Page 137
She comes locked over the top of me with her hand around the back of my neck, and she keeps going through it, because she wants the rest of it out of me.
“Colt.”
That’s all it takes.
I get a fistful of the sheet in one hand and her thigh in the other and I go, and she stays down on me until I’m finished.
Afterward she doesn’t move, and neither do I. Her forehead is on my shoulder and her hand is flat between my shoulder blades, and it doesn’t pat me and it doesn’t rub.
It stays there.
Chapter twenty-four
Colt
When I come back from the bathroom, Astrid is on her side facing me with the sheet pulled to her chest and a foot of mattress between us. Her fingers work the hem until she catches me watching and flattens her hand.
I don’t ask whether she’s all right. She would answer the question I asked, and I’m not certain that’s the one I mean.
“I’m getting water. Want some?”
“Please.”
I pull on my shorts and go down, leaving the bedroom door open behind me and the lamp on beside her. My jacket is over the stair rail. Her dress is on the floor by the stairs where she stepped out of it, and I pick it up and put it over the back of a chair on the way past.
In the kitchen I take two glasses from the cupboard and fill them.
When I get back upstairs she’s sitting against the pillows with the sheet gathered under her arms. Her hair has caught beneath it and she pulls it free before she takes the glass.
“Thank you.”
“It’s water.”
“That does not make it less useful.”
“Fair.”
She drinks half and rests the glass against her knee. I put mine on the other table beside the paperback.
“What are you reading?”
I pick it up and show her the cover. “Somebody killed the man who hired the detective. I’m hoping he got a deposit.”
“Did he?”
“I’m trusting he had the sense to ask.”
She takes the book, reads the back, and hands it to me again. I put it down with the cover facing up.
My phone goes off on the nightstand and puts a square of light on the ceiling.
Quinn. She has been on the phone with Kansas City about somebody else and I came up in it.
I turn it face down.
“You can answer that.”
“It’s my agent.”
