Loyalty in Death (In Death #9)(13)

“No hurry.”

When he got his bag and took it into the bath, she pounced on the kitchen ‘link, called Charles Monroe, and left a message on his service canceling their date that night.

However wise and broad-minded and adult he’d sounded, she didn’t see her baby brother embracing her casual, and just lately spotty, relationship with a licensed companion.

She might have been surprised at just how much her little brother would understand. As he stood under the spray, let the hot water ease away the faint stiffness from travel, he was thinking of a relationship that wasn’t — couldn’t be — a relationship. He was thinking of a woman. And he told himself he had no right to think of her.

She was a married woman, and she was his employer.

He had no right to think of her as anything else, less to feel this shaky heat in his gut at the knowledge he would see her again very soon.

But he couldn’t get her face out of his mind. The sheer beauty of it. The sad eyes, the soft voice, the quiet dignity. He told himself it was a foolish, even childish crush. Horribly inappropriate. But he had no choice but to admit here, in private, where honesty was most valued, that she was one of the primary reasons he’d taken the commission and made the trip east.

He wanted to see her again, no matter how that wanting shamed him.

Still, he wasn’t a child who believed he could have whatever he needed.

It would be good for him to see her here, in her own home, with her husband. He liked to think it was the circumstances of how they’d met, of where they’d met, that had caused this infatuation. She’d been alone, so obviously lonely, and had looked so delicate, so cool and golden in the deep desert heat.

It would be different here because she would be different here. And so would he. He would do the job she had asked him to do and nothing more. He would spend time with the sister he had missed so deeply it sometimes made his heart ache. And he would see, at long last, the city and the work that had pulled her away from her family.

The city, he could already admit, fascinated him.

As he toweled off, he tried to see through the tiny, steam-misted window. Even that blurry, narrow view made his blood pump just a little faster.

There was so much of it, he thought now. Not the open vastness of desert and mountain and field he’d grown used to since his family had relocated in Arizona a few years before. But so much of everything rammed and jammed into one small space.

There was so much he wanted to see. So much he wanted to do. As he hitched on a fresh shirt and jeans, he began to speculate, to plot, and to plan. When he stepped back out into the living area, he was eager to begin.

He saw his sister busily tidying and grinned. “You make me feel like company.”

“Well…” She’d tucked away every murder and mayhem disc and file she could find. It would have to do. She glanced over, blinked.

Wow, was all she could think. Why hadn’t she noticed in her first rush of delight in seeing him? Her baby brother had grown up. And he was a genuine eye treat. “You look good — sort of filled out and everything.”

“It’s just a clean shirt.”

“Right. Do you want some juice, some tea?”

“Ah… I really want to go out. I’ve got this whole guidebook thing. I studied it on the way east. You know how many museums there are in Manhattan alone?”

“No, but I bet you do.” Inside her regulation shoes, Peabody’s toes curled and flexed. Her feet, she decided, were about to get a workout. “Let me change, and we’ll check them out.”

An hour later, she was almost tearfully grateful for the airsoles, for the thick soft wool of her slacks, and the lining of her winter coat. It wasn’t just museums Zeke was after. It was everything.

He took videos with the palm unit he told her he’d splurged on for the trip. It would have been ripped off a dozen times if she hadn’t kept her eyes peeled for street thieves. No matter how often she lectured him to watch himself, to recognize the signs and the moves, he just smiled and nodded.

They rode to the top of the Empire State Building, stood in the freezing, bitter wind until the tips of her ears went numb. And his pale gray eyes glowed with the wonder of it. They toured the Met, gawked at the storefronts along Fifth, stared up at the tourist blimps, bumped along the sky glides, and gnawed on stale pretzels he’d insisted on buying from a glide-cart.

Only deep and abiding love could have convinced her to agree to skidding over the ice rink at Rockefeller Center when her calf muscles were already weeping from three hours of urban hiking.

But he made her remember what it was to be stunned by the city, to see all it had to offer. She realized, watching him be awed, time after time, that she’d forgotten to look.

And if she had to flash the badge she’d tucked in her coat pocket at a gimlet-eyed grifter looking to score the tourist, it didn’t spoil the day.

Still, by the time she finally talked him into stopping for a hot drink and a bite to eat, she’d decided it was imperative she outline some very specific do’s and don’ts. He was going to be on his own a great deal when he wasn’t working, she thought. He might have been twenty-three, but he had all the naive trust in his fellow man of a sheltered five-year-old.

“Zeke.” She warmed her hands on a bowl of lentil soup and tried not to think about the soy-beef burger she’d spied on the menu. “We should talk about what you’re going to do while I’m working.”