The Mayor's Dirty Little Secret

CHAPTER TWO

The bar was a little scanty when he came back.

I saw him the moment he walked back through the door and I immediately looked away because I was not going to give him the satisfaction of being caught watching the entrance.

I had a job to do and that job did not include noticing that he moved through a room like he owned the floor beneath his feet. Or the fact that his presence filled everywhere including my head.

He dropped onto the stool beside mine like he had reserved it.

"I didn't catch your name." I turned to him

He went silent for a few seconds. "Xavier "

"Really?" I scoffed. "How do I know it's your real name?"

"Maybe take a leap of faith." He eyed me. "And yours?"

"Vanessa."

"Why did you come back," I said, eyes still on Mast's table.

"I never fully left," he said. "I was outside."

I turned to look at him despite myself. "You were covering the exit."

"Someone had to," he said simply. "You were busy watching the front."

I hated that it was a reasonable thing to do. I hated more that he had done it without being asked, without discussing it, like we were already a team that had divided responsibilities and he had simply handled his half. "I work alone," I said.

"You keep saying that," he said. "It keeps not being true."

I opened my mouth and then closed it because Mast's table had shifted. One of the two men sitting with Gerald, the broader one with the flat expression, had turned in his seat and was looking directly at us with the kind of attention that had nothing casual about it. My whole body went still.

"We have a problem," I said quietly.

"I see it," Xavier said, already leaning closer, his voice dropping. "Don't look at them directly. Keep your eyes on me."

"I know how this works," I said through my teeth, but I turned toward him anyway and he turned toward me and suddenly we were very close, closer than two strangers at a bar had any reasonable business being.

The man was still looking.

And then he stood up and started walking toward us and my stomach dropped completely.

"Here we go," Xavier said under his breath, and his arm came around my shoulder smooth and his whole energy shifted into something warmer and soft, like a man with nowhere to be except exactly here with exactly me.

The man stopped beside us. He was bigger standing up than he had looked seated. "You two have been here a while," he said.

"Date night," Xavier said easily, his thumb moving at my shoulder. "She picked the place. I'm still not sure how I feel about it."

"I picked it because you never plan anything," I said, turning to look at Xavier with an expression I hoped read as affectionate exasperation. "Three years and the man has never once made a reservation."

"I made a reservation last month," Xavier said, looking at me.

"I made the reservation," I said. "For your work dinner. That I also attended. That I also smiled through for four hours."

Xavier looked at the man beside us with an expression of profound patience. "Four hours," he confirmed. "She brings it up every week."

The man's flat expression had shifted slightly. Not warm exactly but less sharp. He looked between us for a moment longer than was comfortable and then he looked at our glasses, both nearly empty.

"Let me get you both something," he said. "From me. A welcome to Minnesota."

Every instinct I had fired at once. Accepting drinks from these men was the last thing either of us should do and Xavier's hand had tightened almost imperceptibly at my shoulder which told me he was running the exact same calculation.

But the man was already watching us with the specific patience of someone waiting to see what we would do next, and refusing a friendly drink from a stranger in a bar had only one read from where he was standing.

"That's kind of him," Xavier said smoothly. "Thank you."

The man nodded and went back to the table and spoke to Gerald and within minutes a server arrived with two glasses. Xavier picked his up. I picked mine up. We did not drink immediately because neither of us was that reckless.

"We have to drink them," I said quietly, smiling like we were discussing something pleasant.

"I know," he said, smiling back.

"This is a terrible situation," I said.

"Agreed," he said. "On three."

"I hate you," I said pleasantly.

"On three," he repeated. "One. Two."

We drank.

The men watched for another twenty minutes, occasionally glancing over, and we performed the entire time. Xavier told a story about a work trip that was detailed enough to sound real and I interrupted him three times with corrections that made him look at me with an expression that was supposed to be irritation but kept missing and landing somewhere else entirely.

I told a story about a disastrous dinner with a friend and he listened with his elbow on the bar and his chin in his hand like I was the most interesting thing in the room, and the maddening part was that he was good at it, genuinely good, not in a way that felt performed but in a way that felt like he had simply decided to pay attention and was doing it completely.

"You're good at this," I said during a lull, low enough for only him.

"So are you," he said, equally quiet. "You almost made me believe the dinner story was real."

"It was real," I said.

He looked at me. "The part where the waiter fell into the dessert cart."

"Every word," I said.

Something shifted in his face. Not the almost-smile I had catalogued earlier but something quicker and less managed. It was gone before I could examine it properly.

Mast's men eventually lost interest. The broader one gave us one last look, nodded at something he seemed to have decided, and turned back to his table. Gerald Mast had not looked at us once the entire time. Xavier's hand at my shoulder relaxed by a fraction.

"They're done with us," he said.

"Good," I said, and then the bar tilted.

It was subtle at first. The kind of thing you could explain away as tiredness or the single drink hitting differently because I hadn't eaten properly. I put my hand flat on the bar and breathed through it and told myself I was fine.

"Vanessa."

"I'm fine," I said.

"You just grabbed my arm," he said.

I looked down. My hand was wrapped around his forearm and I had no memory of putting it there. "That's embarrassing," I said.

"Look at me," he said, and his voice had changed completely, the warmth of the performance gone and something direct and focused underneath it.

I looked at him.

"The drinks," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"They put something in the drinks," I said.

"I think so," he said, and his jaw was tight and his eyes were moving around the room quickly, clocking exits, clocking Mast's table, clocking everything. "How do you feel."

"Warm," I said. "Heavy. My thoughts are—" I paused because the sentence had gone somewhere I couldn't immediately retrieve it from. "Slow," I finished.

"Okay," he said. He was still looking around the room but his hand had come over mine on the bar, steadying it. His hand was very steady. I noticed that. I noticed it more than I should have given the circumstances.

"Are you affected," I asked.

"Yes," he said, which I appreciated because a lesser person would have lied. "Less than you. I'm bigger and I drank slower." He looked at me and the calculation in his eyes was still running but underneath it was something that looked almost like concern and was definitely not indifference. "I need to think."

"I need to follow Mast," I said and attempted to stand and understood immediately that standing was not available to me as an option.

His arm came around me before I finished the movement. Solid and certain. "You cannot follow anyone right now," he said quietly.

"I know," I said, and hated saying it.

"We need to get out of this bar," he said, half to himself, his voice low and controlled in the way I was learning meant he was managing something difficult. "And I need to figure out what to do next."

"Xavier," I said.

"Still here," he said.

"I don't know you," I said. "I want to be clear that I am aware that I don't know you."

He looked down at me and something in his expression shifted, something that made him look for just a moment like a man who was not entirely sure of his next step, which I suspected was a very unfamiliar feeling for him.

"I know," he said. "I'm going to get us somewhere safe and then you can distrust me properly."

"That is the most reasonable thing anyone has said to me in weeks," I said.

He guided me toward the elevator and I let him because my legs had made their position on the matter very clear, and somewhere between the bar and the elevator the careful distance between us had folded in on itself completely.

His heartbeat under my hand was faster than his face let on.

That was the last clear thing I registered before the warmth took over everything else.