Page 52 of Her Rival

She hadn't slept much. I could tell from the corners of her eyes. She also hadn't cried, which I'd been bracing for and which she hadn't done, and the not-crying was its own form of information about who she was and how she'd been raised. I poured her a coffee without asking. Slid it across.

"Saturday," I said.

"Saturday."

"Dinner tonight. Somewhere downtown. Not here. I'm going to take you out, Hartley. In public. I have not been on a date in three years and I'm not going to do the first one in this house with you, because if I do it here we're going to do it the wrong way, and I'd like to do it the right way at least once."

She looked at me over the rim of her cup. She said nothing.

"Are you asking me to dinner," she said.

"I am."

"After last night."

"Especially after last night."

"With my father on his way into the city."

"Especially with your father on his way into the city. I'm going to handle that. I've already started to handle that, and I'll tell you what that means before we leave this kitchen this morning, and you'll tell me what you want about how to handle it from here. That's the conversation I'd like to have over a second cup of coffee. The first cup is for asking you to dinner."

She set her cup down. Looked at me. She had not yet said yes.

I waited.

"What time," she said.

"Seven. Pick you up at Brynn's."

"Seven."

"Yes."

"Okay," I said.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"You called somebody last night."

"I did."

"I heard you."

"I figured."

"We're going to talk about that."

"Over the second cup of coffee."

"That's the deal."

I poured a second cup. She picked it up.

Outside the wall of glass the valley was coming up gold the way it always did at six fifty in November, and the man in Tennessee was somewhere out there with a rented car and a deadline he didn't yet know I knew about, and a woman who'd spent twenty-six years being told she had no power over the men in her life was sitting at my kitchen island with her hand around a coffee cup, deciding in real time how much of the next twelve hours she was going to let me share.

She let me share some of them.