Page 91 of Steinbeck
“I pulled it off him while he was trying to throw me over the edge.”
He stared at her, breathing hard.“Do you even hear yourself?”
She lowered the phone, her smile falling.“I don’t...This is what I do, Stein.”
Yes.Yes, it was.
What had he beenthinking?He turned and walked away.
“Steinbeck.”
He held up a hand to her voice.
“Stein!What’s your problem?”
He rounded then, right there in the middle of a potato field, and he didn’t care that Colt stood there—or actually had started to edge away.Steinbeck advanced one step, his entire body trembling.“You.Nearly.Died.”
“But I?—”
“Because you didn’t care.You went after Tomas on your own, not even a second to think ‘Hey, I have backup.I have someone.I have...’”He lifted his hand, then turned it into a shaking fist.“Me.You had me.And you didn’t...”
“Stein.He was right there in the lobby, and I...I didn’t want to lose the opportunity to...Did you hear me?I got his phone!”
She’d taken another step, her hair falling out of the dark knot.The wind caught it, turned it wild around her face, the green dress shimmering in the light, matching the look in her eyes, and just like that, he knew.
Like another hit, dead center to the solar plexus.
She might want to live a different life, but even that was a lie.She lived for this—for the heist.For the danger.For the triumph.
To be a Black Swan.
And Swans worked alone, didn’t they?
While the people who loved them stood on the sidelines.
So much for promises.
Stein drew in a breath filled with the rich scent of furrowed earth and the hint of autumn and shook his head.“Good job, Phoenix.Clearly you’re the thief we all thought you were.”
Then he turned and left her on the shadowed rooftop.
Logan stood by the door.“You okay?”
“Perfect.Miss Sticky Fingers got Tomas’s phone.”Then he headed back into the gala to find Declan.
The sooner he wrapped this up, the sooner he could walk away from the ongoing trauma of knowing the woman who just couldn’t stop breaking his heart.
* * *
“How long are you and Tia in town?”
Jack glanced over at Doyle, who walked into the kitchen of the King’s Inn, wearing KEENs, cargo pants, a collared T-shirt, and the look of a man who’d spent the last month on a Caribbean island.
“Just a couple weeks,” Doyle said and walked over to his mother, who stood loading up a basket of cinnamon rolls for their newest guest: Nimue, Emberly’s sister, who’d arrived just hours earlier, needing a place to stay after a house fire.
So Stein had sent her to Minnesota?
But Jack had learned long ago not to ask too many questions, and his mother seemed thrilled to give Nimue housing in the Grover with a handful of other guests while they cleaned the inn before this weekend’s wedding.
