“Are you sure there are going to be meteors tonight?”
Lee shifted Amanda in his arms as they huddled against the wall of her garage. “I looked it up. The meteor shower is supposed to be unusually bright this year. Plus, the moon’s waning.”
“What about all the streetlights? We are in the city, after all.”
He kissed her temple. “Look, if you want to go back inside or over to my place, that’s fine.” He’d initially suggested they try the roof of his building, but she’d nixed that, so they’d agreed to meet in her back yard at one-thirty a.m. He’d been on time, waiting, and had just about decided to risk another climb up the trellis when she’d finally come out, apologizing for sleeping through her alarm.
“I told you why I need to stay here,” Amanda replied, and she had: her mother had been complaining about her late nights again, and her boys tended to get up earlier in the summer than they did during the school year. It wasn’t the first time her family’s needs had played havoc with their plans, and it wouldn’t be the last, but he’d signed up for this. “Oh, look! There’s one!”
He’d been so lost in his thoughts that he’d missed it. “I’ll have to watch for the next one. Or I guess I could just wait until they’re reflected in your eyes.”
She gave him a tender smile. “That’s so sweet of you.”
Lee’s response was another kiss to her temple. “You bring that out in me, Amanda m—” Not for the first time, he cut himself off before he could finish the endearment: Amanda mine. While she used such language as a matter of course, bestowing her “sweethearts” liberally, he’d trained himself out of any such habit a long time ago. They didn’t mix well with short-term flings. Unfortunately, that was all he’d had for…he shook his head, trying to remember exactly how long it had been since the last time he’d tried anything more, before abruptly bringing himself back to the present. Those liaisons didn’t matter now. This relationship did. He wanted it to last a long time.
Maybe, he’d wondered a couple times lately, even for the rest of their lives. But it had only been a few weeks, and tonight wasn’t the time to think about that anyway.
Another meteor streaked across the sky. Amanda’s delighted gasp was like music, and he couldn’t help his own happy grin. Well, why not? She already knew him well enough to know he’d enjoy this. It was past time to squelch his habit of playing his emotional cards so close to the vest that they were practically inside it. Before this summer, he hadn’t realized just how ingrained it had gotten.
Before this summer, he wasn’t sure that would have mattered to him.
“Lee?” asked Amanda softly. “Is everything all right?”
He shook his head to clear it. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? It’s awfully late.”
“I’ve been on stakeouts later than this. So have you.”
She snuggled back against him. “With lots of coffee and the radio. Well, we have the coffee, but it’s so quiet out here. And dark. I hadn’t realized what it could be like this time of night. Which meteor shower did you say we were watching again?”
“The June Boötids.”
“Interesting name.”
“It’s supposedly because they appear near the constellation Boötes, which is an old Greek word that means ‘herdsman’ or ‘ox driver.’ That must have been what they imagined they saw when they looked up at the sky. He supposedly has his plow with him, too, working on his field.”
“Astronomers do a lot of that thing anyway.”
“A lot of what thing?”
“Use Greek and Latin instead of more modern languages.”
“Hey,” he responded. “Greek’s still a living language. There are even a couple of people around the Agency who speak it.”
“Okay, ancient Greek,” she amended, but then he felt her body tense. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Lee, I think there’s someone out there.”
“Out where?” He looked around but didn’t notice anything amiss.
She pushed to her feet. “In the yard. I don’t think we’re the only ones here!”
He jumped up beside her, reaching automatically for his gun before remembering he’d left it locked up at his apartment. Stargazing in a suburban back yard wasn’t exactly a high-risk activity.
Then Amanda took a single sharp breath and stalked toward the gazebo. “Phillip Thomas King! You get out here this instant!”
There was a scramble of movement inside, before a disheveled teenager appeared. “Mom? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”
“I live here!”
“So do I!” he shouted.
“Well, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night? And who else is in that gazebo with you?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re already in major hot water, buster. Don’t make it worse by lying.”
Phillip’s expression became sheepish. “Come on out, Mindy. It’s just my mother, and she won’t leave until you do.”
“‘Just’ your mother?” It sounded as though Amanda’s temper was quickly heating to a full burn. “And where does your mother think you are, young lady? Who is she, anyway? I need to give her a call.”
“No!” shouted Phillip and Mindy at the same time. Then the girl appeared, and despite himself Lee had to admit that Phillip had good taste. She was the same age as he was and would have been an absolute knockout if not for the abject fear in her expression.
“You,” snapped Amanda, “are thirteen years old. That is way too young to be sneaking girls into that gazebo at all hours of the night! Especially if you’re doing things that mean you need a few minutes after someone catches you!”
“Mom! We were just fooling around.”
Amanda folded her arms, demanding further details, and Lee couldn’t keep the smile off his face. She’d be upset, he knew, once she got over the shock. But it didn’t seem like anything worse had been going on in the gazebo besides what they themselves might have gotten up to. He’d already been busted for doing a lot worse at Phillip’s age, although at the time his tastes had run more toward older, well-developed girls.
Lee shook his head at the irony, even as he saw a light appear in an upstairs window: either Dotty or Jamie had been awakened by the noise. That would mean even more embarrassment and, potentially, one of those dreaded “family meetings” Amanda had sometimes described.
It also meant that Amanda was about to march all of them into the house so that she could call Mindy’s mother. Which meant that this date of theirs, too, had been thwarted by the presence of someone else. Lee sighed and slipped along the edge of the garage until he could make his way through her next-door neighbor’s yard. He’d see her later, at the Agency, and encourage her to decompress then. Or, if she was exhausted, he’d send her back home to sleep.
Hopefully, he thought, nobody would remember her avoidance of Phillip’s question about what she had been doing in the back yard to begin with.