks and a white shirt out of his suitcase, making sure they more or less went with his jacket. After their discussion of explorers, he had packed a pair of suspenders too. She was so easy to please, and it took so little extra effort on his part. Ophelia was sitting on the table curling her hair with a flat iron. When he asked why, she had explained that tying up the bathroom to curl her hair served nobody, and there was a perfectly serviceable mirror right there in the room, so he could brush his teeth at leisure. He watched for 20 minutes before he decided this was the way to madness. Between watching her do something clearly impossible and staring at her trying to make her clothes fall off, he needed to get out of this room for a minute before he said the hell with it and moved the entertainment center in front of the door.

“I’m going to find a tie,” he said. “If they don’t have some in the hotel store, they have some at the restaurant. I think they require ties if you eat inside.”

“Good luck,” she said. “I’ll be ready by the time you get back.”

He took the hot iron out of her hand before kissing her, just so she didn’t burn her hair off when they inevitably got carried away. He had no idea how either of them would make it through an entire meal at this rate. They had stayed in bed so long they ended up in the shower together. He wasn’t complaining, although he felt like they’d tested the limits of the hotel’s water heater. Later, he made himself a note for the builder.

He was not pleased to get a call from Hardison while he was on the hunt for a tie, but he had to take it.

“I’m not coming back in yet,” he warned Hardison as a greeting.

“Now why would you think I would even ask that?” Hardison replied. “How’s that family thing working out?”

“Cousin’s still a twerp. About to take Ophelia to meet my aunt and uncle for brunch, so I need you to wrap this up fast.”

True to her word, Ophelia was ready. She had picked an outfit that she hoped was reminiscent of the ocean: a dark blue skirt, a lighter blue corset, a light blue shirt, and a white cropped cardigan. Her bag had seahorses on it. With her grandmother’s pearl earrings and the blue stones on her ring, she was completely coordinated. It was the sort of opportunity she lived for.

Eliot came through the door carrying a blue tie that was eerily similar to the color of her shirt and scowling, because Hardison was still talking and the conversation hadn’t improved. What was more, just at the moment, Eliot didn’t care. He looked up, hoping to be able to signal to Ophelia that she needed to faint or pull the fire alarm or something, anything…then he saw her. She turned from where she’d been putting on her lipstick in the mirror. He dropped the phone right out of his hand. Hardison continued to squawk for at least 30 seconds before he realized Eliot was no longer answering his questions with insults or at all. Hardison hung up, annoyed.

Eliot had never wanted a woman more in his life than he wanted the woman in front of him that moment. And she was his; she had promised. He grabbed her roughly into a violent kiss that she returned with a fierceness he’d underestimated. She groaned and leaned into him as he ran one hand through her hair. He tasted blood, but didn’t know whose. He wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her hard against him. It wasn’t until she gasped that he realized she might not be able to breathe. He broke off their kiss just as suddenly, his hand still in her hair, suddenly going from feral to gentle with a speed he knew was inadvisable. She rested her chin on his shoulder, her breath ragged; he had to will himself not to hear her.

“Wait,” he said harshly.

“We could call,” she murmured against his neck.

“Ophelia, stop.” He grabbed her by the chin, forcing her to look at him. It took forever for her gaze to focus on him.

He could do this, because he used to keeping plans on track when the plans desperately tried to unravel themselves; actually, he was a professional. He didn’t want to.

“We’re not going to call. Listen to me, Ophelia. We’re going to meet my aunt and uncle for brunch,” he said. His tone said she should not argue. His voice had dropped so low she shivered. “We’re going to eat, we’re going to have a good time. Do you understand?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth; he was the one bleeding. And wasn’t that interesting.

“Then we’re going to come back here, and I’m going to remove your clothes with my teeth and we can take each other apart, okay? Nod if you understand me.” There was every possibility she hadn’t registered any of that; he wouldn’t have wanted to in her place either. But she nodded. Reluctantly. “Check your hair and go fix your lipstick. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds later, he guided her out the door, making sure it locked behind them.

“Do you plan to do that a lot?” she asked. Her voice sounded so normal it was shocking. He didn’t have a clear picture of anything, because half of his mind was arguing he should give in to her desire and lock this door with them on the other side of it, and the other half was arguing that this was just like any other job and he needed to keep his head down and his hands off her until later. This was going to be the longest meal in the history of meals.

“Depends on how much you liked it,” he answered. Might as well go for broke, he thought. She was either going to be hideously offended or she wasn’t. Best to find out now.

She leaned in, close enough that he could smell her perfume, and nibbled his earlobe with something like a growl. Then she turned and walked away, her heels clicking against the tile floor in the hall.

He checked the door again, fully aware he was going to spend the rest of their lives, starting immediately, sparring with her for the upper hand.

Henry and Maddie were waiting outside when they arrived promptly at 11, because the restaurant wouldn’t seat half a party and they didn’t have Sophie there to ignore that policy as if it only applied to other people.

Maddie and Ophelia hugged like long-lost sisters while Maddie exclaimed appropriately over Ophelia’s outfit. A girl didn’t go to that much trouble for someone else’s relatives just so nobody would notice. Henry was already drinking a beer.

“You’ve got lipstick on your ear, kid.”

Eliot didn’t make a move to fix it.

“Some days are like that, Uncle Henry.”

“Nice ring she’s got there. You plan to get something real, right?”

“We’re negotiating,” Eliot answered. “She says she wants that one. Who am I to argue with her.”

“Keep that energy. You’re gonna need it.”

As Maddie had promised, Manolo’s was exponentially nicer than Captain Andy’s. The interior was all dark wood and brass railings and leather booths. Maddie raised an eyebrow at Henry, who shrugged. The menus that the polite waiter handed out were not plastic, either.

“Mimosas?” he suggested.

“Yes, absolutely,” Ophelia agreed.

Maddie suggested she would like an appetizer as well, then the waiter departed.

“I’m going to the bar to get a bloody Mary. You want one, Henry?”

He raised his beer bottle.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

After making sure nobody at the table was watching him, Eliot went to find the waiter.

“Kid,” he said. “I need a favor.”

For the life of him, he did not understand all these people going pale when he addressed them.

He cut off the kid’s spluttered response.

“You see that girl up there in the white sweater?” he asked. The waiter looked back at the table before turning his terrified gaze back to Eliot. “That’s my fiancée,” he said. “She ordered mimosas.”

“Yes sir! I’m going to get our best bartender on that right now! I promise!”

Eliot reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. The kid almost fainted. After a quizzical glance, Eliot peeled two bills off and stuffed them in the kid’s jacket pocket.

“I do not want to see the bottom of her glass,” he said carefully. “And use the good stuff, not the champagne you put in the free ones, okay?”

“I…I…”

“She’s over 21,” Eliot assured him. “I want you to talk to the bartender and have him blend in some fresh strawberries, okay? You understand me?”

“Yes,” the kid gulped.

“Are you sure? Or do you need me to talk to a manager?” It wasn’t really a threat. He couldn’t help it if the kid took it as one. He was a little high strung, in Eliot’s opinion, to be a waiter in a place that served brunch if he couldn’t handle one customer’s drink request.

“Understood!” the kid squeaked, then immediately fled to the safety of the kitchen.

Eliot watched him go, then went to get himself a Bloody Mary. Then a second one, because the first one was just to clear his head.

To the kid’s credit, Ophelia’s glass was half full when he got back to the table. Maddie was telling a story about something Shawn had done when he was younger; Eliot could tell because Henry kept making that noise in the back of his throat. But Ophelia was laughing in the appropriate places; whatever she thought of her parents or her early years, she knew how to act convincing at a family gathering. He wasn’t certain Aunt Maddie was testing her, but couldn’t rule out the possibility either.

The waiter appeared, still shaken, back at their table. He refilled Ophelia’s glass without asking, which caused Henry to cast a suspicious look at Eliot, who summoned the most innocent expression he could. Henry wasn’t convinced.

Maddie ordered, then the waiter turned to Ophelia.

“Gosh,” she said. “Everything looks so good. I don’t know what to pick. Can you come back to me?”

Eliot reached across the table for her menu.

“Want me to order for you?” he offered.

“I very much do,” she smiled. Henry looked between the two of them, at her menu, and at the smirk Eliot hadn’t hidden fast enough.

“I’d like the steak and eggs,” he said. “Rare on the steak, poached on the eggs. She’d like the lobster pot pie and asparagus.”

Incredibly, the waiter looked at Ophelia for confirmation. She had drunk enough champagne on an empty stomach to find that incredibly funny. Nevertheless, she nodded. The kid was never going to make it in the service industry at the rate he was going.

Brunch, as promised, was delicious and not fried, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Henry and Eliot left Maddie and Ophelia at the table to get another drink and settle their bar tab.

“Eliot,” Maddie said. “Let Henry pay. He won’t take no for an answer.”

Henry very much would have allowed Eliot to pay, but didn’t argue. They walked to the bar together to get cashed out.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, kid,” Henry warned him.

“Of course I do,” Eliot said. “I hope you know what Shawn’s getting into.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Ewan O’Hara is a wanted man in more countries than I can count, including this one. He’s gone completely rogue, and yet you seem to have no problem with Shawn marrying Juliet.”

“Juliet carries a gun, Eliot,” Henry answered. “And it’s her brother. I’m more worried about who’s going to protect Ophelia from you.”

“The hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Look, kid. Your dad is my brother, and I’ve known him for longer than you have. You just need to consider that you may not be cut out for marriage. That’s all I’m saying. And you need to consider it before you do something stupid.”

“Henry, I—”

“I know what I’m talking about, Eliot. We just had brunch with my ex-wife.”

“But she’s here,” Eliot pointed out.

“Yeah, and it took us years to get back to this. You’ve got a good thing here. Don’t blow it.”

Eliot ran a hand over his face to keep from blurting out a response.

“Better, kid,” Henry said approvingly. “You might be okay after all.”

Maddie sipped at her mimosa, knowing it wasn’t her business and knowing that wasn’t going to stop her.

“I hate to seem pushy, but have you set a date yet?”

Ophelia, who did not give unannounced tests, knew the question was coming, and that she would definitely be graded on her answer. There would not be a curve.

“Not yet,” she replied. “But I’m not sure we’re in a hurry.”

“Because you want to think it over, knowing his dad and his uncle are not saints in the marriage department, and that their brother Jack is a fool but not quite fool enough to get married?”

It took a moment for Ophelia to sort through that question, and another minute to realize there was third Spencer brother Eliot had not yet mentioned.

“Mostly because I’m past thinking it over, but there are a lot of practical considerations,” she replied. She hoped her words had the correct number of syllables, but failing that, that the overall sentence had come out even. “It’s one thing to get married when you’re 24 and neither of you has anything. We’re not 24 anymore, and we both have a lot of stuff. Houses. Cars. Bank accounts. Jobs.”

For someone who had been drinking for two solid hours, Maddie thought her response was surprisingly well considered. And she didn’t seem like a simpering, blushing teenager with no idea how the world worked who thought marriage would make everything magically straighten out.

“You didn’t ask and it’s none of my business,” Maddie said, “but I approve. I think you’ll balance each other out well. But don’t be afraid to ask for help, okay?” She slid a business card across the table. “I thought it was against the rules when Henry and I were married, but it isn’t.”

“You are so sweet,” Ophelia gushed. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!”

If Eliot had a gun, he would have shot it to clear out the parking lot. Henry and Maddie both hugged Ophelia, Henry making her promise she would keep him updated on her novel. Just at the moment, Eliot didn’t care if Ophelia ever wrote another word. It took eight and a half minutes (he counted) to get his aunt and uncle away from the car and Ophelia into it. And then there was the drive back to their hotel that he could have sworn was shorter earlier.

But maybe the thing that made it seem long was the almost complete silence from the passenger seat. She didn’t so much as comment about the weather, much less rehash the meal they’d just sat through, not even to ask if insanity ran in his family. By the time they reached their door, a very loud voice in his brain was shouting that she was over him, and just playing nice for an audience.

“You’ve got quiet,” he mumbled. “Something wrong?”

Rather than answer, she twined her arms around him, kissing him in a way that made him fumble for the key, then the doorknob, then the bolt on the other side. She pushed his jacket off his shoulders; he grabbed hers by the collar, spinning her out of it before catching her. It fell to the floor. Although her corset looks were some of his favorites, just now all he could think about was the amount of fabric between them.

“How do you turn it off?” she asked breathlessly. “How do you stop wanting to do this for hours at the time?”

He found the top of the ribbon, which was mercifully not knotted. He hooked two fingers in the top set of laces and pulled.

“Practice, Princess. My job is risk assessment. I assessed the risk at the restaurant.” He pulled the next set of loops free. “I could have found us a dark closet, but it would have been short, it would have hurt, and I would have had to keep my hand over your mouth.”

He hadn’t known before that instant she could blush, kiss, and unbutton his shirt at the same time. If he’d been paying more attention to her face than to her clothes, he would have found it charming. He pulled the third set of loops, and the ends of the ribbon trailed on the floor.

“Am I too loud?” He was also impressed she could summon up embarrassment with her tongue that far down his throat.

“Anyone is too loud in a restaurant, Princess. But I like to hear you.” Her skirt was too big for her, which was part (a small part) of the reason she wore it. He’d now loosened the corset enough that with a twitch of her hips, the skirt dropped to the floor. Very briefly, he wondered if she had other outfits like this one, because the whole hip-twitching thing was a feature. She pulled his suspenders past his elbows; he let go of her long enough to shake them off.

“You promise you haven’t changed your mind?” he asked. The ribbon made a hissing sound as he pulled it through the last set of rings. “Since you’ve had time to sleep on it?”

The way she tackled him to the bed made him think she was still on board with the idea.

She wasn’t really asleep, but neither was he. The sliding door to the beach was open, letting in the sounds of the ocean and some faint music down on the beach. He played with the curl in her hair, idly wondering if it was the humidity that made it do that, and why she wouldn’t wear it this way all the time if she could, and listened to her slow breathing.

“Would you do it if I asked?” he murmured.

She stirred against his shoulder; apparently she’d been more asleep than he realized.

“Hmmm?”

“If I asked, would you?”

“I think I was asleep for the subject,” she said. He could sense her brain shifting into a different gear, reaching for what she might have missed, or forgotten, or agreed to in the heat of an earlier moment.

He realized he’d been having the conversation in his head, mostly because he thought having it out loud with her might start an argument, which was the last thing he wanted right now. Then she sat up and reached for the glass of water on the night stand, out of his grasp, which suddenly became the thing he wanted least right now. But avoiding an argument was still in the top two. He waited until she put the glass down to reach for her, pulling her back close.

“I meant,” he began again, “if I asked, would you read your books to me.”

“Eliot, I—“

“Phee, I read half of the first one yesterday afternoon, and I had to turn it upside down for a bunch of chapters. I like the books you pick. I don’t know why you think I would like yours any less than someone else’s.”

“It’s just,” she said slowly, “when I read them, I see all the mistakes. I see all the places where I used the wrong word, or the wrong phrase, or something didn’t pay off the way I wanted it to. By the time they get published, I’ve already read them dozens of times, and I can usually recite big parts of them from memory.”

“Because they’re yours and you love them,” he supplied.

“Because they’re mine and I can see what they should have been instead,” she countered. “The parts that stand out are the ones that are derivative, or too close to someone else’s, or just plain not what I had envisioned. Reading the published book is terrifying.”

“Even to me?” he asked, his hand gliding over her back.

“Especially to you,” she answered through a shiver. “I’m not sure I ever could.”

There was no way, at this point, she could say that the experience would be too intimate in a way that he would understand or would think wasn’t insane. The writer couldn’t articulate that while she knew some of her words sounded better in her head than on paper, his agreement with that would be much more disappointing than an editor saying the exact same thing. And she couldn’t face the idea that he might find her work anti-climactic or stilted or a number of other things he would never say to her, even if he thought it. Having never spent time in the company of another writer, he had no idea she had any of these thoughts, just that she seemed to once again value his opinion more than he deserved.

“Even if I wished for it?” he teased.

“I’m not a genie to be bound by a wish,” she countered softly. “But I’ll think about it.”

“You promise?”

“I do.”