“Not one bit,” Bo said, crossing his arms over his chest as he stepped closer and peered down at her. “Do you? Regret it, that is.”

“Not one bit,” she repeated. She was dressed in aquamarine today. Long strands of faceted beryl beads hung between softly swelling breasts. Do not linger here, he warned himself. He checked her wrist—he just couldn’t help himself—and was rewarded with the flash of silver he yearned to see.

Permission.

“What would you say to spending a couple of hours in a jungle?” he asked.

“A jungle?”

He nodded, waiting for her to catch on. “You’ve been cooped up in here for too long. If we can’t enjoy this cheery drizzle outside, we can . . . pretend we’re outside in a tropical garden.”

A slow grin spread across her face. “Golden Gate Park. Wait, what if it’s flooded? Hadley said the lake was.”

“I telephoned. It’s open. And ‘deader than a doornail,’ according to the woman who answered. What do you say? I’ll tell you all about what I was doing this morning on the way over there.” He waggled his brows, and said in a low voice, “It involves a pirate club.”

Now he had her. She rose to her feet and stood inches away from him. For a moment, his brain went loopy, and he considered pulling her up against him and kissing the daylights out of her. Distant muffled chatter from the floor below them reminded him that this might not be the wisest of plans.

“Take me to the jungle,” she said in a soft, throaty voice, and his heart roared with excitement.

TWELVE

Sitting atop a hill studded with palms, the domed Conservatory of Flowers was a great, frilly skeleton of white wood and glass. When Bo was younger, and had just started making deliveries for Winter—deliveries that took him into new parts of the city he’d never seen—he’d thought the Victorian-era building looked like an enormous wedding cake. Today it looked decidedly less festive, streaked with rain and bereft of visitors, but just as inviting as ever. Especially with Astrid on his arm.

He huddled under an umbrella with her as they sloshed from their parking space, traipsing past manicured lawns puddling with water. Fields of pansies were flooded, and a display of flowers on the face of a hill that had once been carefully groomed to spell out MERRY CHRISTMAS 1928 now looked like a drowned rat with a head cold.

None of that mattered, though. Because inside the gabled entry it was dry and warm, and the bored docent at the ticket desk who may or may not have discreetly turned Bo away on a busier day didn’t even give him a second look. She only momentarily came to life when Bo plopped down a bill five times the entry fee and told her to keep the change. They were given a printed brochure describing the exhibits, and then forgotten. And upon stepping inside the main gallery, Bo quickly realized:

They were the only visitors.

And they were completely alone.

In public.

Buddha, Osiris, and Jehovah were all smiling down upon him.

“Ooaf,” Astrid said, peeling off her damp coat in the steamy heat that dripped water onto ferns and primeval jungle plants. “I forgot how warm it is in here. Feels marvelous. And it’s so beautiful. I don’t know what to look at first. Can you imagine living in a world like this? I can practically imagine dinosaurs hiding behind that . . . whats-a-doodle. Oh, the sign says ‘philodendron.’ Fifty years old! How marvelous . . .”

Bo couldn’t hold back his smile. For maybe the first time since she’d come home, Astrid was spilling words faster than she could think. She was radiant, head tilting this way and that as her gaze scanned the thousands of glass panels circling the conservatory’s dome above and the lush tropical foliage below.

She was happy.

And in Bo’s proud mind, he gave all of this to her—him, Yeung Bo-Sing. It didn’t belong to the city; it was his. His to share with her. To provide escape from the all the nastiness of the turquoise idol and the gruesome visions, all the anguish and uncertainty they’d faced in reuniting. All the long months they’d spent apart.

It all just lifted away with the tropical steam.

“What’s the plan?” Astrid said, running her hand over a fern frond.

“Plan?”

“Well, you said no more talking about the idol and the survivors and the pirate club once we got here. You said it was an adventure, and you said yesterday we should pretend we’re other people, so we must be playing roles. The real Bo would never ask me out on a date.”

She had that wrong. The real him would. The real him would have already married her and whisked her off on a yearlong honeymoon around the world. Society and circumstance did not allow him to be himself.

“Let’s see. If we didn’t already know each other, how would we have met? I think it must have been at Gris-Gris,” Astrid said, deciding upon their story. “You were staring at me dancing. I was so enchanting, you couldn’t take your eyes off of me.”

Bo strolled next to her, his coat over one arm. “That’s true enough. It was your smile that did it. I knew you were a girl who liked adventure when I saw that smile.” It was an unruly, disruptive kind of smile, and was the entrance to Astrid’s unruly and disruptive mouth, which had a way of saying whatever flitted through her brain without filter. And Bo liked this quite a bit.

“My smile, huh?” she said.

“And your hips.”

“What about my hips?” she said defensively, moving her coat to cover herself. “You know I hate them.”