As if to prove Steady’s point, a bullet pinged off the armored tailgate. Calliope glanced over her shoulder to see an absolute elephant of a man with a gun. The man put his hands on his knees and heaved for air as their car rounded a corner and sped to safety.
Calliope had met Miller “Tox” Buchanan twice. The first time was on a street corner in SoHo when he gave her her dog. He had been bigger then. She remembered wondering if he was an NFL player or a bodyguard. It wasn’t his size that struck her, though; it was his energy. He was this odd combination of arrogant asshole and teddy bear. Despite his obvious disinterest when he looked at her, she felt inexplicably drawn to him—like she could slip into the space under his arm and they could continue on down the sidewalk. She was hit with this overwhelming desire to peel the onion to discover what made Tox Buchanan tick. She’d also realized she had an overwhelming desire to peel the layers of his clothes off, so she quickly diverted her attention to the dog at his side before she started acting on any of those urges. She had scratched behind the pup’s ears and rubbed her back, all the while repeating to herself, don’t gawk at the beautiful man, do not gawk at the beautiful man.
And so, in an effort to ignore the gorgeous animal at one end of the leash, she had adopted the gorgeous animal on the other, Coco. Well, when Tox was fostering her, the dog’s name had been Fraidy, short for Fraidy Cat. The rottweiler had been “fired” from her job guarding a warehouse because she was too friendly; she had actually been painted with graffiti by vandals as they defaced the building. When Calliope took the beautiful dog off his hands, her first order of business had been to change her name to something less demeaning: Coco Chanel.
Coco rarely left Calliope’s side. She came to work with her at The Harlem Sentry, accompanied her on errands, and followed her around her cavernous Brooklyn Heights brownstone like she couldn’t bear to have Calliope out of her sight. Her unwavering loyalty and undemanding presence were a balm in her chaotic life.
The second time Calliope had seen Tox was at the beachfront wedding of her coworker and friend, Emily Bishop. Calliope had brought her other work friend, Terrence, as her date. She needed the emotional support, and he wanted to ogle the mouthwatering military man meat—his words—who worked with Emily’s new husband, Nathan Bishop. When the guys had invited Terrence to join them to “sugar cookie” a buddy, he hadn’t asked questions, he had simply spun Calliope into the arms of Tox and scrambled off the dance floor after the men. Turned out, much to Terrence’s dismay, that “sugar cookie-ing” someone simply meant throwing them in the ocean then rolling them around on the beach, coating them with sand. SEALs or not, boys will be boys.
Calliope was tall, nearly six feet in her four-inch heels, but when Terrence had twirled her into Tox, her forehead bumped his chin. She had struggled to find her footing as Tox steadied her. When she finally met his gaze, she saw something intriguing. He was smirking at first, like the cocksure jackass she assumed him to be, but then, as he held her gaze, the smirk had morphed into a sweet, almost vulnerable, crooked half-smile bracketed by dimples that melted her heart. His eyes reminded her of a dog’s eyes, brown and glassy and longing. The attraction she felt wasn’t sudden or jolting, like a spark or a zing; it was something indistinct and yet profound, like the force of the tide easing a ship into port. They’d stood still on the dance floor for a solid minute. Then, they both went stiff as boards and danced with the formality of middle-schoolers at a mandatory lesson. The phantom pain of the severed connection lingered, the sudden awareness of an ever-present absence, but Calliope refused to dwell on it.
Tox had revealed nothing about himself that day, and the reporter in her had been brimming with frustration, paradoxically adding to both his allure and his repulsion.
“Why do they call you Tox?”
“Long story.”
“So, you were in the Navy with Nathan?”
“I work for him.”
“Where are you from?”
“West of here.”(They were on Nantucket. Everywhere in the U.S. was west of here.)
“Do you have family in the area?”
“So, Emily said you were from Greece or something?”
She had corrected him and then, for the rest of their dance, talked about herself in the same vague terms. When he thanked her and turned to reconvene with his friends at the bar, she stood on the dance floor with balled fists, feeling quite certain she had been, not manipulated per se, but maneuvered. When he glanced over his shoulder to meet her gaze, he winked, confirming her suspicions. She had refused to talk to him again the entire evening. And while her mouth was in full agreement, her eyes made no such promise. Calliope had to repeatedly scold herself for tracking his movements throughout the tent; she allowed herself a little leeway by rationalizing that he was so big, statistically, the chances that he would be in her line of sight were high. Right. Nevertheless, she had done what she could to ignore him.
Tonight she felt no such compunction.
Tox sat behind the driver, eyes forward. He was this remarkable combination of relaxed and focused, his body calm yet coiled. He had lost some muscle mass in the past year; he’d gone from “linebacker” to “running back,” still strong and massive, but less…beefy. He also had been bald when she had danced with him that first time, but his dark hair was now a very short buzz cut; it was exactly the same length as the heavy stubble that covered his jaw. Everything about him flipped her switch. He wasn’t the kind of handsome that starred in movies or appeared in cologne ads; he had the kind of face an artist might sketch, Primal Man or Man Restrained; the portrait would definitely have “man” in the title.
His sable gaze met hers and startled her from her uncharacteristic musings. He didn’t smile, didn’t cock a brow. He simply looked at her, placid. A scar on his forehead bisected his right eyebrow, giving his kind face an edge. Maybe she should give him a month.
Calliope had never had a relationship that lasted longer than a month. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule; it was just that she never seemed to stick around long enough to entertain the notion of permanence. Tox though… As quickly as she conjured the thought, she dismissed it. If the parts of his body she couldn’t see were as compelling as the parts she could, she would have a problem—not necessarily leaving him, but finding the next guy to fill his battered boots. He’d be a hard act to follow. And if she understood on some level that she was rejecting the idea of involvement with him because he might be the guy to make her rethink things, she didn’t acknowledge it.
“So, how’s your day?” Tox asked the question with genuine interest as if he had just picked her up from a nine-to-five.
“Um, good?” Calliope had a million questions, but her reporter instincts had fled.
“Good. Mine too.”
“What…I mean why…I mean, what was that all about?”
“Just a little dust-up over a poker game. All good.”
“A little dust-up?” Calliope thought about the poker game from which Phipps had just come; probably not the same stakes.
The driver, a striking African American man they called Chat, stifled a chuckle. The guy in the passenger seat—she couldn’t recall his name—checked GPS coordinates as they flew across the Brooklyn Bridge. A phone rang, echoing through the Bluetooth. Chat answered.
“Go Twitch. You’re on speaker. Steady and Tox are here, and we picked up a passenger.”
Steady. His name was Steady.Twitch was going to have a field day with this. For someone who saw the world in ones and zeros, she was shockingly romantic. Calliope could practically picture her sighing with her hands clasped under her chin. Having girlfriends was something of a foreign concept to Calliope. She was never in one place long enough to bond. Twitch and Emily Bishop had somehow wormed their way into Calliope’s heart. At the moment, she was regretting the friendship.
“Hey, Twitch. It’s Calliope. Tox bumped into me on the street, and the guys are giving me a ride.”