“I’m fine, Da.” He hugged his father back, then pulled loose. “Really, I’m good. It was just something stupid, and I was focused on getting there to support Forest. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” Donal parroted back, clapping Quinn’s shoulders, then stepping back. “Take yer friend on. Then ye call me when ye get home. I want to know yer safe.”
Quinn started to nod, then stopped short. “Are you going to be asking Kane to call you when he gets home? Maybe Connor too?”
“That’s different—”
“How?” He shoved his way into his father’s line of sight, forcing Donal to face him. “How is that different, Da?”
“Because no one tried to kill Con or Kane with a truck the other day, and now ye’re standing here fixing a slashed tire. I’ll come by and dust it for prints, see if anything pulls off of it. One thing could be nothing, but twice ill in a week means there’s a pattern, or at least the start of one.” Donal’s knuckles swept a soft caress over Quinn’s cheek, a familiar gesture from Quinn’s childhood. “So, ye call me when ye get home. Or I’ll be knowing the reason you haven’t.”
TRAFFIC THROUGH the city was tight, too tight for Quinn’s liking. A delivery truck pulled up next to him at a stoplight about a block away from his Bay Street home, and he couldn’t repress the crawling shudder in his spine. He took the corner a bit faster than he’d have liked, skidding the borrowed Audi across the wet street.
“Yeah, kill yourself and watch Da go through the roof.” He steadied the car out, slowing down as he reached his street. “Finally, home.”
It was a hell of a commute to and from the university, then the theater. Anywhere across the bridge usually meant an hour or more during the best of days, but Quinn wouldn’t have traded his row-house-style home for anything. The street was a private nook of old buildings and tucked-in courtyards. Built tightly against each other, a nest of townhomes wrapped around the outside of a communal courtyard, and he’d fallen in love with its quirky three-storied structure, the garden patio built on top of his garage, and its rooftop terrace. Perched on a crest, the terrace gave him a clear view over long stretches of warehouses, down to the piers, and across to Alcatraz.
On a clear day, the sound of a nearby school carried children’s voices across the way, and at night, the heavy fog rolling off the water bounced up the sounds of the pier—a jangle of nightclubs, ship bells, and muddled-together music.
There was also the bonus of living someplace with little to no guest parking—a necessity when needing to circumvent a descending horde of Morgans.
The place had been a bit of hard work, not as intense as Connor’s old Victorian but close enough for Quinn to gain a hatred of smelling varnish. Unlike Connor, his forays into renovation began and ended at stripping floors and repainting rooms once a team of contractors broke down walls and rewired everything. Six months after purchasing the place, he’d moved in and settled in for a long life.
“Shit, garage remote’s still in the kitchen where you left it, you daft ass. Screw it. Car can sit in the drive for a bit.” Leaving the replacement Audi in front of his garage, he headed around the corner to the cluster of mailboxes he shared with the other row houses.
And was faced with a very familiar dilemma, knowing he’d met the woman standing in front of the mailboxes, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember her name.
She smiled when he drew near, holding up a stack of envelopes for him to see. There were a jumble of names on them, including his own, and none of it a helpful clue to the identity of the woman who’d just moved into the place with her white Maltese named Max. She was tall, her green eyes even with his own, and her short dark hair fluttered across her cheekbones when she kicked up a slight wind fanning the envelopes.
“I didn’t know you were a doctor,” she sang out to him. “What kind?”
“Kind of doctor?” He blinked, trying to remember if he’d introduced himself to her that way. It wasn’t something he did, not usually. Not ever. He hated the pretentiousness of it, hanging sheepskins on his shoulder as if he were some conquering hero returning from a long journey filled with Cyclops, Minotaur, and sirens. “Um, the usual kind—okay, not like the body kind, but… I did a dual first field, British and East Asia…. Japan, not China. But what—?”
“I’ve got your mail. Well, I think I’ve got everyone’s mail.”
Her smile was blinding, sucking in all of the ambient light coming through the trees and throwing it back into his face.
“Seems like the mailman decided he’d had enough of our crap and shoved all of the mail into my box. I was going to pick out the good ones and toss the junk mail, but I think that’s a federal offense or something. Makes you wonder what he’d do if he had to actually walk the street and deliver it to our houses.”