softened. “Thank you for asking.”
“Ideas on who’s behind it?”
“Too many to discuss.” He glanced up as the waiter returned to clear her plate and dress the tabletop with their entrees. “And your day?”
“Eventful.”
Brows lifted in patient expectation.
She talked around mouthfuls of pan-fried flounder while Max’s Blackened Beef Tender grew cold on his plate. Quick flickers of eye contact assessed his smooth façade for reaction to each revelation, finding none. When she’d finished, he calmly cut his meat and began to chew, pausing only to state, “You’ve had a busy day.”
“That’s all I get? You have nothing to add?”
“Oh, I have plenty, but it can wait until I’ve digested it along with this meal.”
Finally, after he forked up the last of the cast-iron skillet debris and she’d swallowed her final bite of decadent Crème Brȗlée, Max fixed a steady stare upon his mate to demand, “Is this what you want, Charlotte? To become Atcliff to his Brady?”
Black brows rocketed. “It’s hardly the same thing. You wanted me off the streets. And I can be diplomatic.” At the slight quirk of his lips, she tossed down her spoon. “I am the soul of calm, cool and collected!”
“Indeed, you are, Detective. It would put my mind at ease to see you behind a desk instead of a gun. You’d wield either with lethal force, I’m sure, for the sake of your city. A regular schedule in a building surrounded by cops instead of on the streets with criminals? For the sake of our daughter and my blood pressure, I am thrilled. But only if it’s where you choose to be when you’re ready to be.”
Charlotte stared at him, looking for hidden clues to his agenda. Finding none, she announced, “I want you now.”
He pushed back his wrought-iron chair. “Then I’m glad I skipped dessert.” He lifted a finger and their check appeared, quickly whisked away with his card. “It’ll be a long drive home.”
She pointed a finger toward the riverfront. “We have a perfectly good king right over there.”
“To the Towers it is.”
– – –
As they lay tucked together in the big bed listening to the sounds of the city and the river far below, Cee Cee felt the vibration of Max’s laugh beneath her palm.
“I used to fantasize about you in your uniform on my many trips to Interrogation in cuffs.”
A thrill of recall raced through her. His mysterious half-smile, gleaming green eyes, and confident stride, strolling by with hands behind his back as if he owned the station. Then that shock of connection when their gazes met and held for a moment too long.
She chuckled. “I used to daydream of being the one to march you before the judge. What do you dream about now?”
“You out of uniform.” His fingertips did a leisurely assessment of those coveted territories.
She caught that clever hand, lifting it to her lips for a kiss to his palm before cupping it to her cheek. “Am I making the right move, Max?”
The vulnerable uncertainty in her tone squeezed about his heart. “You seldom make a wrong one, sha.”
“It might mean a higher profile in the press. Can we afford that . . . considering?”
His laugh burst out, loud and genuine in its amusement. “Detective, we couldn’t have a higher profile if we were carved into a mountainside.”
“I know how you hate attention.”
After a tender kiss to the base of her thumb, he murmured, “I’ve found the limelight sometimes has its advantages. The shadows are what we need to avoid.”
Cee Cee rolled onto her side, bringing them nose to nose, hard middle to rounded belly. His fingertips gently spanned that circumference. Before drowning in the warm sea of his gaze, she demanded a single truth.
“Can we survive this?”
She didn’t need to explain further. This, the collective chaos that surrounded their life together. The list was endless and seemingly impossible with the added weight of the North crushing down atop it.
His answer summed up his faith with calm simplicity.
“It’s what we do, Charlotte. We survive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Instead of returning to River Road after he’d lingered over coffee and the panoramic riverfront view, Max readied to head to LEI, having gotten the all clear to reclaim the former crime scene. Though she’d left hours before, his mate’s scent lingered in the unmade sheets, in the bathroom towels, in the air itself. He breathed her in and exhaled on a sigh.
As he started to tuck away his wallet, he opened it instead, taking out the small square he carried. His daughter’s first