Another shrug, this one lightly tossed off, barely moving his shoulders. “Of course.”
I examined his face, but the interplay of moonlight and shadow concealed his emotions. So I stood on tiptoe and looked him right in the eye. Up close I could catch it—the deliberately steady gaze, guileless and innocent. Trey rarely lied, but when he did, this was what it looked like.
I tilted my head. “Trey?”
“Yes?”
“How did you know I’d already put my gun away?”
He blinked at me, not saying a word. I stepped even closer, the grass cool under my bare feet, Trey warm in front of me.
“You stood there and watched me undress,” I said.
He put his hands on his hips. “You left the curtain open. I’ve warned you many times—”
“About perverts lurking, yes, you have.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but didn’t defend himself. I laughed, which earned me another sharp look. He put one finger to his lips, but that made me laugh harder.
“You gotta work on your peeping tom game,” I said, and then utterly lost it. I laughed until I was weak in the knees, hiccupping, tears in my eyes. Trey endured the spectacle without comment. Eventually, I pulled myself together and wiped my eyes on my sleeve.
Trey’s voice was stern. “Are you finished?”
I swatted his arm. “Don’t act prissy. It’s not like anybody’s still asleep after that unholy noise you unleashed.”
“It was an accident. I was distracted. There’s no reason for you to compound the…whatever.”
I caught it in his voice then. Sheepish amusement. He still had his hands on his hips, but his mouth was kinked at the corner. I couldn’t tell in the dark, but I knew he had to be blushing. He couldn’t help it. He had an Irish complexion and an altar boy soul.
“Are you off duty now?” I said.
“Technically. I’m still on call, though, so I have to be back at the station in an hour.”
I smiled. “That’s okay. We can do a lot of debriefing in an hour.”
He exhaled softly, let me take his hand to lead him inside. But then he stopped. “Tai?”
“Yes?”
“How did you find out?”
I looked up at him. The night was sweet with late summer, the moonlight clear and potent as liquor. In the dappled shadows, it was easy to forget that there was any world beyond the circle of us. Mayhem raged, some of it barely a hundred feet away. But with Trey, there was sanctuary. He created it as deftly as any defense system.
“Do you really want to know?” I said. “Because if you do, I’ll tell you. If you ask the right way.”
He didn’t move for another fifteen seconds. Then he slipped his hand from mine, not breaking eye contact as he retrieved the radio from his pocket.
He pushed the call button. “Seaver here. I’ve completed the perimeter patrol.”
A hiss of static, then a voice. “Got that, sir. You going ten-ten?”
“Affirmative. You have the radio for the next hour.”
A voice crackled back. “Copy that, sir.”
“Seaver out.”
He slipped it back in his pocket, pulled off the earpiece and tucked it in his pocket too. He ran his gaze over my eyes and mouth, my throat, the rest of me. I didn’t move, stood stock-still in the cool silvery light as he took my hand and turned it palm up, then pressed a kiss to the thrumming pulse point at the inside of my wrist. The breeze quickened as he snaked his other hand under the tee, from the small of my back up the curve of my spine, trailing goose bumps and shivers, and I literally—literally—got so dizzy with the blood rush I thought I might fall out on the patio.
I wrapped my arms around his neck. “That is definitely the right way to ask.”
He laughed lightly, in the back of his throat. Laughter was new from him, rarer even than that dazzling roguish smile. And I felt a deeper thrill, one beyond sensation, one that came from the understanding that in the tangled web of his past, present, and future selves, Trey was simply Trey. And he was all mine.
I kissed the center of his chest, right above his heart. “You think sixty minutes is long enough to get all the details?”
“Most likely. Accounting for the typical variables.” He canted his head. “But there’s no rush, is there?”
I reached for his belt buckle. “There might be.”
Chapter Forty-four
He dressed in the dark, sitting on the edge of the bed. I stayed naked under the sheets. I’d hoped to entice him to stay, but duty called. Or something like duty. Whatever it was pulling him back into the night.
He turned his head sideways. “How did you convince Mac to tell you the rest of the story?”
“He got the idea I was mad at you, and that worried him. So he explained. Everything.”
Trey slipped into his shirt. “I’m waiting for your commentary.”
“On what? That you got fired because you were offering gigolo services on the side?”
“I was not! That is exactly—”
I laughed. “Hush. I’m messing with you. Mac explained very clearly that that wasn’t what happened.”
Trey shot me a somewhat mollified look and continued dressing. The lawyer had been a regular at the hotel, Mac has said, a business traveler. If Trey was on duty, she’d ask for him, tipping him a hundred to personally care for her Porsche. And then one night, she’d written her room number on that hundred, and Trey—young and broke and one hundred percent heterosexual male—had gotten off work and gone up to that spectacular suite. And then he got fired the next day when one of the other valets accused him of being, in Mac’s exact words, a rent boy. But Mac told the lawyer what had happened the next time she showed up, and she threatened the HR department with many nasty lawsuits. In the end, Trey’s supervisor at the Ritz not only hired him back, he sent Trey and Mac both to
