“It’s a close call, but yeah,” she laughed.
“I’ll take that as a win.” Ben reached over and took her hand, the same hand with the burn wounds.
Ella flinched, not at the pain, but at the touch of another man. She could punch a suspect’s head in without hesitation, but a potentially romantic caress set her defense mechanisms alight. She knew Ben had felt her flinch too.
“This is a problem,” she said. “I’m still reeling from how things went down with my ex. I don’t expect you to put up with my neuroses.”
Ben sugared his coffee then stirred it in. “Ella, do you remember when we first met?”
Ella recalled it in vivid detail. It was her last good memory. “Of course.”
“Put that eidetic memory to good use. What did I say?”
Ella’s memory was photographic, not aural, but now wasn’t the time for a psychology lesson. “You said you were a bay leaf. I think your exact words were king of the ninety-day love affair.”
Ben nodded. “Good memory. And we’ve known each other longer than ninety days, so that makes you my longest, and weirdest, relationship to date. You’ve nearly got me killed, so a little flinching isn’t going to bother me. How about you stop overthinking everything and just go with it for once?”
All Ella could think was that she didn’t deserve someone like this.
“You make a good point. I can do that, if you’ve got the patience of a saint.”
“I might have, I might not,” Ben shrugged. “Sometimes you just gotta hop on the ladder and start climbing.”
Ella couldn’t look him in the eye. Too embarrassed. “Even if you end up falling through a pane of glass?”
“Sure, but even if you do, you end up with a pretty cool scar.”
Ella’s phone pinged once. Twice. She regretted not leaving it in the car.
“Do you need to get that?” Ben asked.
“No. It won’t be work. I’ve got two weeks off to recover. Plus I’m sick of our meetings being interrupted.”
Three times. Then a call came through.
“I think you should check it. I don’t wanna be the reason people are dying somewhere.”
Ella placed her coffee down then looked at her phone.
William Edis, the FBI director, was calling her.
***
“Director?” Ella asked. She stood in the smoking area of the Milestone bar, the same location she’d first met the director around nine months before. The more things change, she thought.
“Miss Dark, I’m sorry to bother you. I hope you weren’t busy.”
Ella glanced through the window back at her date, drumming his fingertips against the table.
“I was actually. Can this wait?” she said, surprising herself. Only 24 hours ago, Edis had suspended Ella from her FBI duties when her ex-boyfriend’s body was discovered in her apartment. The director had her penned as a murderer, and she and Mia had to risk their lives to prove Ella’s innocence. Ever since, she’d lost a touch of respect for the man.
“I just wanted to run something by you. Do you have five minutes?”
“Is it about Tobias Campbell? Do we have eyes on him?”
“No we don’t. It’s nothing to do with him. It’s a different case.”
Ella rolled her eyes and began making her way back into the bar. The last thing she needed right now was a new case, a new unsub, a new psychopath to chase down. Under other circumstances, she’d have jumped at the chance, but having been in the job for nearly a year, she began to understand why most field agents made friends with the bottle.