He knew it was. She bowed her head, cheek against cheek, and moaned.

It had been so long since she’d been touched this way. So very long.

And it felt so spectacular and new that she wondered if she’d ever been touched at all—everything in the past was a dream and this was her new reality. The standard by which any other touch should be measured.

“Tell me how it feels,” he demanded.

“So good” was all she could manage, but he made a pleased noise in the back of his throat, as if it were exactly what he wanted to hear. So she repeated it like a mantra between hard breaths until—

What was that noise?

The door. The door!

“No, no, no!” She jumped off his lap to pull her dress down before moving in front of the chair, as if she could block the view of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Scandinavian with no shirt and an enormous erection.

Keys jingled as an elderly woman with white hair stepped into the apartment. She looked up and stopped dead in her tracks, eyes big as dinner plates.

Hadley straightened her posture and pasted on a smile. “Good evening, Mrs. Wentworth.”

TWENTY-ONE

LOWE PRETENDED TO LEAVE. He parked the Packard across the street and sat in the driver’s seat half the night, watching Hadley’s apartment building to make sure they hadn’t been followed. No flaming lioness goddesses, no suspicious cars. The lights in Hadley’s windows flicked off. Maybe she was in bed now. After conjuring the memory of her moaning on his lap, he unbuttoned his fly and pleasured himself in the darkened car until he came on his hand, hoping she was doing the same, nine stories above him. When the milkmen began making their rounds in the wee hours of the morning, he finally went home and slept.

The next afternoon, he headed into the Fillmore District and stashed Lulu in a new hiding place. Then he walked a meandering path to ensure he wasn’t being tailed. Along the way, he smelled something achingly familiar and stopped in front of a florist. Wooden buckets of greenhouse tulips and daisies lined the sidewalk, but he looked past them and spotted the star-shaped Siberia lilies. A middle-aged blond woman brushed off her hands. Norwegian, he guessed, from the flag in the window. “Like a bouquet for your sweetheart?” she asked.

“Not a bouquet, but I do have something in mind.”

“Anything you want, we can do,” she said, waving him inside.

Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from the shop and headed down a side street to Adam’s. Stella looked up from her doll party and spied him at the back door before running to greet him.

“Hello, Miss Goldberg,” he said, hauling her into his arms as Adam appeared.

“Found another piece to that amulet, did you?” Adam said with a grin. “Let’s see it.”

After returning Stella to her dolls, Lowe gave his friend the second crossbar and inspected the finished copy he’d made of the base. An exact match. Even Hadley might be fooled, though this particular thought made him feel a little guilty. More than a little, truth be told.

“What’s the matter with you?” Adam asked after the pieces were stashed in the vault.

“Had a long night, that’s all.”

“Are you sure? Because the way you’re smiling and frowning at the same time, it looks like you’re either ill or doped up. Maybe both.”

Lowe slouched in his chair. “How did you know Miriam was the one?”

Adam stared at him for a long moment. “Oh, no.”

“Look, I’m not saying I have feelings for anyone.”

“For Hadley,” Adam corrected.

Lowe groaned. “I’m just saying I think there might be the chance that what I once thought was just lust could be something more. Maybe. Possibly.”

“You think? Listen, you either have feelings or you don’t.”

He ran a hand over his face and rubbed the heel of his palm over a brow. “I just advanced a florist one hundred dollars.”

“Are you mad? That was—”

“Stupid.”

“Most definitely stupid.”

Lowe’s shoulders slumped. “It really was.” Then again, he had a long history of making stupid mistakes. Maybe this was nothing out of the ordinary.

 • • •

Hadley rarely made stupid mistakes, so she had to assume that her inability to add simple numbers and use the telephone without accidentally hanging up on the caller were indirectly related to the time spent on Lowe’s lap. And her newfound stupidity continued to hobble her throughout her workday. The other curators squinted at her like there was dirt smeared on her face. George asked why she was smiling to herself. Her father—blind, at that—suspected illness and suggested she go home and rest.

Rest was the last thing she needed. She was wound tighter than a cheap watch, bursting at the seams with an antsy sort of elation.

But as the hours passed, all that elation shifted into a nervous anticipation that created a dull fog over her brain. When five o’clock finally came, and she was on her way out of the office, she found herself standing at the front desk while Miss Tilly slowly repeated what she’d already said twice, looking at Hadley as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

She stared at the secretary’s hand in disbelief, her insides jumping with glee. “For me?” she said dumbly, finally catching on to what the woman was telling her.

“I know. I thought the same thing,” Miss Tilly said before glancing up at Hadley’s irritated reaction. “Oh, no—I didn’t mean that no one would ever send you flowers, it’s just that no one has.”