could—” Em was gone. “—say that.” Across the crowd, someone dropped a cup loudly into its saucer, making him jolt. He converted the movement into a stretch—nothing to see here, folks, no soldier making an idiot of himself—and plucked the paperback from his camera bag, but before he could settle himself on the page the goddamned bells jangled again, clawing on his nerves like a black cat, and he jerked toward the door.
His chest expanded and deflated.
Well, well. Jane Doe. Of all the girls.
She took off her sunglasses to reveal an expression of utter, utter dismay. (With another girl he might simply have said total dismay.) Her shiny dark hair bobbed about her ears as she looked one way and the other, searching for a booth around which to enact her invisible force field. She wore a berry-red dress, sleeveless, a white cardigan pulled around her shoulders. Her face glowed with recent exercise, making him think instantly of sex (vigorous, sweaty morning sex on white sheets, while the early sunlight poured through the window, and a long hot shower afterward that might just end up in more sex, if luck were a lady, and if the lady could still walk).
Em passed by. Miss Doe tapped her on the elbow and asked her a question; Em replied with a helpless shrug and moved on.
Miss Doe’s elegant eyebrows converged to a cranky point. She had expected better than this. To her left, a sandy-haired boy about four years old started up a tantrum, a real grand mal, no holds barred, a thrashing, howling fit-to-be-tied fit over a glass of spilled milk. In the same instant, the door opened behind her, and a large man barged through, smack between Miss Doe’s white cardiganed shoulder blades. She staggered forward, clutching her pocketbook, while the man maneuvered around her and called for Em in a loud Boston twang.
At which point, Cap raised his hand into the crowded air.
Not a wave. Not a beckoning of the fingers. Just a single hand, lifted up above the sea of heads, the way he might signal noiselessly to another soldier in the jungle. I’m here, buddy. At your back. Never fear.
Miss Doe wasn’t a soldier. She saw his hand and ducked her head swiftly, pretending she hadn’t noticed. But an instant later, her eyes returned to his corner. He lowered the hand and shrugged, pretending he didn’t care.
But his heart was bouncing off his rib cage, and it wasn’t just the crash of the coffee cup and the jingle of bells. Miss Doe was slender and gently curved, almost boyish, not his preferred figure at all, and still he couldn’t remove his mind from the belly of that berry-red dress, the tiny pleats at her tiny waist, the rise of her breasts below the straight edge of her collar. The pink curve of her lips, slightly parted. The suggestive flush of her cheeks. Flushed with what? Did she spend the night with her fiancé? Did she shed her immaculate clothes for him, her immaculate hair and lipstick? Did she let down her force field and allow him inside?
What was she like, inside her force field?
She lifted an uncertain eyebrow. He held up his hands before his chest, palms out, and sent her his best crooked smile, the one that never failed. No threat here. Just helping a girl out, the goodness of his heart.
Miss Doe hoisted her pocketbook up her shoulder, the same gesture as before, and walked poker-faced toward his booth. He liked the way she moved, sinuous and gymnastic in her matching berry-red kitten heels, not the usual mincing gait you saw around town. Girls with no stride at all, no swing, no natural grace.
You could always see the real girl in her walk, couldn’t you? The one thing she couldn’t make over.
She arrived at the booth, smelling of Chanel.
“Caspian,” he said, without standing up.
She slid in across from him, holding her dress beneath her. She settled her pocketbook on the seat, well away from his grasp, and folded her hands on the edge of the table. Her engagement ring glittered just so in the yellow light from the hanging lamp. Mother of God. Three carats at least. Almost as big as his grandmother’s rock.
“Tiny,” she said.
“Tiny?” he said. “Is that a nickname?”
She fixed him a steely one. “Yes, it is.”
She studied the menu carefully, considered each item, and raised her head at last to order her usual coffee and an apricot Danish. Em hid a smile and scooted obediently off, tucking her pencil between her ear and her graying brown hair. She scooted right on past the boy with the tantrum and his harried mother, who cajoled and scolded in alternating beats.
“Please go ahead,” Tiny said, gesturing to Cap’s plate. “Don’t let it go cold on my account.”
“I won’t.” He picked up his fork with one hand and his paperback with the other, and commenced—against every instinct, ground in him since childhood—to shovel and read, having rolled the cover carefully around the back so she couldn’t see the title.
“I appreciate your offering me a seat, Caspian,” she said. Elocution lessons, no doubt at all. The vowels so terribly well-rounded, the consonants crisp enough to shatter on contact. That kind of expensive vocal delivery didn’t just occur by accident.
He loaded his fork with eggs, gestured prong first to the paperback, and said, “Sorry. Do you mind?”
Her pink lips compressed into a straight line. “I beg your pardon.”
He pretended to read amid the fracas. Tiny tapped her finger on the edge of the table and glanced back at the screaming boy.
“She should take him outside,” she said softly. Not the way most women would say something like that, all pursed lips and disapproval. Curious. You’d think the impeccable Miss Doe would regard the mothers of misbehaving children in the same class as criminals.
“What’s that?”
“She should take him outside. The boy. He’ll settle down sooner without an audience, where it’s calm.”
He shrugged and turned his eyes back to the paperback.
Tiny’s coffee and Danish clattered down before her. She added a dainty few grains of sugar, a precious few drops of cream.
“Refill, Cap?” asked Em.
He looked up. Em winked and tilted her head at the berry-red figure across from him, sipping her coffee.
Cap held out his cup and pointed his thumb at Tiny’s Danish. “Yes, ma’am. And I’ll have one of those, too.”
“Well, and who’s the hungry one today? Exercising again?”
“Yes, ma’am. Fit for service.”
Em set down the coffeepot on the edge of the table. She was the kind of waitress who could ignore the breakfast rush when it suited her. He liked that about her. “C’mon, then,” she said. “What did you do this morning?”
Ran eight miles. Lifted dumbbells in the attic. Climbed the stairs, wearing his pack, bottom to top, seventy-five seconds flat. Five times.
He shrugged. “Some running, some weights.”
Em stuck out her hand and tried to measure his left bicep with her hand. “Flex for me, Cap.”
He obliged.
“That’s not bad. They grow ’em big where you come from, huh?”
“Just elbow grease, ma’am. Works every time.”
Em winked again and turned to Tiny, who sat there razor straight, face frozen in a prim pink smile. Em nudged the nearby air with her coffeepot. “You watch yourself with him, ma’am. He’ll charm your socks off if you’re not careful.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me.”
Cap returned his attention to his book. Tiny sipped her coffee, and when Em arrived back with Cap’s apricot Danish she asked for a fork, so she could eat her own, which she did in small bites, each one passed gracefully from her plate