“So,” she said. Her drink was already half finished. “Now that you’ve got what you want, why are you here?”

“A guy can’t simply stop in and—”

“Cut the cute stuff.” She swung on him. “I’m not in the mood.” She took a smaller sip, and her eyes met his. “Frankly, I haven’t been in the mood for three years.”

“That can change,” he said. “Everything changes.”

“Not this, it can’t.”

She finished off her drink and made to pass by him to return inside. He caught her arm, stayed her. She glanced down at where he had hold of her, not hard, but certainly firmly enough to keep her in place. He took his hand away, and she moved on inside, refilled her glass.

“So how’s life with Bill AT&T?” he said as he strolled back inside.

“Calm.”

“Nice.” He did not approach her; her signals were perfectly clear. “Calm is nice. If you’re dead.” She did not rise to the bait, and this made him uneasy. Maybe he had misjudged the situation, misjudged her, misjudged everything, in fact. He could hear Cutler saying, “That’s just like you, Gregory.” And maybe it was, which would be too bad for him. Possibly for Charlie, too. At least, the Charlie of three years ago. But he had yet to figure out how much of that person still existed.

He knew one thing though: to show any sign of weakness around her was a death warrant. So he didn’t sit, but continued to stand, arms crossed over his chest, watching her drink her beloved Pappy. In their time together he had seen her put four men under the table at once without ever getting visibly high, let alone drunk. Another of her uncanny abilities.

Those were bets—high-stakes bets—not one of which she ever lost, as she moved from bar to bar, fleecing novices and know-it-alls alike. He had asked her once where she came by her drinking, to which she had replied, “What can I say? I’m a fucking fluke of nature.”

“You mean freak of nature.”

“No, baby, that’s you.”

He was annoyed with himself for remembering the conversation verbatim. He hated being humiliated.

Draining the last of her whiskey, she set the glass on the sideboard and, without a word, disappeared down the hallway into her bedroom. Whitman stood and waited. He had a sense of what was coming, or he would have had it been three years ago. But this was now. Did he still know?

Four minutes and thirty-two seconds later—he was timing her—she returned clad in a pair of skin-tight jeans and a man-tailored checked sports shirt. The jeans showed off her butt, long legs, and powerful thighs, the shirt opened low enough to reveal enough of her cleavage to be distracting. Having exchanged her Louboutin pumps for a pair of powder-puff blue Nike Air Jordans, she crossed to the vestibule closet, took out an oblong case made of hand-stitched stingray skin, which glimmered like liquid in the light.