“I don’t want to lawyer my way out of this. Call it strategy—a good chance to get a handle on the lay of the land at Morningside, tenant-wise.”
A good chance to get a handle on one particular tenant, at least.
Dean took his time answering. “Wow. She must be something.”
Nate instantly started feeling tetchy. If he had to face an inquisition he might as well go back to Tori’s. “Who?”
“Your jumper.”
“She wasn’t jumping.”
“Don’t change the subject. This is about her, isn’t it?”
Nate surged forward as he saw the subway car preparing to move off. “This is about me remembering where I came from. How things were done before the money.”
Dean sobered immediately. “The building’s getting to you, huh?”
Nate shouldered his way between closing subway doors and leaned on the glass partition. “I just don’t want to buy my way out of this.”
“So you keep saying. But I’m not convinced. You worked hard all your life precisely so that you could have access to the freedom money buys.”
“Yeah, but I’ll do my hundred hours and then walk away knowing I did it the right way.” Knowing that she knew it.
Dean thought about that. “Your call, buddy.”
“Thank you. You can withdraw the appeal?”
“Consider it done.”
Nate signed off and slid his phone back into his pocket.
One hundred hours with Tori Morfitt and he got to keep the moral high ground. A win-win. His favorite type of outcome.
He had some guilt about the effort they were about to go to in setting up the webcam but, at the end of the day, it was his effort to waste. He’d be doing most of the work. And it wouldn’t be totally pointless. His plans to redevelop the building site wouldn’t kick off for months so they’d get one good season out of the webcam, at least.
Of course, it meant spending more hours in the building where he was born than he particularly wanted to, but he’d control that. He’d managed the feelings his whole childhood, how hard could it be now? Memories started to morph from the gray haze he usually maintained into more concrete shapes and sounds.
He went for his phone again and dialed his office rather than let them take root in his consciousness.
“Karin, I’m heading back. What have I missed?”
As always, work did a sensational job of shoving the memories to one side. It had served him well for fifteen years and it didn’t fail him now as the subway rattled him back downtown to his own world.
CHAPTER THREE
“ARE you sure this is safe?”
Twenty-four hours later, Nathan was hanging out Tori’s window again, watching her fit the stone block he’d brought with him into the corner of the ledge opposite the nest box. It was artfully hollowed out, and comfortably housed a small black camera, the lens poking discreetly out the front. The peregrines would notice nothing unusual when they returned after an evening’s hunting and the camera would be protected from New York’s wilder weather.
“It’s safe. I’ve been much higher than this,” Tori said through tight lips, not because she was frightened, but because she didn’t like to talk about climbing. Sometimes she didn’t even like to think about climbing. It made her feel things she was better off suppressing. She shifted her weight, wedged her scaling boot more firmly in the corner, and slid the block fully back into position.
“Better you than me,” he murmured.
“Not good with heights?” she teased lightly.
“I love heights. My company’s forty floors up. It’s falling to my death I’m not so wild about.”
Tori’s body responded instantly to his words, locking up hard, squeezing her lungs so hard they couldn’t inflate. It took all her concentration to will them open again so that air could rush in. She faked busy work with the camera to buy a couple of recovery seconds.
When she could speak again, she said, “You seemed ready enough to lurch out here last week.”
“I thought you were in trouble. I wasn’t really thinking about myself.”
Sure. And hell had an ice-hockey team. Her money was on him thinking very much about the bad publicity that goes with a jumper. She turned and gathered up some of the scattered substrate from the nesting box and returned it to where it could do the birds more good.
“Won’t it all just blow out again?” he asked, watching her clean-up effort. “It’s gusty up here.”
“It’s heavier than it looks, so it doesn’t blow. The peregrines toss it all out while investigating the box. They’ll probably just do it again but at least it will have started fully set up for their needs. It’s all I can do. They seem to like it this way.”
He shrugged and mumbled, “The hawk wants what the hawk wants.”
Curiosity drew her gaze back to him. So he did have a sense of humor, albeit a reluctant one. “Well, if they’d want a little more tidily that would be great for me.” She sat back on her haunches and examined the now-tidy box, then looked at the hidden camera. A thrill of excitement raced up her spine. Nothing like the adrenaline dump of her climbing days, but it was something. “Okay. I think we’re done.”
She scooted backwards and twisted through the window, taking care not to snag the new cable that draped through it, connecting the camera to the small temporary monitor set up in her bathroom. Nathan stood back and let her back in.
“When I come next I’ll hook it up to your TV so you can watch it with the flick of a switch,” he said, shifting his focus politely from the midriff she exposed as her T-shirt snagged on the window latch.
“If I have a couple of nesting peregrines to watch, I’m not going to be switching anywhere,” she said. Having the nest visible via closed circuit television would be a vast improvement on leaning out her window every day. Less likely to disturb the birds, too.
She lifted her gaze to him as she stepped down off the toilet seat and killed her height advantage. “That would be great, thank you.”
Neither of them moved from the cramped bathroom, but Archer clearly had no more idea what to do with genuine gratitude from her than she did. A tiny crease marred the perfectly groomed place between his eyebrows. Her breathing picked up pace as she stared up at him, and her lips fell open slightly. His sharp eyes followed every move. Then his own parted and Tori’s breath caught.
A rapid tattoo on the door snapped them both from the awkward place where silent seconds had just passed. A subtle rush of disappointment abseiled through her veins. Her face turned toward her new front door and then the rest of her followed, almost reluctantly. “That will be Mr. Broswolowski.”
She squeezed past Nate’s body carefully, failing at total clearance, and twisted slightly to avoid rudely shouldering him in the chest. That only served to brush her front against him as she moved through into the living room. If she’d been stacked instead of athletic it would have been totally gratuitous. As it was, his tight jaw barely shifted and his eyes only flicked briefly downwards.
While her breath tightened unaccountably.
She flung the front door wide as soon as she got to it.
“Aren’t you the Queen of Sheba,” the elderly man standing in the hall said as he admired her spotless new door. “Need to get yourself a peephole, though. This isn’t the upper west side, you know.”
Tori laughed as he entered. “I