The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)

at her with one hand: the hand, Jane realized, that was hidden from the rest of the kitchen by the doorframe. ‘Hi, Ella,’ Dee supplied in the awkward sudden silence, her throaty voice as cheerful as possible while pointedly emphasizing Jane’s cover name.
    ‘Hi,’ Jane began again. ‘Um . . . coffee?’
    ‘We were just having some. There’s toast, too, which you look like you could use.’
    We?
Jane frowned a little, then more as the wrinkling made her headache even worse. ‘Hi, Harris.’ She sighed as she rounded the corner to find him sitting at the spindly kitchen table.
Duh.
    He waved a slice of bacon at her cheerfully, his mouth already full of what looked like French toast. He wore jeans and a white V-neck tee that had a couple of pinpoint holes in it from frequent laundering. His usually sparkling green eyes were still a little puffy and bleary.
He slept here,
she realized. He looked like a natural part of the apartment, as if he were completely comfortable there.
Didn’t take him long to make himself at home,
she thought shrewishly, then grimaced at her own meanness.
    Dee pressed a mug of black coffee into her hand and Jane finished nearly half of it in one scalding swallow. ‘Long night?’ Harris asked amiably, having finally finished chewing.
    ‘Apparently those are going around,’ Jane replied loftily. Under his light dusting of freckles, Harris blushed.
Leave it alone,
Jane told herself, but part of her was quietly gleeful at his embarrassment.
    ‘Harris took me out to celebrate my first day of work,’ Dee inserted between them, not looking embarrassed in the slightest, and this time her pointed emphasis was on Harris’s name. ‘Ella, have you ever been to Masa Bar? It blew my mind. And then, of course, we went and finished the job with tequila.’
    ‘I’m so sorry I had to miss it,’ Jane told her, more or less sincerely. Even if it stung a little to watch Dee and Harris together, she knew she should be there for her friend. At the very least, she should
want
to. ‘My work ran really, really late.’
    ‘Clearly,’ Dee agreed, her amber eyes raking over every wrinkle in Jane’s clothes. Jane, who had fished them off a still-sleeping André’s floor just an hour before and was painfully aware that they looked a little too ‘lived-in’ for eight in the morning, scowled at her. Dee’s eyes came to rest on a substantial bruise that was starting to surface under the bare, dark skin of Jane’s left arm. Jane, suddenly and vividly recalling the splintering crash against André’s coffee table that had put it there during Round Three, decided to scowl at her plate instead.
    Harris’s green gaze flickered back and forth between the two women, watching them like an approaching storm cloud. He stuffed two more pieces of bacon into his mouth while Jane and Dee both sulked in their opposite corners of the narrow kitchen, chewing and swallowing in record time. ‘I should go,’ he declared abruptly, pushing his chair back and depositing his plate in the dishwasher in one elegant movement. ‘I just need my . . . um . . .’ He flushed again, glancing at Dee but studiously avoiding Jane’s eyes.
    ‘In front of the couch,’ Dee told him, as discreetly as she could manage with Jane sitting right there.
    Harris kissed her quickly on the cheek and then strode away into the living room, where he scooped a pale-green button-down shirt off the floor. He fastened it as he moved towards the door. He kept his head down, but Jane could still see his blush. When he was halfway through the door, he politely hesitated to call, ‘Bye, Ella, nicetoseeyou,’ before pulling it shut behind him with a solid thud.
    ‘So,’ Dee said, turning a black rubber spatula over and over in her tawny, calloused hands.
    ‘So,’ Jane echoed, swirling the dregs of her coffee in the thick white mug and wishing for more.
    Suddenly Dee was a flurry of tangled hair and long, golden limbs, and within seconds Jane was facing a plate piled with French toast and bacon. ‘So my new job is
awesome,’
Dee went on, apparently deciding to go first. ‘Way better than the bakery, because our clients want all kinds of things and I’m completely in charge of the desserts. More variety
and
more responsibility, and Kate – I told you about Kate, right? You never really know with start-up caterers; half of them are just bored home cooks who have no idea what they’re doing. But I can actually
learn
from this woman, and she