All it took was a touch for him to freeze. Touching was another thing he was picky about. Handshakes were fine, but he always looked annoyed when another man clapped him on the back or shoulder. When the wife or consort of an associate felt the need to lean in for a kiss. He was adept at avoiding the casual touch of strangers. When he didn't like someone and wanted to be particularly overt about it, the hand sanitizer would sometimes appear in full view of the person in question. Robert didn't usually lower himself to actually saying fuck you, but he had his own ways of getting it across that were quite loud and clear. When he was on, he had a way of looking at people that made them feel small and inherently wrong. A finely tuned glare inherited from Christine, not quite to her level but effective enough. He was capable of dropping the temperature of a room just by clearing his throat.
But in Adelaide's presence, he was warmer. He turned to her like a plant seeking sunlight, eyes softening at her kiss. Perfunctory and lacking anything remotely like passion, but Robert had no basis for comparison. His passions were stilted at best. A burning need to win. A dedicated hope for normalcy. The gentle peck of her lips against his skin was approval enough, and he smiled at her, lifting a hand to lightly touch her hair; smooth it back just a bit. Another minor thing left unspoken; how much he enjoyed seeing her in the early hours. Before a mask of makeup and respectability had been applied. Adelaide was rarely anything except perfectly together, and he loved the fact that he got to see her even when she wasn't. And wasn't that the definition of intimacy? Falling asleep beside someone. Enjoying the way her hair twisted out of sorts after she'd been sleeping on it.
"I think so," he told her, wanting to seem stalwart. Not that going back to bed at that hour could have been interpreted as laziness, but it seemed somehow depressingly common to admit fatigue, and his need to impress her sometimes outweighed his need to beg her to order him to bed. "Things are going to be stressful," he warned her, having the grace to be sheepish about. "Until the department has dealt with this murder."
Not to mention the raid on the supply truck. Five men had been lost, and the fact that they'd been killed to make a point hadn't been lost on him. Robert was quick to read into things, so the message had been received: We can do this, and get away with it. Watch us. We aren't afraid of you. Next time the attack might be even closer. Next time it might be at their front gate. Olinger had immediately -- predictably -- wanted to blame it all on the damn biker gang. Hell, the Mayor had all but insinuated that the so-called Dog King was at fault for the raid as well as the dead girl. But Robert had built an empire on patterns, reading variables and putting together puzzles. He didn't think the two crimes were related. Neither did Archer Avery, in the brief correspondence they'd had.
But he didn't want to worry his wife. He'd hesitated to even bring up the murder in her presence, except she would have found out anyway, and he wanted to make it clear to her that her charity work at the medical center would have to be postponed until after the crime had been solved. For her safety. For Charlie. For his own sanity. He wouldn't have been able to have borne the thought of her in danger. A potential target.
It was a lie, in any case. Things were going to be stressful, period. Unless he could find a way to make an island of just them and no others, with everything they could ever hope to want for within reach and all of their potential enemies corpses beneath their feet, things were going to be stressful. He was good, but he knew some of his limitations. Robinson Crusoe he was not, so destroying the rest of the world and running off with Adelaide and Charles to some tree house in South America was a fool's errand. He needed people to work the machine around them efficiently, and he needed someone else to be in the pilot seat. Olinger, his brother, his mother, his wife... Robert had never been one to drive alone. He'd never cared to. What would be the point?