She relished sliding her fingers across his callused palm and lacing her fingers through his as he finished in a low, slightly husky voice, “I enjoy spending time with you. These past couple days have been more fun than I’ve had in years.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Me, too.”
They sat there in companionable silence. The thought occurred to her that they could probably talk about anything, and he would be just as easy. That’s who he was, and not the monster she’d built in her mind. Weird, when you considered he had a literal monster inside him, but she had discovered that monster was kind of . . . noble. As well as being seriously cool to look at.
Then he glanced at her laptop sitting at her right hand. “So are you writing the next book?”
“I’ve always got at least one going,” she said. “I’m mulling the next one. Still in the planning stages.” At his interested look, she thought, why not use what had started as an excuse? “It starts with a tea party at a grand house with a bunch of obnoxious super-rich snobs. When one of them gets bumped off, the reader doesn’t really care. The story drive is to see which twit did it, and watch them get what they deserve. Classic Agatha Christie kick-off. But that’s the easy part. Tougher is to figure out who, why, and all the false leads as I hide the real clues. Who knows? I might even get some twists for the mystery out of this trip.”
He smiled at that. “I have a feeling this is the sort of stupid question that authors get asked all the time, but where do you get all those characters? You just make them up?”
Her lips parted, and the truth hit her like a kick from an invisible mule. That is, she knew she took characteristics from real people, and mixed and matched them when building characters. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes unconsciously. Like the way her P.I. had developed over the course of her series.
But . . . the villains in those first few books had all been variations on Rigo.
And he didn’t seem to realize it.
She looked up at him, braced to see irony there, or hurt, or the narrowed look of a verbal trap. Except that she knew by now that he wasn’t the kind of person who played those games.
In fact, he wasn’t the kind of entirely human monster that she’d written so angrily into those books.
Should she admit the truth?
Not now. She had a feeling it would only hurt him. Maybe someday they could laugh over it . . .
Someday? Like, she was going to continue this . . . whatever it was between them?
“Godiva?”
She blinked, recovering the present. And the fact that she was sitting there with her cup suspended in mid-air.
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“Did I ask the wrong question?” He was looking concerned.
“Not at all! I just had, um, a thought about the new mystery. I’ll have to write it down before I forget. To answer your question, every writer is different. For me, characters are taken from everywhere. A funny gesture from this person, a quirky habit from that person, the way someone overheard in a grocery store line was talking. It all goes into the mix, and the character pops into my mind, straight from Subconscious Central Casting.”
“That’s amazing,” he said.
You’re amazing, she wanted to say, but not here. Not in public.
And so, when he asked if it wouldn’t spoil the writing experience to talk about her mystery—he’d love to hear about how it was built from the inside—she used up some time spinning out the rough idea of a possible new plot, as they traded off watching the post office window.
People entered and left, but the only one who went near that section was a woman with a cane. Godiva stiffened, and Rigo broke off what he was saying to murmur, “I can get over there pretty fast if you think I should.” Then the woman bent over to a box three levels below Godiva’s.
“False alarm,” she said.
The time whizzed by. From her book, they went to the Phantom and its unexpected new career as a publicity magnet. Godiva said, “I haven’t asked Alejo yet what he loves doing, but my guess is, he’s into cars?”
“He’s into rebuilding old things,” Rigo said. “Especially beautiful things. I wouldn’t even have the Phantom if it hadn’t been for him. I was past wanting one probably by the time he lost his first tooth. But on our trip to San Francisco I happened to mention how you and I used to look at those magazine ads and wish. He remembered when he found that chassis rotting in a field. He thought he and I could rebuild it together.”
“So it was his idea,” Godiva marveled.
“Yes. It was a turning point for him, discovering how much he loves finding wreckage with what he calls good bones. Cars, cabinets, anything. He rebuilt the entire bannister in our place. It was . . . functional before, but now it’s as fine as something in one of those grand townhouses you see in the pictures. Did the same out front. Rebuilt the sagging porch into a balcony extending all along that side of the house. We have meals out there in autumn, when the leaves are turning, and the temperature is about perfect. He likes beautiful things. Especially things people made.”
Of course he did. These two men so unexpectedly, and so wonderfully, back in her life were quite a pair. She was choking up again. What a stupid time and place for that!
She pushed her laptop open again, to have something to do, then Rigo said in that mild tone, “Here’s an idea. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be wanting some lunch before too long—it’s already nearly one o’clock. If you want to make a run to get that hat, I can watch, then maybe we can turn about, and we can think about some lunch?”