Who: Max and Dylan What: Awk, Marigolds, discussing Lin (1/3) Where: Canaletto (Thanks, wingman!) When: Just before hopping the Mexico flight Warnings/Rating: None
It was no secret that Max had been trying to get into McKendrick's pants for months. Sex was safe. Sex was a way to get someone out of your system before they burrowed their way beneath your skin. Sex was an end, at least as far as she was concerned. McKendrick had told her, once, that if he slept with her she'd grow bored with him. At the time, she'd wished he would just fuck her, in order to make that prediction true. Because the sex didn't scare her. The feelings, those scared her. She'd vowed off feelings after Brandon, and she'd done a good job of keeping that vow for half a decade. She'd always thought that if she ever capitulated and did the relationship thing again, it would be with Corvus, because Corvus was as sure a thing as existed. With Corvus, there was no risk of falling flat on her face, becoming cringingly psychotic, or crying all over herself. Corvus wasn't going to cheat, and he wouldn't look at her one day and tell her that he'd never been able to love her, even though he'd tried. He was safe. She'd always thought she'd go that route, if she got lonely. But she'd never gotten lonely, and she figured she'd dodged a bullet.
And then McKendrick had come along.
Not that she was admitting anything to herself, because that just wasn't going to happen. The hotel had been right about her ridiculous insecurities and feelings of inferiority, and those grew fangs when she cared about someone. She wasn't about butterflies in her stomach; she was about tornadoes. She'd become a sabotager, toward the end of things with Brandon, because it hurt less that way. She was thirty years old, and she was self-aware enough to know how exhausting she could be.
That was her final thought as she climbed out of the cab, wearing a dress that she'd bought that morning, and that she'd chosen because it was soft. Not black, not skintight, not competent assassin. She didn't even pick something that was intentionally seductive, despite the barely-there sides of the top that obviously hid no fabric beneath it. The dress made her feel even more vulnerable, as did the silvery heeled shoes, and she wondered if it was too late to go back home and slip a gun and holster around her bare thigh.
She was favoring her left leg just slightly after the long walk through Venetian's casino to Canaletto's entrance, and the linen tablecloths and romantic street lamps under a faux Italian sky made her want to turn around and run, find a shooting range and a pair of jeans and forget the tornado brewing in her gut.
What was she even doing?
The fact that Dylan had resorted to asking Daniel for advice on the situation was a significant red flag that he didn't know what he was doing either. There had to of been better people to quiz on the subject of first dates, but Dylan had no idea where to find one. The only people he mixed company with outside of the internet were government officials, and those people knew nothing about the romantic stuff unless there was shooting involved. Admittedly, Max might have preferred for shooty things to be involved. Taco Bell and a shooting range would have been so comfortable. Too comfortable. But tonight was about having them both jump out of the spy plane of comfort, blindfolded and with their primary shooting arm tied behind their back.
It would have been really easy to sit with Max on the couch, get drunk on cheap beer, and discuss work while he played video games. She expected that from him, and he knew she would be comfortable with that, but Dylan wanted her to know this was a date. Knowing it was a date meant having her wear a dress, and in exchange he'd bought something nicer than a Zelda t-shirt and pajama flannel for the occasion. He doubted that any restaurant in the Venetian was going to serve tacos, and that was mildly disappointing as Dylan had unconsciously psyched himself up for cheap Americana and bullet holes while he got dressed in a grey button down, dark slacks, and some belt that hadn't seen use since his grandmother had bought it for him on a Christmas some four years ago. It was the most expensive thing on him, unless somebody was counting his blood.
He ended up arriving early and waiting on her in the restaurant's lobby area. He was tall enough that broad shoulders were mandatory to keep from looking stick scrawny, so despite the nice shirt, and despite being faced in the other direction, she would have known it was him. It didn't take a spy's skill to figure that out. The click of her heels, while unexpected for Max, was what had him instinctively turning. Her dress had him smiling immediately, wide and without restraint. It was the kind of smile that said he'd have enjoyed teasing her about the dress under any other circumstance. Even in heels, she wasn't someone to mess with, but the smile remained, almost cocky with how pleased he was. In his hand was a bouquet of fire colored marigolds. Not a traditional flower for dates, but the florist had assured him that they could survive through the neglect that came with somebody who knew nothing about flowers. Dylan was pretty sure that summed Max up in the gardening department. "Hey."
Max hadn't seen a date since before Brandon. Since high school, possibly, and she didn't have the slightest idea what she was supposed to do if this wasn't just a lead-in to sex. It was like she'd told Daniels, she very much wanted to just have sex with him, in the hopes that it would get him out of her system. Because he made her nervous, and she didn't know what to do with the feeling of itching skin and anxiety. And, why bother? No one in her life had ever decided she was something worth keeping, not at the end of the day, and there was no reason why he should be any different. She had this horrible vision of him trying to drag himself out the door, while she begged and held onto his arm, pathetically promising him that she could be better. It was her father all over again, Brandon all over again, and there was a reason she'd taken herself off the market in the first place. She convinced herself to breathe, because there wasn't any indication that McKendrick wanted anything more than one date. She still wasn't sure this wasn't his gallantry rearing its head after the events of the party. He was so moral, and she didn't even know what that felt like.
When he turned, she forgot to overthink it for just a second. He was a far cry from pajama pants and Zelda. For a second, she stopped and stared, and then she reminded herself that this was just upscale beer and wings in nicer clothes. She'd gone to plenty of functions with Brandon, and she'd been raised upper-middle class; she knew how to play the part. But she'd be lying to herself if she didn't admit that his unrestrained smile made her stomach flip over and her breath catch for a moment, like she wasn't a trained killer with a six-year-old child. She walked the remainder of the way, and it was the flowers that actually made her want to flee the scene.
She had absolutely no idea what to do in the face of flowers.
But, much like the teenager she'd been at the party, she tried to play it cool, despite the nervous wave of something that felt like impending nausea. She wasn't going to cry over a bunch of marigolds. "Did you buy them for yourself? They're a good color for you," she said of the flowers. "They bloom all summer. That's why they're popular," she added, because her mother's entire hobby experience involved flowers. "I managed to kill my mother's in a week," she admitted, wishing she had pockets to shove her hands into, and her smile warmed as she shook her head at her own babbling. "You clean up nice, McKendrick."
By now Max had to know that nothing with Dylan was a lead-in to sex, aside from hotel mojo. Sex was great, he liked sex as much as any warm blooded male with all the wires connected in his head. Dylan just didn't use machinations or internet profiles or even dinner dates to get it. This probably stemmed from a childhood defined by too much appreciation for love and destiny. Everything that was meant to happen would happen, and while Dylan surely didn't believe that all(or even most) of the time, it was what he'd been raised on. He had no idea what to do on a traditional date, as he'd never witnessed one outside of some random late night episode of Saved By the Bell, and he was no Zack Morris. His parents' marriage had always been too based in art and travel to be anything less than very, very open. Dylan had no idea what to do with that kind of relationship blueprint, which is why he usually didn't bother at all.
Flirting was nice, though. He smiled when she commented on his cleaning up well, and he shrugged to obfuscate the nearly-spoken fact that he'd had a lot of help in choosing what to wear. The smile melted into a crooked smirk when she started in about the flowers. As if he ever bought anything more than video games and deodorant for himself. "Take the flowers, Main." He extended them to her with a tip of the wrist, letting the fringey petals brush her arm like a cat needing a home. "You can throw them away after dinner if you want, give them a quick death." Oh mighty killer of nature that she claimed to be.
"We've got a table in there," he said with a vague gesture behind him, where the restaurant's cool atmosphere awaited. Dylan rotated his shoulders in a thoughtless attempt to dislodge inopportune tension. "Unless you want to hit the bar for a drink first, but I'm not sure if they serve miller lite here."
Oh, Max knew. Max knew she'd been trying to get into McKendrick's pants for the better part of a year, all with the express intention of getting him out of her system. She hadn't even realized when he'd wormed his way there to begin with. She was fairly sure it was sometime after hacking into her files, just to prove that he could, and before he'd ended up rebuffing her in Paris. No, that was a lie. By the time Paris had come around, she'd already been in trouble. And she knew all about having sex when she was in love with someone. She knew perfectly well that nothing else could compare to that, and she knew it was the most terrifying thing on the planet. Shooting people? No problem. Going undercover on a surefire suicide mission? Piece of cake. Getting naked with someone she loved? Absolutely terrifying. Being told, as the person looked at her, that they didn't find her attractive anymore? Traumatizing. So sexing him out of her system was a defensive move, one that she was worried she'd already missed the window on.
She looked down at the flowers when he extended them toward her, and her expression softened in a way that brought to mind shy youth, and not a woman at thirty. She reached out a long arm, delicate wrist and long, capable fingers, and she closed her fingers around the end of the bouquet, gun calloused fingertips brushing against the outside of his thumb as she transferred the flowers into her own grip. She looked up to see the residue from his smirk, and she unthinkingly brought the flowers up to her nose. Sharp green and musky, they didn't smell anything like a flower, and she'd always liked that about them. She looked up at him over the copper-gold blooms. "I think I can manage to keep them alive for a day or two," she quipped.
She considered the bar. Or, she considered the bar until he distracted her with that rotation of shoulders. It helped, somehow, knowing he was nervous, and she laughed a husky laugh and shook her head. Her long hair slid along one shoulder, baring the nearly indecent hint of skin high at her side. "I think we can get something stronger at the table. A place like this probably has decent whiskey." She moved forward, almost reaching a hand to steady against his arm when her hip complained, but correcting midcourse and rubbing her fingers firmly against his shoulder instead. Tension, she was helping to relieve it. Right.
Dylan appreciated the deep knead of her fingertips into the muscle of his shoulder, because it felt like she was telling him that he'd done something right. Even if he'd forced her into it with one arm wound behind her back, he wanted to think that she would approve. If they could leave all of their baggage at the door, Dylan logically knew that they would be perfect for eachother. The problem was that he didn't really believe either of them were capable of doing so.
Max was who she was. She'd been born and bred into her life, trained to please authority(whether she saw it that way or not).. and he was the exact fucking opposite. He'd rebelled from his parents, he'd taken a job in the most prestigious sector, but with the least amount of leash. He was always going to need the ease of rebellion. They were the same in that way, needing distance to feel safe in their own skin, despite the closeness they craved.
"Considering the guy who recommended it, I'm sure they have great whiskey." If Daniel knew about it, the pasta was probably swimming in bourbon sauce. The hand she gave to his shoulder was brief, and she seemed intent on drawing the massaging fingers away before he reacted. Dylan caught her wrist, entirely without command or instruction, and wound his grip into hers. His attention went to the side, with the tilt of his head, and he smiled. "I promise I'm more nervous than you, it's okay."
There was something about being well past twenty that made learning new tricks hard. All the wrongs of childhood were superglued by thirty. The screw ups of being a teenager and the even bigger fuckups of young adulthood were written with indelible ink on the skin. And Max had more baggage than most. She knew it, too. She was self aware enough to know what she did to compensate for fear and nervousness, and she knew how dangerous it was to trust her feelings into the safekeeping of someone else. She liked men. She liked men more than she liked women. But that didn't mean she trusted them. The arm wound around her back made her want to trust him, though, and that was the scariest thing about him. Not the feelings he dredged up, but the possibility that he wasn't a complete asshole. It would have been easier to develop feelings for an ass, someone she knew not to trust. But there was something about him that made her think she could risk it, and she had to fight that off at every turn.
Still, she leaned against him when that hand circled her back. No point in limping to the table when he was there, and there was no denying that she liked the way he felt there, against her side. She smelled of soap, cleanliness, a little musk and all those marigolds, and she would have drawn her hand away if he hadn't grabbed her wrist. Whatever quip she'd intended to make about the whiskey was lost when he tilted his head. He always disarmed her when she wasn't expecting it. He didn't guilt, didn't fight, didn't logic, and she had no idea how that simplicity could make her feel like she couldn't breathe. She swallowed nervously, and she nodded. For the moment, she didn't even remember to insist she wasn't nervous. Her gaze was dark and settled on his, and she smiled after another heartbeat. "You had help from a wingman?" she asked, hearkening back to his mention of whoever had recommended the restaurant. Her fingers slid easily along the sleeve of his shirt, gun callouses and a thin, sharp hip against his side through the flimsy-soft fabric of the dress.
"He's not a wingman," Dylan promised. The promise was clipped through the wrinkled grimace of teeth on his lip, as if that would disguise the smile. The idea of Webster as a wingman was about as comforting as the idea of Webster as a pilot on his transcontinental flight. For some reason, it was only disconcerting because he didn't want Max to think he needed a wingman, although that hadn't been enough for him to even consider the subtle dishonesty that came with pretending like this restaurant had been his idea. They both had to know that even when he was in town and not kicking through the desert on assignment, he was ordering his meals out of takeout menus and drive-thrus. Still, while it was a nice place, it wasn't stifling, and Dylan relaxed a little bit more by the time Max was comfortably at his side.
The hostess smiled with a pleasant tilt of her head, the sunshiney plastic welcome that was born and bred in this city. She promised to walk them to their table, and Dylan thoughtfully surveyed the dining room as a whole while they followed slowly behind. It wasn't even a conscious assessment of nearby threat, but something that his mind did without prompt these days. It had started in those beat cop days, when walking down the street was as dangerous as kicking in a door. This was the same involuntary surveyance that made his hand go still at the small of her back, suddenly aware that he'd been running his fingers in a nervous circle that traced over and over.. and even then, he was only aware of what he'd been doing because of the thought that suddenly registered in his mind.
"You don't feel armed," he whispered near her ear, low and discreet. Not that they were really going to somehow be overheard above the gentle music and ting-ting of silver on china. The whisper was a smiling one, as if he'd been expecting at least a grenade harness.
"A friend?" she asked, curiosity overpowering her nervousness and the seriously debilitating fear of the flowers in her hand. She didn't know anything about McKendrick's life outside the agency. She barely knew anything about his family. She knew about his tablets, video games and witty nerd pursuits. She knew he was the best hacker money could buy, and she knew he had a morality streak that was as appealing as it was frustrating. She knew he was a good man, and she knew those were few and far between. And she knew he had a killer smile, but she didn't know anything about his friends. "A friend with good taste in restaurants." Because, the joint didn't look like anything either of them would choose, but there was no denying that it was straight out of a movie romantic.
She noticed the way he noticed the open dining area. The place was dark, and the gaslights above the tables made shadows more prevalent than not, and she'd already scoped the entire space out before they started moving. She knew what it looked like, a spy taking note, and it surprised her in a man she thought was only a hacker. It gave her an itch to pull his file, and she was still thinking about it when she noticed the twirl of fingers at the small of her back. She almost shuddered, the simple pleasure of the touch making it hard for her to think, and god, she felt like a fucking virgin. The whisper, low and discreet, shouldn't have sent the shards of pleasure along her stomach that it did, not considering the topic, but she couldn't help the reaction. It made her grin, and her voice was husky and warm when she whispered back, intimacy in the almost imperceptible turn of her cheek, so that she could whisper in his ear. She slowed, back against his front for just a moment, fabric soft and teasing against his shirt and pants. "It's strapped to my inner thigh," she promised.
And then the hostess stopped, and Max eyed the chair with a teasing smile. "Do you pull out chairs, Dylan?" she asked, intentionally using his given name, and a little more at ease than when the walk to the table had begun.
Dylan's brow wrinkled briefly at the idea of Webster being a friend. Dylan didn't have friends, aside from maybe that fourteen year old Taiwanese girl with a limited understanding of English on one of many game teams. It was easy to talk to people who didn't understand, easy to connect with them. That's why he loved Starbucks while still hating coffee. People at a distance and with limited information were the lone true contact he'd had for a long time. Webster only partially fit into that category. They didn't talk, considering their families, they were probably expected to be amicable yet hostile.. and that was true, but even Dylan had to confess to the realization that he'd contacted Webster for a reason, just like Webster had contacted him ever so briefly now and then. People that barely knew you were the safest ones to talk to.
He blinked back when she said that the weapon was strapped to her leg, and fought the urge to glance down the length of her body. As if he could actually determine such a thing just by looking at her, but politeness and cast iron approval kept him from doing so. He liked the fact that she was armed as much as he was saddened by the fact that she needed to be. Logically, he knew that she didn't need him to save her. He wasn't even a hero in the most standard measure, but Dylan was also aware of how different everything would be if they weren't working. Weirdly different. The problem was that Dylan liked weird, and maybe that's what sprouted all of these ideas about how lives could change with a twist. The hotel had only fueled it.
Smirking, he stepped over to draw her chair out with a hand. It wasn't a familiarized move, although he'd witnessed it enough that the action seemed practiced. "Don't worry," he said with a grin as they sat across from one another. "I'll let you open my car door for me to be fair." Although then his eyes dropped consciously to the menu, aware that he'd unintentionally implied that they would be riding home together.
Max had people, but she wasn't sure she would call them friends. She worried about Daniels, the kid, even Corvus, but she hadn't been open with anyone since Brandon, and everyone knew how well that had gone. Where McKendrick hid himself in games and people watching, she preferred physical activity to get through. The past six months, unable to move as she normally would, had tested her. With the exception of her time spent with Amanda, she'd been left alone with her thoughts, old 80s movies and a bunch of playlists on Spotify. Now, she was jogging again, working out, and she was still having trouble turning it all off like she'd done before Bangladesh. She refuse to consider whether or not he might have something to do with that as well. She'd managed to avoid this for five years - well, no, this had never happened with Brandon.
She smiled when he blinked, and she looked to see if his gaze slid down. She wasn't bluffing, but he'd only know that if he stuck his hand up her skirt, and she would bet good money that McKendrick wouldn't do that. She'd considered going without the firearm, thinking that she'd feel more like a woman in a blue dress without the constant reminder of warmed metal between her thighs. But Mexico was close, and they were both high profile at the moment. It would have been irresponsible, and so the tiny 9MM was pressed against delicate, tan skin, and she'd at least kept from bringing her modified Rutger. She hadn't actually poked around McKendrick's file to find out how good he was with a weapon. She knew he was field certified, which meant he'd passed tests somewhere along the way, but that didn't make a field agent. If she hadn't seen the man beside her keep his cool in the face of an arsonist with a gun and a shot up truck, she wouldn't have thought she had it in him to handle field work at all.
She liked that it didn't seem like he'd pulled out a thousand chairs before hers, and she was too busy setting the marigolds on the edge of the table to panic about the realization. Plus, there was that smirk. Max had always appreciated a man that could smirk. "I get to drive," she told him, her own smirk in return as she sat and crossed her legs at the thigh, baring skin and indicating that the gun holster must be very, very high up her thigh. Unlike him, she wasn't embarrassed about the potential of driving home together. Getting him in bed was the only thing that didn't make her nervous. She'd convinced herself it wouldn't involve any emotions, because sex never did for her these days. "Do you think they sell wings?" she asked, teasing warmth in her dark brown eyes. "Ribs?"
Well, of course she was going to be armed. The fact that Dylan had actually come into the restaurant without a weapon strapped to him spoke of just how far from a field agent he actually was. If he'd really thought about it beforehand, he probably would have. The anxious weirdness that had taken control while he'd been getting dressed made Dylan contemplate a whole litany of things, but packing heat hadn't been one of them.
Like any operative, although especially for one commonly in strange territory, Dylan had firearms. They probably looked like Fisher Price when up against Max's arsenal, but it was a small, tidy collection that got cleaned more consistently than it got used. He just wasn't the super spy assassin, and considering most recent events, it really should have occurred to him to bring a gun.. but it hadn't. Planning for this date had involved shopping for flowers and polishing his shoes in the bathroom sink, not counting bullets into a clip. Although in talking about it, Dylan was forced to realize that such a thing had been careless. He could always count on Max to come in prepared, though, and that made him smile all over again.
Then, he was quick to give no reaction when Max playfully inquired about the possibility of barbeque. The smile was gone in lieu of such serious subject matter. Having grown up in an occasionally veganized household, he had to take grilled meat seriously. "I don't see why not." Tongue-in-cheek and absolute nonchalance as he skimmed the menu to keep from cracking another grin. "Maybe you should ask," he suggested as their waiter approached with a dark linen folded over his arm in traditional garcon style to announce their wine list and make his recommendations. None of which involved smoked brisket or fried wings. Dylan fought a new grin, and watched Max expectantly with such interest that she was probably going to have to relay the specials to him in a few minutes, because he obviously had been only half listening. For him, a man built off of binary details, that was practically criminal. He nudged her ankle playfully with the toe of his shoe from beneath the table.
The menu was in Italian, and Max was rusty. Her Bengali sounded almost native. Her German and Russian were flawless. Her Turkish and Arabic passable. Her Italian, like her French and her Spanish, suffered from being the languages of places where people didn't try to kill each other with any nationally important regularity. She skimmed the menu, settling on a seemingly harmless risotto, and she listened to the waiter's recommendations of red versus whites, branzino versus black squid ink. "I don't think it's a squid ink kind of night," she told the waiter, and she leaned forward on one elbow, jaw pillowed against the palm of her hand and all of her attention on him for a brief instant. "Why don't you just bring us a pitcher of sangria? Heavy on the brandy?" She would have tormented the man, but Dylan's foot against her ankle surprised her enough to keep her from taking out her nerves on the poor waiter, and the man made a safe escape.
She quirked a brow at Dylan, entertainment in her brown eyes. "I didn't take you for a footsies kind of guy, McKendrick," she said, and her smile said she knew he'd been playing. But no one had ever taught her to play fair, and she wasn't about to start now. Little soldier girls were taught to win, at all costs, unfortunately for the agent across the table from her. She waited until the sangria came, because she needed the brandy burn to remind her that she was sexually confident, even if she was slightly out of practice and possibly too nervous to attempt it. She took a long, long sip of the sweet red, and she smiled at him cross the table, goblet still between her fingers. "I don't recommend the squid ink," she told him, slipping a shoe off beneath the table and tucking her bare toes beneath the hem of his pantleg. She felt a little ridiculous, because it seemed like the most chaste thing she'd ever done in her life, but there was still a completely nonsensical thrill that chased along her spine.
Dylan remained obnoxiously fixated with the menu while Max went about ordering the sangria. That was something that he hadn't had in a long time, and it sounded like some well-deserved refreshment. Maybe it would help calm his nerves enough that he could actually think about eating something, and not just pretending to be fascinated by a menu which at this point was resembling just so many intangible strings of culinary code. He did have to wonder who in holy hell must have first looked at squid ink and been like, yum. Dylan gave a nose wrinkling and momentary grimace at the idea, sabotaging his illusion of refined taste. "Yeah, no. That sounds like prison food for mermaids."
He managed not to laugh when she questioned him on the footsie, and settled for a shrugging smile instead. "Yeah, well you don't know all my secret spy tactics, Main." Leave no method of making her smile unexplored, as childish or ridiculous as it might have seemed. He certainly didn't expect her to play back, and its not as if he'd continued the nudging after that initial push of his shoe against hers.
Dylan reached for the glasses of prepared mineral water on the table between them, needing something to erase the imagined taste of ink from his tongue. He took a swig just as her toes brushed onto his ankle where the smooth fabric of a dress sock was lazily scrunched down. With a raised eyebrow in her direction, Dylan seemed for a moment as if he might have been close to choking on that sparkling water, but he eventually managed a rough swallow. "Don't start a game of footsie you can't win, Main," he warned with stony seriousness before attempting to hide his smile by taking another sip of Pellegrino.
The waiter returned in that moment with their sangria and poured the initial glass for the lady of the table before setting the second before Dylan, who suddenly felt prompted to order, and considering that this was a date, he figured that meant ordering for both of them. Given that he'd barely focused on the menu in the midst of their game, the only choice really was to order at random. So it was calamari and antipasto, penne a la vodka sauce, and that one fish thing that he completely butchered the pronunciation of. Brawnzino.
She chuckled at the imagination that was required to come up with squid ink as prison food for mermaids. It made her think of Amanda, oddly enough, who came up with the most fanciful things. Max always wondered if the kid had been swapped at the hospital by mistake, because neither she nor Brandon knew the meaning of whimsy, but Amanda inherited the Main genetics too strongly to be someone else's kid, and so she had a lot of experience with things like mermaid fare these days. That made her think of Lin - genetics - and she tried to push the thought away, wanting the severity gone for the evening. She needed to ask McKendrick for a favor where the General was concerned, but she still hadn't decided how to broach it.
"Let me guess, you hacked your way into a high security database by playing footsies with an unsuspecting secretary somewhere?" she teased. And, even though she was joking, she thought he might have it in him to do it. She cocked her head, taking a long sip of her sangria, and she tried to decide if she could imagine him playing that game well enough. A huge part of her job was acting; she was good at it. She wondered if he was too. Her toes pressed against his shin for one second longer. "I usually skip the shin and go right for the crotch, Dylan," she told him, frank and a second's worth of teasing as her toes slid along the outside of his pantleg, higher, until she gave him a feminine smirk at the knee, then retreated and slid her foot back into her shoe.
She wouldn't admit that she thought it was charming that he ordered for her. She should probably be outraged, feminism rearing its head, but she'd lost some of that zeal with motherhood. It was hard to rage against everything female when you had to nurture something small and soft. She ducked her head and smiled a soft smile at his mispronunciation, and then she tucked her hair behind her ear and took a long swallow of the brandy-heavy wine. "Would it be abusing authority if I asked you to look into something for me? Something personal?" she asked, not even realizing she was going to ask it until the words were out. She took another long swallow, and poured some fresh sangria into her cup; she was going to need it. "It's illegal," she warned him in advance. She knew his moral code was strict, but she was pretty sure it didn't extend to government databases, especially not the ones belonging to her father. And, oddly, she wasn't worried about him not giving her an honest opinion about the situation. She wondered when that had happened, and she stared for a second too long. "Assuming you can hack it," she finally said, recovery and a teasing grin.