long and shapely. She would smile. What harm could it do, for these few moments, to forget The Gift and simply be happy in a man's company?
If only such a thing were possible.
She made it to the Rose Gardens's gift shop in less than twenty minutes, but he'd managed to get there ahead of her. In the manner of men everywhere, as he waited he paced, fidgeting, a paper bag from a fast-food place in one hand, the other in his pocket except when he pulled it out every few seconds to glance at his wrist.
She didn't mean to listen in on his unguarded emotions, but his pacing path had taken him away from the entrance to the gardens, so he was unaware of her approach and therefore unshielded. And too far away to call to without making a spectacle of them both. She would have expected impatience, even annoyance, given his earlier mood-in her experience, all men seemed to hate waiting. But if he did feel any of that it was being overshadowed by darker, fiercer emotions. Waves of frustration too strong to have been caused by a few minutes' wait. Rashes of violence. Islands of tragedy in a sea of emptiness. A complex puzzle with too many pieces missing for her to see what it was about.
Her steps faltered, then quickened as she hurried to get close enough to him to call out. Her jaws tightened as she struggled to smile. She was determined to smile.
'Wade-hello!'
He executed an almost comical about-face, and she felt instant relief from the emotional barrage. As he strolled lazily toward her the smile on his face revealed nothing but the pleasure of a man greeting a woman on a beautiful spring day. His feelings were completely shielded from her now, so she couldn't even be sure if the pleasure and the smile were real.
To avoid the almost certain awkwardness of their meeting like this, she gestured toward the fast-food bag he was holding and said. 'Was that the best you could do?'
He arched his eyebrows. 'Hey, I'm a manly man. I require red meat.' He shrugged and added. 'Besides, it was on the way.'
He motioned toward the camera hanging around her neck. 'I see you came armed.'
'It's the reason I wanted to come here, actually. I needed more rose photos. I use them for my paintings, and with the Rose Festival coming up I have to have plenty ready to sell.'
She didn't mention the part about needing the healing powers of the place, and was surprised when he said softly, 'Is that the only reason?'
Something quickened inside her, and she squinted and put up a hand to shield her eyes, though not from the sun. 'What do you mean?'
'Oh, I don't know…just that you said this was a place where most of the feelings floating around are happy ones. I figured, after the past couple of days, you might be needing some of that about now.'
She couldn't answer him-didn't know what to say. She felt idiotic to be so touched by his words. And by the fact that it seemed he'd gone beyond just believing in her gift and was even beginning to understand it.
The awkward moment stretched, and as such moments often do, ended when both of them spoke at the same time. Tierney said. 'What did you want-' and Wade said. 'I guess we should-' and it was Tierney who yielded with a small self-conscious laugh.
'Eat first,' Wade said firmly. 'Then talk.'
He'd almost forgotten what he'd come for. The watcher in the car outside his apartment this morning, who may or may not have been present at the news conference at police headquarters-it had all faded into background noise the moment he'd turned and seen her coming toward him. the sun making a halo of her hair and painting roses on her cheeks, her rapid pace stirring breezes that flirted with her skirt and teased him with the suggestion of long, slender thighs beneath…
They decided to eat lunch in a picnic area in the park near the gardens. Tierney chose a reasonably clean table and Wade dusted it off with some of the abundance of napkins he'd grabbed to go with his burger. He tried to remember the last time he'd eaten a meal outdoors under trees with a beautiful woman, and couldn't. He made a mental note to do it more often, assuming he could find a woman willing to go along.
He hauled the fries out of the bag first, as always, and managed to get a couple of ketchup packets opened before he lost patience and went after the main course. He was about to bite into his burger with his usual gusto when his attention was claimed by the woman across the table from him.
He watched, his own lunch poised halfway to his mouth, as she unwrapped the foil from an untidy mound of just about every vegetable he'd ever heard of-tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, some kind of sprouts, and God only knew what else-barely contained between two slices of seriously healthy and crunchy-looking brown bread. His eyes followed, his breathing held in suspense, as she carefully lifted this monster to her mouth, closed her eyes and took a hefty bite. There was a distinct crunch, followed by a soft moan of pleasure.
Wade's stomach gave a loud growl. He just managed to get his mouth closed before her eyes opened wide and focused on him.
'Hmm?' she asked, smiling with closed lips in a way that reminded him of a contented cat.
'Nothing.' Which was the only thing he could say without opening up doors between them that were better left shut.
She chewed, swallowed, picked an errant wisp of sprouts from her lips, then said with a shrug, 'You were probably going to say something snarky about my sandwich-and that's not by benefit of my 'gift', by the way. Merely what most men would say, I suspect.'
'Maybe I'm not 'most men,'' he said with a certain arrogance, and with veiled eyes and a shrug of his own. Then he looked up at her and smiled. 'Not that it surprises me. I should've guessed you'd be a vegetarian.'
'I'm not a vegetarian. Not totally,' she managed to say through another bite. 'I just forgot to go grocery shopping. With everything that's been…' She let that trail off into silence, and he knew she regretted being the one to invite the shadows back.
They ate in silence, then, and she waited until she'd finished her sandwich and he'd polished off his burger and tapped into his diet soda before she reminded him why they were there. She twisted the top off a bottle of water, took a sip, then quietly asked, 'So? What did you want to talk to me about?'
He squeezed a glob of ketchup onto the wrapper from his burger, picked up a small bouquet of French fries and dabbed them into the ketchup, thinking it didn't seem right, somehow, to be talking of nightmares and sinister watchers and serial killers in such a setting. Wishing he could enjoy the respite
But the world, particularly the part of it he lived in, wasn't a rose garden.
He frowned at the ketchup-draped fries, popped them all into his mouth and went on frowning while he chewed and thought about how to ask the questions swirling like dry leaves in his mind.
'I suppose,' said Tierney. casually helping herself to one of his fries, 'you want to know more about The Watcher. I'm not 'reading' you,' she added, fixing her candid blue eyes on his face. 'It pretty much has to be that or the case, and if it was the case, you'd probably have asked me to meet you at police headquarters. And-' she popped the French fry into her mouth and munched for a moment '-you wouldn't find it so hard to talk about.'
He confirmed that with a mirthless laugh. 'Nice deduction, Sherlock. Okay, yeah. I want to know about this… watcher, stalker, or whoever he is. It
'I think so.' She tilted her head, considering. 'Yes-I'm pretty sure it's a man. Or…men.'
'And you're not picking up on what the guy-or guys-want?'
'No…but-'
'But
'I don't get any sense of anger, or hate-anything that suggests he means you harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. He seems… I don't know. I just keep picking up this sense of
