Peabody yawned until her jaw cracked as she contemplated her breakfast choices. In order to start the day right, in a healthy, body-conscious state, she shouldn’t have the bagel and schmear. She should choose the fruity yogurt. She certainly shouldn’t have the bagel and schmear and the fruity yogurt.
And she shouldn’t even think of the possibility of the cherry Danish she could pick up on the way to Central.
Why did she always think of the damn cherry Danish in the morning? She wasn’t entirely sure the thought of it didn’t put an extra pound on her ass.
“I’m having the fruity yogurt, and that’s it.”
At his seat at their tiny kitchen table, McNab poked at his bowl of Crispy Crunchie Charms and said nothing.
Peabody doctored her coffee first and wished the stupid low-cal sweetener tasted as good as the wonderful zillion-cal sweetener. But she felt righteous if deprived, sitting down with the healthy yogurt and the low-cal coffee.
She wished she could eat bowls of Crispy Crunchie Charms with an ocean of soy milk like McNab and his skinny ass that never seemed to gain an ounce.
Life was definitely unfair when your metabolism had all the zip of a lame turtle.
She drank some coffee, and felt her brain start to clear. She liked the way the sun came in their kitchen window in the morning, and played through the bright yellow curtains she’d made herself—still hadn’t lost her Free-Ager skills, she thought.
She’d enjoyed making the curtains, selecting the fabric, designing a pattern, sitting down at her little machine to whip it all together into something pretty and functional.
Plus McNab had been mega-impressed.
One day she’d actually finish hooking the rug she’d started for the living area, and that would knock him right out of his gel-boots.
He got such a kick out of the fact she could make stuff, so that added more pleasure and satisfaction to the making. It was good to have their things mixed and matched together in their own apartment. Her dishes with his pub glasses, her chair, his table. Just theirs now.
And it was good, really good, to sit with him in the mornings when their shifts meshed, eating together, talking.
As she drank more coffee, she realized he wasn’t eating, or talking.
“Your triple C’s are going to get soggy,” she warned.
“Huh? Oh.” He shrugged, pushed the bowl aside. “I’m not really hungry.”
“I don’t get you people who aren’t really hungry in the morning.” The entire concept put her in a sulk. “I wake up starving, then have to talk myself into not eating everything in sight so my butt doesn’t become an ad blimp.”
When he didn’t respond—and he always had something cute to say about her butt—she frowned. He looked a little pale, she thought now. Heavy under the eyes, and very broody.
“You okay?” She reached across to touch his hand. “You don’t look so good.”
“I didn’t sleep much.”
“Are you sick?” Instant concern had her leaning over to lay a hand on his brow. “I don’t think you have a fever. Why don’t I make you some tea? I’ve got that blend from my gran.”
“No, that’s okay.” His pretty green eyes lifted, met hers. “Peabody … Delia.”
Oh-oh, she thought. He only called her Delia when he was upset, pissed, or feeling very, very horny. And he didn’t look horny.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I just wondered … I love you.”
“Oh, I love you, too. I was just thinking how much I like sitting here with you in the mornings in our kitchen. Just starting the day together. And—”
“Do you want to get married?”
If she’d been drinking coffee, she’d have sprayed it all over his face. Instead, she swallowed hard. “Oh. Um. Huh.” How did her tongue get so fat all of a sudden? “Sure, yeah. Eventually.”
“To me, I mean.”
“Well, yeah, to you, dummy. Who else?” She gave him a light punch on the shoulder, but he didn’t smile, and her stomach went queasy. “Didn’t I just say I love you? Did I do something to make you think I don’t? Ian …” Like her first name, his was reserved for bigger moments. “I can be stupid about—”
“No. Dee, no. You don’t want to get married now?”
“Well …” Her stomach fluttered, clenched, fluttered again. “Do you?”
“I asked you first.”
“Maybe you should tell me what brought this on.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing K.T. Harris lying beside the pool up on that roof. And the way the light made her look so much like you. And how for a minute, it was you, in my head. I couldn’t breathe.”
Concerned, relieved, in love, she got up, sat on his lap, cuddled him in when he pressed his face to her shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m okay, we’re okay.” She kissed his hair, bright as her curtains. “It’s all okay.”
“It just made me think how much you mean to me, and I started to wonder if I was—if we were—wasting time. That maybe we should get married. I wanted to ask if you wanted me to ask. You have to know you’re it. You’re it for me, Peabody. The one.”
She eased back, cupped his face. “You’re it for me. Ian McNab. The one and only. I’ve never felt about anybody the way I do about you. It makes me happy. All of this makes me so happy—my dishes, your pub glasses. Our place.”
“Me, too.”
“We don’t want to get married now. That’s for grown-ups.”
She said it with a smile that brought one to his pretty green eyes.
“But one day, down the line?”
“Oh yeah. We’ll have a big, crazy wedding. A mag wedding. Get married, have kids.”
Now he grinned, patted her belly. “A little She- or He-Body.”
“When we’re grown-ups.” She kissed him with the sun playing through the curtains, made it count. “The best part, right now, is you’d ask if I wanted you to ask. I love that you’d do that.” She wrapped him up again. “I really love you for doing that. Ask me again, one day down the line.”
“You could ask me.”
“Uh-uh.” She drilled her finger playfully into his belly. “You.”
He dug his fingers into her ribs. “Why not you?”
“Because you started it.” She giggled her way into the kiss. “Crap,” she muttered when her com signaled.
She angled back, reached over to slide it across the table. “Text from Dallas. She says to meet her at the morgue.” She calculated the time, grinned. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”
She popped up to race him to the bedroom. Fifteen minutes with the guy who loved her enough to ask if she wanted him to ask?
Even better than a cherry Danish.
Eve walked down the white tunnel of the morgue. She’d long ago gotten used to the smell of death coated with lemon-scented industrial cleaner. She’d stopped thinking that the men and women at Vending or heading to an office had recently lifted the internal organs out of a corpse, or were going to after the next hit of coffee.
She no longer wondered how many occupants resided in the cold drawers, or how many gallons of blood washed down the gullies of the tables on a daily basis.
But when she passed through the doors of the autopsy room and saw Harris on the slab, the resemblance to Peabody gave her a hard jolt.
Chief Medical Examiner Morris turned away from a comp screen. He wore a navy blue suit with razor-thin lines of silver. He’d twisted his ebony hair into a ladder of sleek tails at the back of his head.
Some sort of gritty, back-beating rock played at low volume, and a vending cup of coffee steamed away where he’d set it down on a steel tray.
His exotic eyes skimmed past Eve, then back. “I’d hoped Peabody would be with you.”
“She’s on her way.”
“It’s a … I’m not sure what to call it.” He walked to the body, naked on the slab, the Y incision tidily closed. “Really, the resemblance is only surface. And yet.”
“I know.”
“I’ll admit I’m grateful Carter was on last night, and did the work here.” He tapped a finger to the screen to bring it on. “I would have found working on her very disturbing. You didn’t request me.”