He only regarded her with a steady gaze. Not an unkind gaze...far from it. And I wish I wasn’t doing this, but I am. And I will.
She heard it loud enough, unspoken or not, and blew out an impatient breath. “You know, I can tell when people are trouble. But it didn’t work with you. I don’t get that. If anyone has the potential to cause trouble—”
“But not to you,” he said. “Never to you. Not like you mean.”
She blinked. Damn, he was right. With anyone else, everyone else, she never knew. Could be chance, could be intent, could be collateral damage. But whatever he was up to, he’d made sure she was safe. Whatever his intent elsewhere, his intent toward her had been not only benign, but protective.
“Oh,” she said, her voice coming out smaller than usual. “Well.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know what the pendant is.” She took it out from beneath her shirt, pulled the chain over her head, and held it out to him. Ancient metal, crude stamped design, indecipherable runelike markings.
He drew himself up, nearly stepped back—but visibly stopped himself. And then gave a rueful shake of his head. “Not right now.”
“Like my father,” she said, just a touch of bitterness. “You want it, but you can’t stand it.”
He looked as if he might say something but didn’t quite. It left her room to continue. “My father gave me the pendant. He was strange about it, but at that point...he was strange about everything. He told me to protect it, to always keep it. He didn’t tell me why. And then later he tried to kill me to get it back.” She found her hand on her stomach, tracing the thin white line of the scar that slanted from just inside her hip bone up and over her neat little innie. On second thought, she pulled the new T-shirt up and the elastic waist of the sport shorts down—just enough to reveal the scar. She didn’t miss the grim look on Mac’s face. “Yeah,” she said. “He tried to warn me, even as he did it. I didn’t believe him. Lucky for me I was a slippery little thing, or that would have been the end of it.”
After a moment, Mac cleared his throat. “That’s all? He didn’t tell you anything about it?”
She shook her head. “Keep it always. Protect it. I think...” And she did, pausing to consider those confusing days, the times her father tried to talk to her and seemed to get tangled in his thoughts—to struggle with himself, as if it was a fight to say the words at all. “I think he tried to. He was just too far gone.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why.”
He wanted to reach for her—she saw it all too clearly. He wanted to hold her. But that wouldn’t make it better or different, and now...
Now she needed to pretend she was past all that. “Anyway,” she said, shrugging again, “after that night...after I got away and healed up and they found his car and no one ever saw him again—not completely in that order—things were different with me. I had this...” She looked at her hands, at the pendant; brought them in against her chest to close her eyes and think of the feel of it. The deep unease, the sharp stutter of warning that told her when someone was out for trouble. The schoolyard bully, the soccer team mean girls, the high school toughs. At first just when the trouble was aimed for her...but later, so fine-tuned that she could see it coming regardless.
She looked straight at him. “I’d had the pendant for...what, two years before that night? But it was after that night that I turned into a human trouble detector. And boy, did I get into trouble until I figured out how to deal with it.” She wrinkled her nose at him, commentary on days gone by. “It is just so not a good idea to go pointing fingers at people before they’ve even done anything. Suddenly you’re the one who’s causing trouble, so the good guys blame you for that—and then the bad guys blame you for spoiling their fun.”
He grinned, that mouth that was made for it, a sudden thing that surprised her with its genuine nature. “No wonder you’ve got that fast-talking mouth,” he said, but there was understanding behind it. Understanding and...affection.
She gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “That’s not fair. Do you know how long it took me to figure out where that came from?”
The smile turned somewhat rueful. “Let’s just say I’ve had reason to think about it.”
“Yeah,” she said, not letting up on the glare. “Let’s just.”
But it didn’t inspire him to any grand revelations, so she gave up and dropped it, throwing her hands up in a loose gesture of finality. “So that’s it. I’m a freak of nature trouble-detector, and I don’t have any answers about the pendant. What happened back there...” She struggled with saying it and pushed through in a rush. “What happened is that I’ve worn that thing so long and my dad gave it to me and I was so frightened for you that I just grabbed it like a little kid and wished on it.” A little girl wishing for her father, more like it. The one she had once known, and not what he’d become. “So there. All is confessed. In a pretty one-sided way, I might add.”
He winced a little at that, but didn’t look away. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I just...” He blew out air, jammed his hands into his back pockets again. “I have to think.” Then he gave her a sidelong glance, a deliberate thing from beneath a half-turned brow. “And eat. I have to eat. Man cannot live on crushed ice alone.”
She snorted. “The only crushed ice you had,” she said, with as much asperity as she could muster, “was the cool taste of it on my lips.”
That did it. He looked at her as though briefly stunned, stuck there—his eyes so clearly on her mouth. And then he said, with some visible effort, “You did that on purpose.”
She tossed her head ever so slightly. Just enough to shorthand that she’d done it. “You looked like you could use a reminder.” She headed for the sidewalk, and she knew what her legs looked like in the shorts and what her ass looked like in retreat. She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Not just fast-talking. Smart.”
“I...” He took a deep and audible breath, if only to finish his response in a mutter. “I consider myself reminded.”
Chapter 7
I have to think.
That’s what he’d told her. Cowardly in its way, but true enough.
There was too much new, too much different.
And though Mac thought he’d learned to deal with this blade, to compensate for it...
He was no longer so sure.
Either the balance had changed, or it simply wasn’t working any longer.
Understanding how Gwen’s pendant—how her father, how she—fit together with the blade, or how any of them fit with what was happening here in Albuquerque...
He definitely needed to think.
Even if he pretty much already knew what had driven Gwen’s father. And even if he wished it didn’t give him some clues about what was happening with him.
The hell with that.
“Fierce,” Gwen said. They sat at a table in the diner, and the waitress served them with a knowing smile. When he glanced at her with question on his face, she said, “Your expression. Fierce.”
“Good,” he said as she forked a piece of his burger right off his plate. He feigned offense. “You sure make yourself right at home.”
“You betcha,” she said. “Your hotel room, your food. Can’t imagine what’s next.” And then bit her lip, clearly hearing how the words sounded outside her own head, eyes wide...until she went for the head toss. Perfection, that toss—so understated, so perfectly paired with the gleam in her eye.