Someone was cooking, she hoped, because a violent scent of garlic was boiling out from the passthrough in clouds of steam.
She noticed this in an abstract way, all her focus zeroed in on Maverick, who watched her in return with an affable, unbothered expression.
“Well,” he said, after a long pause in which she couldn’t hear whether or not Pongo was breathing, and knew that she wasn’t. “That’s not true. Youdidhave a choice. You two chose to be martyrs when there were people perfectly willing to help you.”
Melissa frowned.
A guy with shaggy black hair and a lip ring stuck his head out of the kitchen, scowled, and said, “Is everyone eating or what?”
~*~
It turned out Toly made a damn good pasta sauce, if heavy on the garlic. “Vodka,” he said, when Pongo asked for the secret ingredient, to which Shepherd had snorted and said, “God, that’s fantastic.” Toly gave him a look so withering Shepherd should have been reduced to bones. Alas.
Dinner was pasta served on paper plates that tried to buckle on their laps. There were at least real, clean forks. They sat in the living room, there being no kitchen table nor, even more laughable a possibility, a dining table. Dixie was scootched up next to him on the couch, Shepherd on her far side, and Pongo wanted the bastard anywhere else. So did Dixie, if the way she kept inching closer and closer was any indication. Pongo was seconds away from ditching his plate and hauling her up into his lap – but held steady, for now, with Toly and Maverick across from them in the recliners.
Toly ate with his head down, seemingly disinterested, but Pongo knew he heard every word.
Maverick set his dinner aside on the coffee table and stayed leaning forward, elbows on his thighs, hands linked loosely between. “Okay, you two,” he said, and Pongo was back in the principal’s office, orange spray paint staining his fingertips. “First off: nobody’s in trouble.”
“Ppfffft,” Shepherd laughed. “Okay,Dad.”
Without looking at him, Mav said, “You can wait in the hall, or you can be quiet.”
Ooooh, Pongo thought, taking pleasure in the pettiness. He didn’t say it, though.
Dixie wasn’t eating, either, plate forgotten in her lap, very in danger of sliding off onto the floor and staining the carpet. She still had her head tilted back, chin in the air in a way that made her look ready for anything – and also terribly small and young. She wore the expression of the girl she’d been, back when a whole town turned against her. Braced for the worst and ready to tackle it alone.
He wished he’d had a moment alone to help prepare her for Maverick’s arrival.
He wished to God Shepherd wasn’t here.
“Melissa, right?” Maverick asked.
“Yes.” She bit off the word, her jaw tight, and Pongo knew it was nerves.
The easy slant of Maverick’s smile said he knew it, too. “Melissa, I don’t know what you’ve heard about the Lean Dogs…”
He left an opening, one that she filled with, “A lot.”
“I’d imagine so, in your line of work. But whatever it is, you don’t believe all of it, or you wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” The lines around his eyes deepened as his smile widened, and that was when Pongo heaved an internal sigh of relief, because it was going to be okay. This was Maverick, after all.
Dixie, though, he could tell by the stiffness of her thigh pressed to his, was going to take some convincing.
Maverick said, “One thing I wanna settle, before we go any further: I have no intentions of using anything you’ve done with or learned from my boy here” – nod toward Pongo – “against you with your bosses.” His gaze cut toward Shepherd, who remained silent, and then back. “You helped us out a few weeks ago and we all really appreciate it.
“Maybe that’s what’s been happening here, with your case. Maybe he’s helping you to return the favor. Maybe you told him he owed you one, after that night.”
He was being careful, Pongo noted, not to use any names, of people, or buildings, or organizations. He knew Dixie wasn’t wired, but Mav could have no way of knowing – and it stung a little to think that Mav doubted him that way; that he thought he might have been either covering for her, or been duped by her.
Then again, whatwouldhe have done, if she was recording this conversation? If she turned it over to her captain and get them all dragged off in cuffs?
The whole thing was a shitshow, one that had been brewing for a while, unbeknownst to him…or to her, going by the way her hair shivered across her shoulders, her body wracked with fine tremors that she couldn’t push back, despite the death grip she had on her own thighs.
“A little quid pro quo between friends,” Maverick was saying. “But I don’t think that’s how it works with you two. I think you care about each other–”
“Damn, just saying it and shit,” Shepherd muttered.
“–and you help each other, and lean on each other. That wouldn’t normally be a problem. My guys with old ladies are happier, healthier, and tend to make better decisions.” He cast a quick look around the room. “No offense to you three.”