“Dodging reporters, hoping my boss gets engaged, planning on setting one parent straight, fitting in a phone call to the other parent, and looking forward to hitting the town with the girls tonight.”
“You’re awesome.”
“What can I say?” I smiled. “How’s school? And work?”
I knew Trey was studying to be a veterinarian and juggling jobs to pay for it. One of those gigs was as a photographer’s assistant, which was how he’d met Cary.
He winced. “Both brutal, but it’ll pay off someday.”
“We should have another movie-and-pizza night when you get a chance.” I couldn’t help rooting for Trey in the tug-of-war between him and Tatiana. It could just be me, but she’d always seemed very adversarial toward me. And I didn’t like the way she’d put herself forward when she met Gideon.
“Sure. I’ll see what Cary’s schedule is like.”
I regretted bringing it up to Trey first instead of Cary, because some of the light left his eyes. I knew he was thinking about Cary having to fit him in between time with Tatiana. “Well, if he’s not up for it, we can always go out without him.”
His mouth tilted up on one side. “Sounds like a plan.”
AT ten minutes to one, I exited the lobby to find Clancy already waiting for me. He waved aside the doorman and opened the town car door for me, but no one looking at him would believe he was just a driver. He carried himself like the weapon he was, and in all the years I’d known him, I couldn’t recall ever seeing him smile.
Once he’d resumed his seat behind the wheel, he turned off the police scanner he routinely listened to and pulled his sunglasses down enough to catch my eye in the rearview mirror. “How are you?”
“Better than my mom, I’m guessing.”
He was too professional to give anything away in his expression. Instead, he slid his shades back into place and synced my phone to the car’s Bluetooth to start my playlist. Then he pulled away from the curb.
Reminded of his thoughtfulness, I said, “Hey. I’m sorry I took it out on you. You were doing a job and you didn’t deserve to get bitched at for it.”
“You’re not just a job, Miss Tramell.”
I was silent for a bit, absorbing that. Clancy and I had a distant, polite association. We saw each other quite a bit because he was responsible for getting me to and from my Krav Maga classes in Brooklyn. But I’d never really thought about him having any sort of personal stake in my safety, although it made sense. Clancy was a guy who took pride in his work.
“It wasn’t just that one thing, though,” I clarified. “A lot of stuff happened before you and Stanton ever came into the picture.”
“Apology accepted.”
The brusque reply was so like him that it made me smile.
Settling more comfortably into the seat, I looked out the window at the city I’d adopted and loved passionately. On the sidewalk beside me, strangers stood shoulder to shoulder over a tiny counter, eating individual slices of pizza. As close as they were, they were distant, each displaying a New Yorker’s ability to be an island in a crashing tide of people. Pedestrians flowed past them in both directions, avoiding a man pushing religious flyers and the tiny dog at his feet.
The vitality of the city had a frenetic pulse that made time seem to move faster here than anywhere else. It was such a contrast to the lazy sensuality of Southern California, where my dad lived and I’d gone to school. New York was a dominatrix on the prowl, cracking a mean whip and tantalizing with every vice.