The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(54)

Is he hitting on me?

Or am I hitting on him?

Good questions both.

I wondered if he thought something happening between the two of us was as bad an idea as I did, and not just because it was a couple of days after Thomas’s funeral. What kind of circle of life was that?

I knew the answer to that. It had hardly anything to do with the circle of life and practically everything to do with my not wanting to spend one more night alone in the house. And if Ben Cantor hadn’t asked me out, I would have been having dinner somewhere else with Ryan Morrissey.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What were you saying?”

“Was once again wondering out loud if one of your brothers or both of them might have had something to do with it.”

“We’ve gone over this. Is Jack capable of it? I think he’s capable of a lot, but maybe not that. And I think Danny is too much of a coward. But could one of them have been involved? We’d both have to be nuts to rule out the possibility.”

I was trying to pace myself with my drink. I was driving. Thomas had joked before he died about getting another DUI. This would be a lousy time for me to get my first.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said to Cantor.

“What shall we talk about? The crash of the crypto market?”

He smiled then. The smile, which continued to be a pretty impressive smile, went quite nicely with his eyes.

Like some kind of matched set.

“Holy shit!” I said, slapping my forehead. “Crypto went south? Now I’m really screwed.”

Cantor laughed. Somehow, after one of the worst days of recorded worst days, I laughed along with him. I kept telling myself this wasn’t a real date. But it suddenly felt like one.

“I didn’t even trust you when I first met you.”

“I tend to bring that out in people,” Cantor said. “But now you’re stuck with me, because other than your coach, I seem to be all the backup you’ve got these days.” He smiled again. “Other than an undefeated high school football team.”

“And my very own crisis manager.”

“Forgot about him,” Cantor said.

He ate some burrito, then reached over and forked some of my enchilada. The food was every bit as good as he’d said it was going to be.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you and keep forgetting, just because of everything going on,” he said. “But why are you still coaching?”

“Because I don’t quit.”

“This has to be about more than football with you,” he said.

“No shit, Sherlock.”





Sixty-One



BEN CANTOR DIDN’T FEEL like any kind of ace detective at the moment.

No shit, Sherlock, she’d joked from her side of the small table.

It was like he told her: he couldn’t believe she’d agreed to go out with him, especially after she said she’d turned down an invitation from her coach.

Maybe she was just blowing smoke at him. But he didn’t think she was the type. Cantor had known a lot of women in his life, been with a lot of women. Been married, divorced, and nearly married again. Jenny Wolf was the most right-there, up-front woman he’d ever met. Sometimes he’d forget, but only for a couple of minutes at a time, that she owned the football team in town. And one of the newspapers.

For the life of him he couldn’t come up with a good reason why the two of them being here like this was a good idea, and not just because he felt out of his league. And that didn’t mean the National Football League.

He still couldn’t escape how attracted he was to her, how attracted to her he’d been from the start, even when he was treating her like a suspect, talking about what a star swimmer she’d been. She’d asked him, before the margaritas were delivered tonight, why he had stopped looking at her as a suspect.

“Unless your phone went to Sausalito for dinner that night, like you said you did, and you went to the boat without it, you couldn’t have been in two places at once.”

“You went in and checked my phone records?”

He gave her a little salute. “Just doing my job, ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me.”

He hoped now that she couldn’t tell he kept searching for reasons to look away when she was staring at him across the table.

“I wasn’t expecting to have this good a time,” Jenny said.

“Stop,” Cantor said, “before you make me blush.”

“You know what I’m trying to say.”

“Yeah, actually, I do.”

They were walking back to his old Victorian house on 18th Street by now, where she’d left her car. Before dinner, he’d asked her if she wanted to come in for a drink, but she’d said she was saving herself for her first margarita.

Jenny asked now why so many of the cross streets in the area were named after states. Texas. Missouri. Mississippi. Like that. Cantor said he happened to know the answer: it had all started before California became a state and a guy named Dr. John Townsend was mayor of San Francisco.

“Townsend saw this as an intersection of Mexican California and the United States,” he said. “So naming the streets after states was another way of kissing up to the government.”