Page 18

I scan the windows until…there. Gage sits in a booth near the front, one tattooed arm stretched along the back of the seat, a dark shirt pulled tight across shoulders I’ve already scanned for purely responsible purposes. He’s looking directly at me. The bastard lifts his coffee cup and waves.

Heat explodes into my face. I flip him off through the windshield. His grin gets enormous.

Something bright and stupid and almost forgotten bursts through my chest. Not dread. Not obligation. Not fear. Just the giddy, breathless awareness that someone is waiting for me. Me.

I grab my purse and climb out before I can talk myself back into hiding.

CHAPTER 6

Gage

Jubilee has asked me three questions about the croissant and seven about the corpse. I find this charming.

“So,” she says.

I set my fork down. “You make that word sound so accusatory.”

She’s sitting across from me in the narrow booth, one long leg crossed over the other. Black floral vines climb the sheer tights to the short skirt I have made a disciplined and deeply unsuccessful effort not to examine.

The bow in her hair is worse.

Pale blue. Long ribbons spilling down like some gothic little flag announcing the woman from last night has decided to personally ruin my concentration.

She lifts her coffee. “Why did you have two shovels in your truck?”

I cut into my eggs. “Gardening.”

“You had two shovels.”

“Enthusiastic gardening.”

Her violet-blue eyes narrow, and something in me pulls taut.

Outside the window, Chicago traffic moves in its usual noisy indifference: horns, tires hissing over pavement, a bus grinding away from the curb.

Inside, silverware clinks against ceramic. The espresso machine hisses behind the counter. Somebody laughs too loudly near the door.

“And the plants?”

I shrug. “Gardening again.”

I chew slowly. The potatoes are decent. Crisp enough on the outside, fluffy in the middle, plenty of rosemary but not its entire personality. The eggs are a little overdone. Bacon is fine. Nothing offensive. Nothing transcendent.

Jubilee sets down her coffee. “Shovels, gloves, a tarp, native plants.” Her fingers count in the air. “Even a dead raccoon. You had everything.”

I pause with a potato halfway to my mouth. “The raccoon was roadkill. I was going to bury it on my property.”

“You pick up roadkill?”

“Not recreationally.”

Her brow wrinkles, but she keeps going. “Fine. But you knew exactly how to use all of it.”

“I watch a lot of true crime,” I excuse.

Jubilee stares at me. I give her my most open, trustworthy smile. It has gotten me through television interviews, one disastrous blind date, and a conversation with a state trooper who did not need to know what was beneath the tarp in my truck.

She remains unmoved. “True crime,” she repeats.