Sigh. Not surprising, but annoying. Dalton pretended to be focused on a stack of paperwork for the meeting while surreptitiously watching Tierney’s feet sidle up to his desk.
When those feet were about a yard away, Dalton spun his chair a quarter turn and Tierney flinched. Dammit, he wasn’t trying to intimidate the guy. No sudden movements. He nodded. “Good afternoon, Mr. Terrebonne.”
Tierney coughed, or possibly choked on spittle. “Do you have to call me that?”
I’m trying to treat you like anyone else. “I feel it’s disrespectful to address visitors to the office by their first names. Even if we had coffee together socially.” Ooooh. Could have handled that better. And it wasn’t true—he’d call them by name if invited to, and this man had not only invited it, but insisted.
Tierney’s nostrils flared, and he poked his lip out. “I’ll be waiting over there.” He jerked his head toward the love seat in the corner of the entryway before stomping off in that direction.
Dalton stood up. “Tierney? If you like, you could wait in the conference room.” The best he could do to make amends here and now. “We have donuts.”
Tierney halted, turning, but then someone came into the reception area behind him. Two someones—one of the city’s assistant chiefs and that hospital administrator who raised Dalton’s hackles for no reason he could pinpoint.
Tierney’s body language changed immediately: His shoulders dropped back and his weight shifted. One corner of his mouth curled up. Not exactly a smile, more the edge of a smirk. But it was his eyes that changed the most, somehow seeming to shrink and go hard, more brown. Walling the real Tierney inside.
“Hey there, guys. Aspell, Chief.” He nodded at each as he said their names. “I see I beat you here, again. You two ride together?”
Dalton sat down, half his attention on compiling his paperwork and the other half eavesdropping on the group. The way the three men spoke to each other was revealing. Mr. Aspell and Chief Siriano were comfortable together, and the chief displayed that same business-jocular approach with Tierney that Tierney met him with. The same couldn’t be said about how Tierney and Edward Aspell treated each other. If they were dogs, they’d be making stiff-legged circles, lips raised in proto-growls.
Strange how comforting Dalton found it that Aspell didn’t like Tierney. Mr. Aspell was a douche bag, and everyone knew douche bags of a feather flocked together, therefore Tierney couldn’t be a real douche bag.
Or he was a douche bag of a different feather.
Oh shut up. Dalton forced all his attention on assembling the information for the meeting. He’d spent far too much time in the last week thinking about Tierney, he didn’t need to continue it now, when it was so obvious Tierney couldn’t handle even the most rudimentary friendship.
So, that was that. He mentally wiped his hands of the man.
Yep.
God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if dealing with inappropriate attraction was really that easy? It’s not attraction, it’s something else. Empathy. His susceptibility to wounded creatures.
The sound of his boss’s door opening behind him startled Dalton out of his reverie. “Do you have those packets ready?” Ian asked. “Sorry I had to ask you to do it.”
Mental eye roll. “It’s my job.”
“Yeah.” Ian grimaced. “I’m not used to having a secretary.”
Dalton gave him a look.
“I mean an office specialist,” Ian corrected, smiling apologetically.
Dalton nodded. “I’ll finish the paperwork and get it to you before you start.”
“Hell,” his boss muttered. He didn’t want the packets? “Tierney’s here already.” Ian ran a hand through his hair and adjusted his tie, turning toward the men in the reception area and smiling. “I wish the dude would just hurry up and have his big, queer breakdown, then maybe it wouldn’t take so much energy to deal with him,” he said to Dalton out of the side of his mouth.
Dalton couldn’t repress his snort. “You really think he’ll come out of the closet one day?”
Ian gave him an odd look, but answered. “You’ve met him. He’s a fighter, not the type to just passively accept shit. He’ll struggle with this until it breaks him. He’s already falling apart, you can tell by looking at him.”
“It’s going to be painful to watch,” Dalton said, sighing and glancing at Tierney beneath his lashes. He was threadbare, in spite of his sleek designer suit and expensive haircut. “And to live through.”
“Yeah. It’s gonna suck to be him for a while.”
There was no argument for that. “He’ll need his friends.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll do my best, but the dude’s good at pushing people away.”
“Ian!” Aspell chose that moment to holler across the office. “How you doin’? Ready to hand over some of that grant money?”
Ian gritted his teeth in what might pass for a smile from more than a few feet away. “Nope, sorry. This is just the meeting where I explain how this process is going to work and what information I’ll need from you. I must not have made that clear in the email invite.”
“Oh, yes, you did,” Dalton said, sotto voce. Then he ducked his head, because really, he should stay out of it.
“This is gonna be a horrible meeting,” Ian said in a similarly quiet voice before stepping forward to greet more visitors. Dalton glanced at Tierney again and caught the man watching him, locking gazes with him before Tierney jerked away. Shortly after that, he wandered into the conference room, flashing a faint smile when Dalton glanced up just as he disappeared through the doorway.
Was that progress? He really didn’t know.
He could hear someone coming. Dalton’s car was almost the only one left in the state employee parking garage, so Tierney figured he had a good chance of those rhythmic tapping noises being his footsteps.
His feet twitched when he caught sight of Dalton’s blond head shining in the parking lot light. He was looking down, bangs obscuring half his face while he dug through his leather messenger bag, probably for his keys or phone.
Straightening up from where he slouched against the compact white Toyota, Tierney fisted his hands in his pockets. You can totally do this, dude. “Um, hi.” Maybe should’ve rehearsed a better opening.
Dalton stumbled, lurched to a halt, squinting and yanking his hand out of his bag. In it he held a can of mace attached to his key fob. After a second, he dropped his arm and the defensive posture. “In case you don’t recall,” he said, “I witnessed an assault a little over a week ago, and finding someone hanging out by my car in a deserted parking garage after dark is disconcerting.” He walked up to the vehicle, nudging Tierney away from his door. His hair obscured his eyes from this angle, but Tierney had a very intimate view of his ear, again. He liked the swirling whorls of it and the way the darker-blond hair on the back of Dalton’s head swept forward and just brushed the pale upper curve of it. Ignoring twitchy fingers that wanted to trace the shape, he licked his lip and said, “Sorry. My bad. That was . . . Sorry.”