Southtown (Tres Navarre #5)(39)

She realized that was why he’d shown up on her doorstep tonight, despite her refusal. He knew she shouldn’t be alone.

“Hey,” he said gently. “I thought you liked shrimp.”

She looked down. Appetizers had appeared and she hadn’t even noticed.

“I haven’t been fair to you,” she said. “I’ve haven’t explained anything.”

“We agreed not to talk about our jobs. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about the sinuses I cleared today.”

“Sinuses won’t kil you.”

“I don’t know. There was this big nasty one—”

“I’m serious, J.P.”

“You don’t have to explain anything,” he said. “I trust you. If you don’t tel me, you have a good reason.”

She wanted to cry. She knew so much about him. Once she’d realized she might actual y love this man, she’d run a complete background check. She knew al about his school days, his career, his wife, who had died in childbirth twenty years ago and whose name he had never so much as mentioned. J.P. had never remarried. He’d devoted his life to raising his daughter, who had just recently graduated from col ege.

Except for the one horrendous tragedy of his wife’s death, the man had no secrets, no enemies, no skeletons in the closet.

Erainya’s closet, on the other hand, was loaded. There was so much she couldn’t tel him.

It was easier to concentrate on the wine and the shrimp Paesano.

The sky darkened. Traffic on Basse subsided to an occasional streak of headlights, the rattlesnake sizzle of tires on wet asphalt.

J.P. twirled his fork in the fettuccine. “Have you told Tres our plans?”

Their plans.

“I haven’t said anything,” she admitted. “Not yet.”

He kept his attention careful y focused on achieving the perfect bite-sized forkful of pasta.

“I’l tel him soon,” she said.

“Only if it’s stil what you want.”

He tried to sound casual, but she heard the fragility in his voice. He had opened himself up for emotional hurt, for the first time since his wife’s death. The fact that Erainya had so much power over him scared her.

They had agreed to get married in the fal . She would quit working, close the agency. He would provide for her and Jem. He had more money than they would ever need.

Did she real y want this?

She only had to look at J.P. to know the answer was yes. No one had ever loved her so much. And the sex . . . wel , she’d almost consigned herself to a life of celibacy until J.P. came along. The sex was fantastic.

At first, she had resisted the idea of quitting work. She told herself she needed the job. It was part of her identity. But she believed that less and less.

For a few years after taking over the agency, she’d felt good about the work. She’d been exorcising Fred’s spirit, becoming a PI in her own right to prove that she could. But business soon began to go sour, deteriorating into a petty grudge match between her and Barrera.

Despite her way with people, her contacts, her face-to-face talents, she wasn’t much of a businesswoman. She hated the Internet, computers, information brokers. She liked the human part of the PI business, and that part was disappearing. She was rapidly becoming a dinosaur.

She’d been contemplating quitting, in fact, the day a young man named Tres Navarre had walked into her office, looking for work. Something about him had reinvigorated her—made her want to teach him the trade.

He had made the work interesting again, fresh, good. But now . . . she wanted an escape. She wanted to believe she could slip out from under Fred Barrow’s legacy, with Jem safely in her arms, and start a new life at age fifty-one.

Almost as soon as she made that wish, Wil Stirman had reappeared in her life.

J.P. pushed his plate aside, took a long drink of wine. “Al right. I lied.”

Erainya realized she’d been silent too long. “What?”

“I do want to know. Let me help. Tel me what’s going on.”

She wanted to. Her anger at Stirman had faded to a dul ache. Her confidence was starting to slip. The enormous Colt in her purse seemed ridiculous in this elegant restaurant, with the affluent people and the candlelight, the shrimp and fettuccine and wine.

“Not here,” she said.

“Wil you come back to the house?”

The house. As if there were only one—with the bright yel ow lights across the canyon, shining through the rain.

Ten years ago, this quarry had been the poorest neighborhood in San Antonio. Workers’ shacks lined dusty roads and dump trucks rumbled back and forth, hauling limestone to the rail depot. Now the quarry was a golf course, a clubhouse, a string of fashionable mansions around the canyon rim. Even the old factory with its smokestacks had been transformed into an upscale shopping center.

The very location of J.P.’s house seemed to suggest that anything was possible.

She decided she would tel him everything. She would postpone her hunt, at least until the morning. And if the worst happened, if Stirman got to her first, she would trust this man—a man she had known for such a short time—to do what was necessary to protect Jem.

“Back to our house,” she said. “That would be wonderful.”

His smile was the best reward, the only reward, she’d had for days.