Chris...Chris...well, fuck, which Chris? Shane rubbed his forehead with his thumbnail and tried to concentrate. She had at least a dozen friends named Chris, both male and female, any one of whom she’d get drinks with any night of the week, and another five or six casual acquaintances from work she’d meet for networking or professional purposes. But Lannisters was only a few blocks north and east of McFarlands, closer to Penn Station. He headed up Sixth Avenue, hands in his pockets as the cold fall air channeling through the canyons whipped at his trench coat and the Manhattan Portage bag slung across his body.
Lannisters was across the street, but he could clearly see Natalie sitting at the table in the window, wearing her favorite black suit with a white blouse underneath, and black patent leather high heels. The blouse gapped open a little, revealing the upper swell of one full breast, and the diamond pendant he bought her last Christmas hung halfway between her collarbone and the open shirt placket. She sat with a man, tall and thin with an angular face. He sprawled in his chair, one foot braced on the bottom rung of Natalie’s seat, with an empty glass in his hand, all his attention focused on her. Hands in his pockets, Shane stood on the corner, waiting for the light to change, and watched Natalie’s old buddy from B-school, professional downsizer Chris Holstead watch his wife as if no one else in the world existed.
No. No fucking way was Natalie exposing the fault lines in their marriage to Chris Holstead. Except, based on the frown lines between her eyebrows, that’s exactly what she was doing. All her considerable energy was directed at another man.
You helped make this mess, hotshot-partner. You’d better fucking clean it up.
When the light changed he crossed the street, hauled open the bar’s door and shouldered his way through the crowd to the table by the front window. Natalie’s words crystallized as he approached.
“It’s hopeless. I’ve tried everything I can think of to save—Shane?” She blinked up at him. “What are you doing here?”
Surprise, not guilt, infused her tone, which registered as odd in the rational part of his brain. The more primitive back brain kept him on his feet, looming over them. “Looking for my wife,” he said.
Chris’s dark eyebrows lifted, but he didn’t get up. “Hey. How’ve you been?”
“Fine,” Shane said shortly.
The waitress arrived with a fresh drink for Chris and a hot pot of coffee. “Want a top-up, love?” she said in a British accent.
“Yes, thank you,” Natalie said pointedly.
Coffee meant she wanted a clear head for the conversation, which meant it was probably professional, but in that moment he realized he had no idea what was going on for her at work. Awareness stung like a reprimand shouted across the trading floor. “She’s done,” Shane said to the waitress, who took one good look at him and turned on her heel and left.
Nat glared at him. “You have no right,” she started icily.
“I left work early to go home with my wife,” Shane said. Energy seethed under his skin, combative and growling. Coffee or not, he bared his teeth at Chris in what could pass for a smile, if the other man was an idiot.
The corner of Chris’s mouth lifted in a wry smile. “Looks like you’re done, Nat,” he said easily. “Call me over the weekend if you want to keep talking.”
“You don’t have to leave, Chris,” she protested.
“I’m not leaving,” he said as he picked up his glass and looked around the bar. “You are, unless you want to make a big scene in Lannisters.”
Shane wasn’t risking life or limb to help her with her coat. Nat tugged on the ankle-length wool coat with jerky, angry movements, then buttoned it all the way to the fur collar. On the street she made him wait while she wrapped her scarf around her neck, trapping the long fall of her dark brown hair inside the blue fabric, then set off in the direction of Penn Station.
Silence. She was utterly silent on the way to the station, her fury almost as cold as the wind slapping at their faces while he walked and she stalked, her heels hitting the cement like hammers. Once inside the station she wouldn’t even look at him while they waited for the train, merely sat on one of the benches and pulled out her BlackBerry. Cold hung around her like damp drifts of snow. He stood off to the side, watching her thumb away at the little keypad, and wondered what had become of the fiery, passionate woman he fell in love with before he could even talk to her about anything other than Medieval history.
He wanted her back. He wanted their marriage back, but she was freezing him out, and an ice cold, brittle Natalie wasn’t in the right frame of mind to clear the air. Inside the nearly empty train car she plunked down in a window seat next to a middle-aged woman immersed in an e-reader, forcing him into the seat across from her. Mildly amused, he sat down, braced his foot on her footrest. His calf rested against her bare leg, and she cut him another glare.
“Don’t you want to know why I was calling?” he asked with a glance at the BlackBerry.
“No,” she said, and went back to the BlackBerry.