The List

by Anne Calhoun

  “Go back to work, Mum,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “All right, darling. Lovely to see you. Help yourself to whatever,” she said, gesturing vaguely down the hall toward the kitchen.

  It was an automatic response. Her mother drifted into her study. The clicking of keys accompanied Tilda and Daniel past the towering Christmas tree decorated with white lights, up the stairs to the second floor.

  “The reception room?” Daniel said under his breath.

  “Living room.”

  “That’s what a living room is called in England?”

  “Only in Chelsea,” she said. “In here.”

  She opened a door to a room whose bed was bare of linens. Surely her mother would have remembered to tell her household help to make up a guest room. No, wait, she was remembering the town house two streets over. “Hang on. Here.”

  She opened the door to the second guest room, the one with the en suite bath, and found a four-poster bed straight out of Elizabethan England, mounded with white bedding topped with white satin throw pillows, and stopped dead. Still preoccupied with trying not to bang the luggage into the cream wallpaper, Daniel nearly ran up her heels.

  He stifled a laugh. “It’s very . . . bridal,” he said, and nudged her forward, into the hideous room. “Is this her idea of a joke?”

  That was the problem with her mother. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps she was trying to do something lovely for Tilda, something romantic. Perhaps it was a not-so-subtle gesture to give her back what was long gone. Explaining the vast, labyrinthine history leading to these divergent possibilities to Daniel was beyond her. “White’s very chic at the moment,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I can wait to see you in that bed,” Daniel said under his breath. He set his small rolling case on the strip of hardwood left bare by the Turkish rug, then crossed the room to heft Tilda’s larger bag on the luggage rack in the closet. She unzipped it and pulled out her toiletries bag.

  “You may have to. Mother’s dinner parties can linger until the wee hours, if the conversation gets going. I want to have a look at the storefront locations,” she said and stepped past him into the toilet.

  “I thought you were doing that tomorrow, with the real estate broker and Colin?” he called through the door.

  She rinsed her face and began reapplying makeup. “I am, but I want to see the sites without someone telling me what I’m seeing.” She ran her brush through her hair, and opened the door.

  “You want to do some surveillance,” he said with a little half smile. He was standing by the foot of the ridiculous bed, hands in his pockets, jacket and shirt miraculously unwrinkled, deliciously scruffy, but then Daniel always looked like he belonged. “Scope out the joint. Reconnoiter. See what you can see.”

  “Exactly,” she said, and emptied her leather tote of all but the essentials—iPad, wallet, makeup case, lipstick, business-card case. Her cards still read Matilda Davies. The paperwork to change her name was staggering and would involve bureaucracies on two continents, as she was still a British citizen, with a passport issued in her maiden name, a green card also issued in her maiden name, not to mention her entire financial identity tied up in West Village Stationery. She would make at least one more trip to the UK to close this deal, perhaps two, and there was some talk of going to Tokyo and Dubai to meet investors. The thought of dealing with the TSA if somehow her names didn’t all align was enough to make her back away, hands up protectively. Daniel hadn’t asked about changing her name, and she hadn’t offered to.

  “Let’s walk. I could use a walk.”

  She followed him down the stairs, then peered around the door to her mother’s study. “We’re going out,” she said. “Dinner’s at eight?”

  “Yes,” her mother said, clearly distracted. “Tilda, I’m in the middle of a rather tricky conclusion—”

  “We’re leaving. We’ll be back in time for dinner. Text me if you need anything.”

  Her mother seemed to remember their company. “Yes, of course, darling. Have fun showing Daniel the city.”

  She closed the front door behind her and stepped out into a gorgeous London winter day. Shifting her tote higher on her shoulder, she reached for Daniel’s hand and set off down the pavement toward Marylebone. The quiet residential streets quickly filled as they approached.

  “Good foot traffic,” she noted.

  “Zip your bag,” Daniel responded absently. He was studying the buildings around them, but the cop never really stopped working. Tilda shoved her phone in the front pocket of her jeans and zipped the top of her leather tote. “Where are we going?”

  “Bond Street and the Dover Street Market, and Primrose Hill,” she said. She left him reading a sign on the side of a building and walked the length of the block. A nice mix of shops, restaurants, cafes. Further up the street she could see two art galleries, one name she recognized and a second she didn’t. Crossing the street, she walked more slowly and examined the shop windows. Luxury goods, for the most part, the windows understated, elegant, the kind of angular theme in the shop windows that walked the fine line between artistic and incomprehensible. No sale signs, no price tags, even. If one wanted to inquire, one would have to go inside and ask, which meant one likely couldn’t afford it. “It’s the equivalent of the Upper East Side. Old money, which appreciates time-honored traditions, with new money buying in, eager to blend in. Let’s get a coffee.”

  She claimed a table in one of the cafe’s outdoor seating areas while Daniel ordered two large lattes at the counter. When he sat down she had her iPad out, making notes. Lots of window-shoppers, tourists gawking, a few art students making their way from the galleries to the Tube stop several streets over. Range Rovers, BMWs, and Mercedes lined the streets, or in rarer instances, idled at the curb while the chauffeur waited to ferry a woman to her next destination.

  “I thought the people at Quality sent you reports on the location. Foot traffic, sales information, that kind of thing.”

  She sipped the latte. “They did,” she said. “But data can be massaged. Locations have a particular feel. South of Houston isn’t SoHo, London. SoHo isn’t the West Village. Places, like people, have an energy all their own.”

  He looked up from the guidebook, and caught her eye. “You have a sixth sense for that.”

  “You do, too,” she said.

  “It’s a matter of life or death for cops,” he said, but his smile muted the seriousness. “If you don’t hone that gut instinct, you end up walking into bad situations. A healthy radar keeps it from going from bad to worse.”

  “Do you teach that?”

  He flipped the book over and sat back, ankle on his knee. The intersection of his Oxford and jeans, the brown leather belt, the way his jacket gaped to reveal his slim torso sent a slow, hot rush through her. “I only trained a couple of rookies, but when I did, I hammered away at the danger signs. The rest of it is pure instinct. You either know when someone’s hiding something or you don’t. You either see the killer in a pair of eyes, or you don’t.”

  “But where you counsel people to turn around and walk away if they feel threatened or challenged, you keep going.”

  He shrugged. “That’s the job.”

  “How were your instincts?”

  “Sharp enough to keep me alive,” he said. “Better than most, worse than some. One rookie I trained, Deshawn Richards, was like you. He could read nuances in a person or a group like they’d whispered all their secrets in his ear before he walked into it. He knew who had power, who meant harm, who would walk away when told to, who would get in our faces, who’d walk away and then come at us behind our backs. He had instincts. I had memory.”

  She smiled at him, caffeine and the adrenaline rush of the expansion coursing through her veins. She could almost, almost forget what lay ahead. “You’re an odd one,” she said.

  He just l
ifted his eyebrows and grinned. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored. I know how you feel about being bored.”

  “I know how you feel about being bored,” she scoffed.

  “I’m never bored with you,” he said quietly.

  The mood shifted, acquired an edge she didn’t recognize. He reached across the table and clasped her left hand, running his thumb over her thin wedding ring, then lifted it to his mouth and kissed it. Then he went back to his book.

  They lingered for another hour. Tilda took notes, formulated the questions she’d ask at the meeting tomorrow, and bought a bottle of water to drink on the walk to the next location. Daniel methodically plowed through the guidebook, and disappeared for twenty minutes, coming back with a more confident step.

  “Ascertained our location in the space-time continuum?” she asked. When he nodded, she added, “Let’s go,” and zipped her tote.

  The visit to Primrose Hill was a short trip made longer by a meander through a secondhand bookstore. Tilda repeated her process outside the second location while Daniel leafed through a 1950 edition of the Parade’s End tetralogy.

  “When’s dinner?” he said absently.

  “Drinks probably around eight, perhaps eight thirty. We won’t sit down to eat until after nine.”

  “Let’s eat something,” Daniel said.

  Another seat at another cafe directly across the street from the shop with a For Let sign in the window. Daniel produced two more lattes and a platter of bread, cheese, olives, and fruit, with a gigantic shortbread for dessert.

  “I’m not sure,” Tilda said. She knew London well enough to get around without consulting a laminated map, but beyond that, she was lost. “It doesn’t feel like the West Village.”

  Daniel swallowed his mouthful of roll. “You can’t expect it to feel like New York.”

  “Yes, but it needs to be close enough to replicate the success I’ve had there.” She closed her eyes and let the energy surge up from her feet, pooling in her joints, knees and hips and elbows and shoulders, her spine and her jaw. “It’s close. I’m just not sure.” She found her tablet and opened the documents from the real estate agent and investor.

  Daniel stifled a yawn. “I need a nap or I’m going to fall asleep in the soup course when it’s served at ten.”

  “I think it’s a cold soup, if that helps,” she said, still focused on the spreadsheet. “Can you find your way back?”

  “I can,” he said, amused, “but you’re coming with me. You need a nap, too. I saw you sitting in the inn’s window seat when I woke up at two. And at four. You’re going to crash.”

  “I wanted to watch the moon on the ocean,” she said absently. “And I do not crash. As much traveling as I’ve done, I hardly feel jet lag.”

  “It takes the right combination of jet lag, sleeplessness, and stress, then you crash like an ocean liner sinking,” he said. “Slowly, magnificently graceful as you slip beneath the waves, but it takes a crane to get you up again. Thirty minutes. Just a short nap.”

  “I just need to read through these—” So much was riding on this expansion. Everything she’d wanted the night she met Daniel. Quality Group joining forces with West Village Stationery would put her on the global map, taking her from a moderately successful shop owner into the rarefied air of an international brand. No one could take that away from her.

  “Tilda. We are going to go back to your mother’s house and we are going to lie down for thirty minutes. If you want to come back before this late-night meal your mother’s calling a dinner, we’ll have plenty of time.”

  She glanced in the plate-glass window of the antiques shop next to the cafe. Her skin was pale, and the shadows under her eyes weren’t just a trick of the light. “Thirty minutes,” she said.

  He stood and held out his hand. She stuffed everything in her tote and took it. They hailed a cab on the corner and were back in Chelsea by five.

  “Just taking a quick nap, Mum,” Tilda called as they opened the door.

  “Lovely, darling,” her mother said.

  “Has she moved from that office since we left?” Daniel asked as they climbed the stairs.

  “Likely not,” Tilda said.

  Daniel stripped to his boxers and a T-shirt, then set his phone alarm. Hands on his hips, he cocked one eyebrow toward the bed piled with throw pillows. “What do we do with these?”

  Tilda thrust both arms into the mound and swept them off the end of the bed. Daniel chuckled as he pulled back the duvet, then stretched out on his stomach. Tilda undressed to her bra and knickers. He was asleep before she lay down beside him.

  —

  She dreamed, something she rarely did at night, let alone while napping. In her dream she sat alone in a sage silk-papered dining room, dressed in a denim microskirt and her wedding ring, eating bangers and mash off elegant china.

  —

  Daniel didn’t move when the alarm buzzed. She kissed his cheekbone, sandpaper-rough with stubble. “Daniel,” she whispered.

  He didn’t even grunt. Amused, she pushed up the short sleeve of his T-shirt and kissed the bellied swell of his triceps. He had the lean look of a distance runner, his skeleton carrying nothing but skin and muscle. Tendons and veins stood out under the skin of his arm. In sleep, the furrow between his eyebrows had smoothed out, as had the tension around his mouth. He looked young, and vulnerable.

  “Daniel,” she tried again.

  Nothing. His breathing didn’t change, so she hooked one finger under the T-shirt’s hem and pulled it up to reveal the small of his back. She placed another kiss in the fine dusting of dark gold hair there, then the dimple to either side.

  No movement at all. “Wake up,” she said in a singsong voice, and tugged down the wrinkled elastic edge of his boxers and kissed the place where his tailbone disappeared into the cleft of his buttocks. He really did have a very fine bottom. When she touched her tongue to the spot she just kissed, he shifted ever so slightly. She pulled the elastic down even more until it caught on either his hipbones or his erection, and continued to lick her way down the cleft, insinuating her hand under the elastic, between his thighs, to cup his balls.

  At that touch he twitched and lifted his head to peer over his shoulder. His eyes were sleep-dazed, but arousal battled the exhaustion. She needed this. Sex with Daniel was rapidly becoming the only thing that grounded her in space and time. “Hi,” she said.

  “Door locked?” he asked. Sleep transformed his normally low voice to the resting purr of a motorcycle engine.

  “Yes.”

  He rolled toward her, onto his back, revealing his torso. His body was built to go the distance, not bench-press a car, so he carried very little extra muscle, and almost no body fat. “Keep going,” he said.

  So she did, primly kneeling beside him while she lifted the elastic waistband clear of his erection, working the cotton down to his upper thighs. His shaft, thick and blood-hot, strained to his hipbones. She stroked him slowly while his hand wandered down the length of her spine to her hip, and back up again. She kept her touch light until his hand, on a return trip to her nape, pressed ever so gently to urge her forward. Flashing him a quick smile, she bent and licked the salty fluid from the tip, then took him in her mouth.

  The angle was awkward, preventing her from taking him deeply, but she compensated with a firm stroke in time with her shallow bobs. Heat simmered between her thighs when his breathing hitched into a low, rough rasp. She tongued over the head, used her hand to spread saliva down the shaft. He was stone-hard in her mouth, his grip on her hip almost painfully tight.

  “C’mere,” he muttered when she pulled off to tease him.

  He helped her get her panties off, then they shifted to give her room to straddle his shoulders. He ran his hands up her back to urge her forward, then grasped her hips and pulled her slick folds to his mouth. Even with the awkward angl
e his tongue quickly found her clit; he made a soft, rough, satisfied sound when she trembled in his grasp.

  “God, Daniel,” she gasped, arching at the confident touch.

  A lift of his hips reminded her of her role in this stolen, silent moment. She sucked the first couple of inches of his shaft into her mouth and followed his pace, far too slow for her liking. She curled her hand under his heavy thigh, pulled his legs further apart, and stroked the tender skin there, prompting him to lift his hips. Only her hand around the base of his cock kept him from sliding deep. She took advantage, sucked and squeezed and hummed, all at once, his answering groan muffled against her sex.

  She began to subtly rock her hips, pushing her clit into his rapacious mouth. He flattened one palm against her lower spine and slid two fingers into her, then crooked them against the bundle of nerves inside. She exhaled shakily around his cock, half gasping and half sobbing as her muscles quivered. Her own technique grew sloppy but he didn’t seem to care in the slightest, rocking his cock through the tight circle of her hand, into her mouth in time to her own movements.

  She came in a series of pulsing thuds, her cries muffled against his hipbone. She collapsed beside him, her head by his knees, her feet tucked under the overstuffed pillows. He turned and kissed her calf, then made a soft, humming noise and moved his fingers up to the crux of her thighs. “You in nothing but your bra is very hot,” he said.

  “Not awkward?” she asked with a smile.

  “It’s like I’ve left something undone,” he said, and rolled onto his side. His big hand curved along her hip and ribs to stroke the place where silk and elastic met skin. “You know how I hate loose ends.”

  “My bra is a loose end, and this,” she said, squeezing his erection, “isn’t?”

  He nodded, his smile now lifting the corners of his mouth. “Looks like we have several loose ends. How much time do we have?”