Page 22 of The Whisper Place (To Catch a Storm #3)

Eve’s house was always intrinsically Eve. No matter where she lived, whether it was an over-the-top renovated Victorian mansion or an accessible townhouse on the edge of a cornfield, she made every space undeniably her . And I needed that more than I wanted to admit right now.

I washed sky-blue dishes and looked out a window lined with delicate beakers holding leaves and branches of all shapes and sizes.

A gauge mounted above the greenery measured at least four atmospheric things.

I recognized temperature, or at least I was pretty sure it was temperature.

The breakfast bar was covered with academic journals, scribbled notes, a pill reminder box, and more vases dotted with single flowers in each one—a black calla lily, a dahlia, and more I couldn’t name.

Magnets with scientific formulas covered the fridge, along with several pictures—mostly of Eve and Earl.

The largest one showed Earl with his late wife, her laughing as he kissed her cheek in front of their apple orchard.

Another was a black-and-white photo of Marie Curie working in her lab.

There was a picture of me I didn’t remember Eve taking.

I was facing away from the camera, sitting on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in my backyard.

The first time I saw that picture, displayed next to Eve’s family and heroes, I’d felt suddenly strangled by a mix of hope and dread.

A panic attack clawing at the edges of everything I wanted.

I’d tried to ignore it, both the feeling and the photo, and pretend my heart wasn’t crashing waves against my chest for the rest of the night.

I think we played Scrabble—word games were part of Earl’s ongoing post-stroke therapy. I know I lost.

Now, the photo calmed me. I felt centered, focused for the first time since I left the office in the wake of Max’s asshole confession. I belonged here, among the formulas and foliage, taped up on Eve’s fridge and washing her dishes, with people who didn’t lie to me for my own good.

Beyond the small kitchen, Eve and Earl sat at the dining room table together. They’d been huddled in front of my laptop studying the Pastries & Dreams security footage ever since they’d finished devouring the Chinese takeout I’d picked up on the way here.

Earl typed something on his iPad and Eve nodded. “It’s like she hears distant thunder.” Then, checking an app on her own phone: “No storms that day. Overcast skies, zero precipitation.”

“The working hypothesis”—I framed it for Eve’s benefit— “is that she was running from something or someone in her past. That’s why she had no ID, no phone, no name or any means of tracking her down.”

They both nodded and for once Eve didn’t question the theory or demand more evidence.

She understood, better now than she would have a few years ago, what it felt like to live looking over your shoulder.

Not that the drug trafficking ring she’d helped bust had anyone left to hunt her down—the major players were either dead or in prison—but the trauma of watching your husband get tortured in front of you, of being almost killed yourself, didn’t dissipate with any application of logic.

I could feel the tension in her whenever the doorbell rang, the momentary panic before she smiled at Earl and went to answer it.

I knew why she still kept a baseball bat in the coat closet.

It was hard not to feel like I’d brought that into her life, even though I knew it wasn’t true.

Her husband was the one who’d involved himself with a drug lord, who’d gotten himself kidnapped and eventually killed, for money or glory or whatever made people do the shitty things they did.

But she’d been oblivious to it until he disappeared, until I’d knocked on her door and told her I could help her find him, and we’d uncovered the whole ugly truth together.

It wasn’t my fault that she panicked before opening doors now, but guilt was a lot like fear. It didn’t fade with logic.

Earl wheeled to the bathroom as I put the last of the dishes away.

Eve waited until the door clicked shut before coming to the kitchen and leaning against the counter.

Her gaze dropped to my mouth and all thoughts of guilt and fear hazed into something warmer and much more insistent.

I moved into her space and braced my hands on the counter on either side of her, boxing her in.

“Hi.” She smiled, her face inches from mine. At this distance I could count each individual lash ringing her eyes and feel the heat of her skin.

“Hi.” I kept my voice as low as hers. “Are we sneaking around behind Earl’s back?”

“That would imply he’s a party to this, so obviously no.” Her hands skimmed up my arms and looped around my neck. “But I haven’t found the right time to talk to him yet, and I’m still reading a few books on the subject.”

“How To Tell Your Ex-Father-In-Law You’re Dating Again For Dummies.”

Her eyes narrowed and her energy crackled dangerously on dummies . I bit down on a smile. Sometimes, her reactions were too easy.

“I need him to be comfortable with this. You’re one of his best friends now and he’s lost so much in the last few years. I don’t want him to feel like he’s losing either one of us. Or access to smuggled steaks.”

Everything I’d sensed from Earl told me he was ninety percent fine with me in his daughter-in-law’s life, but I wanted to do this right.

It felt more important than anything I’d done.

I drew back. “Do you want me to be there when you talk to him? Or ask for some weird patriarchal permission on the sly?”

She smiled again. “Thank you, but no. I want to talk to him alone. I will. Soon.”

Before she could start logging mental calendar appointments, I moved back in, feeling the spike in her heart rate and the answering one in my own chest. The freedom to do that, to be this close to her, was like a drug soaring through my veins, only better than any drug I was used to.

“Then I guess we should make the most of this bathroom break.”

The other night on Eve’s lawn had felt like something out of time, slow and deliberate, like we were amazed to find each other in the same dream and doing everything we could to avoid waking up.

This was different. This kiss was instant heat—fast and open and hard, both of us twisting closer and looking for more.

She pulled me down by the hair, scraping her nails over my scalp.

I grazed her temple, her ear, her throat, trying to learn as much of her as quickly as possible.

Someone groaned. It might have been me. The need vibrating through her and echoing inside me turned the world into a vacuum where only we existed.

And neither of us wanted to come up for air.

She lifted a leg, running it over my hip, and under the white noise filling my brain I heard the idea in her head.

“Like this?” Lifting her, I set her on the edge of the counter and stepped between her legs, bracketing her hips until a start of surprise shocked me into the reality of what I’d just done.

Everything went cold.

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

I backed up, putting space between us, trying to redraw nonexistent lines between my head and hers as panic filled the edges.

She hadn’t asked me to put her on the counter.

She hadn’t made any physical move to indicate she wanted to be up there.

She thought it, and I’d taken that as some kind of permission.

Like any errant thought in her head was mine to consume.

She perched on the countertop, confusion mixing with the haze of need clouding her energy. Her hair looked like she just got out of bed, but her eyes were as piercing as always, cataloging everything. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know how to do this.”

“Which part? Because the evidence so far suggests otherwise.” She tilted her head and reached a hand out, but I couldn’t take it.

“You know which part. The part where you thought something and I acted on it, because I have no boundaries.” I paced, trying not to look at her, because looking at her made me need to touch her again.

“You won’t get to have any boundaries either.

I can spy on everything in your head whether or not either of us wants me to. ”

“Kendrick.”

“You’re thinking I’m an idiot right now, that we were past all this. But you also like how I’m running my hands through my hair and what it does to my arms.” I dropped them to my sides and turned to face her. “Do you have any idea how tuned to you I am? How invasive this is?

“It’s like the dreams, the one-way glass where I see people who have no idea I’m there. I’m a voyeur to their misery, drowning in their panic and fear, and what good does it do? I wake up and they’re still alone.”

The need in her cooled. Her mind started firing again, analyzing everything I said. The arm appreciation was already history. Her fingers drummed on the counter.

“Do you think any of this is new information to me?”

“You were surprised.” I stared at the fridge and the picture of me on it. Maybe there was a reason I was facing away from the camera, a sign that I didn’t belong with the smiling faces. “I felt it. You can’t lie to me.”

“And I told you I could handle whatever you are, as long as you’re honest about it.”

I remembered. Outside a barn, on the verge of a panic attack and a massive, unhinged heist. A painfully white world. Her eyes on mine.

“Come over here.”

It was impossible not to do what she asked.

If she told me to scale a mountain, I would’ve died trying.

I moved back in front of her and even the proximity made my skin hum, like electrons were jumping back and forth between us.

She started to say something, but a crash in the bathroom caught her attention.

“He’s fine. The toilet paper bar fell off the wall again. We should move that so it’s not getting caught by the wheelchair.”

She laughed. “And you think you only invade privacy? If you hadn’t been here, I would’ve checked on him.” She waited until my gaze snagged on hers. “You’ve given Earl his dignity back. You see him.”

I shrugged it off, but she wasn’t done. She caught my face in both hands. “And I see you, Jonah Kendrick. You were upset when you got here tonight. Something happened with Max.”

I hadn’t brought up the argument about Max’s under-the-table funding. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, even though his presumption kept eating at me. He’d always been good at keeping his thoughts and emotions in check. I just had no idea how much he was hiding underneath that blank veneer.

“How did you know that?”

“Observation and analysis. You picked up dinner from Cedar Rapids, which meant you needed a long drive to work off excess input.”

“Excess input?” My hands had found her back again. She leaned into them.

“Yes, too much data from the world. Your street racing expels the excess, probably through a combination bath of adrenaline and dopamine. But it didn’t completely offset the incident, because you were still upset when you got here, which meant whatever happened was personal—not a random encounter with a stranger.

You repeatedly ran your hands through your hair while we set the table, which yes, looks sexy when you wear these black T-shirts.

And when Earl mentioned Max, you reacted to the name in an anomalous way. ”

I stared at her, mouth open, and her voice dropped to barely more than a whisper. “This entanglement goes both ways. I thought you knew that.”

I did and I didn’t. Eve was a gift I didn’t know how to accept, and being with her was as terrifying as it was inevitable.

“I’m tuned to you, too. My methods are different than yours, but some people find them just as invasive.”

“They’re not.”

“My students would disagree. I’ll admit I was surprised when you put me on the counter, but I wasn’t exactly unhappy about it.”

She pulled, slow and steady, until our foreheads pressed together. “Next time, ask. And I’ll tell you if I do or don’t want something.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It never is. But we’ll start there. Right or wrong, you have to choose a methodology for your data set.”

Her lips found my throat and it became difficult to think, let alone talk. “I knew I would end up in your lab someday.”

She hummed and wound her legs around my hips, pulling me in hard. I lost track of time until the bathroom doorknob rattled, bringing us up with a start.

“Shit.”

Eve barely made it back to the table before Earl opened the bathroom door. I rearranged random things in the fridge until it felt safe to join them.

Neither of us paid much attention to the footage.

We shot glances at each other and she thought about what happened in the kitchen until I had to leave the room entirely.

She laughed as I escaped to the porch, which is when I realized she was reliving it on purpose.

To torture me. Goddamn, this woman was going to kill me.

While I stared desperately at weather instruments and tried to think about nothing but rain and lightning, Earl startled both of us by banging on the table.

“What?”

He pointed at the screen and I felt excitement churn through both of them before I even got back to the table. Eve backed up the footage as Earl typed on his iPad.

You would’ve seen it if you weren’t too busy making googly eyes at each other. Ask her out already.

“Good idea.” I clapped Earl on the back and we both turned to Eve, who blushed until her skin matched her hair.

“I wanted to, um, talk to you about that first,” she stammered.

Just get on with it. You two are driving me nuts.

Earl shook his head at both of us, eyes twinkling as he jabbed at the screen.

On the grainy footage, Blake was taking the trash out. She opened the gate then stopped, dropping the bags. Pulling her phone out to take a call, she wandered away from the fence, and Earl—schooling us all in investigation—paused the shot.

We had a dead-on view of the license plate of Kate’s car.