Salt Kiss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Floor
Nolan watches Ford rule the club floor, puts a hidden-camera man on the bricks, and is called upstairs; Ford says he has a fiancee who left, and Nolan is going to bring her home.
For forty minutes, Nolan Drayton did not look at anything but the man in the charcoal suit.
It was his eighth night at Brine, and he was supposed to be watching the floor.
He was watching the floor, in a way.
The floor was the center of an old brick warehouse on the Cooper River, with iron beams overhead and low amber light.
A hundred and forty adults in black and dark red moved through it, glasses in hand, talking low.
Every one of them was there because they wanted to be.
Every one of them looked at Ford Heyward when he crossed the room.
Ford was forty-one, lean, with a shaved head, a close black beard and rimless glasses.
He wore a three-piece suit and a pocket watch, and he never hurried.
Nolan stood on the mezzanine with his back to the rail and his hands folded in front of him, the way he had stood at checkpoints for eight years.
Below, a woman in a green dress stopped in front of Ford.
Ford said something too quiet to hear.
She smiled, a real smile, the kind that cost her nothing, and sank to her knees on the brick.
Ford put two fingers under her chin and she stayed exactly there, glowing.
Nolan's mouth went dry.
He told himself it was the job to know where the host was at all times.
He told himself that for forty minutes.
At minute forty-one, something small and wrong caught the corner of his eye.
A man by the south pillar, silver lighter in his fist, had flipped it open with his thumb toward the woman on her knees.
A lighter doesn't have a lens.
Nolan was down the iron stair before he had decided to move.
He crossed the floor without running, because running makes a room panic.
The man saw him coming and tried to turn, and Nolan caught his wrist and folded it behind his back.
The lighter hit the bricks and a tiny red light blinked inside it.
"Phones go in the pouch at the door," Nolan said.
"Everyone signs that."
The man swore at him.
Nolan put him face down on the brick with one knee between his shoulder blades, and the whole room went still.
Lorna Aiken, the manager, came across the floor with her reading glasses swinging on their chain.
She picked up the lighter, looked at it, and said, "Darling, you are not on my list."
Two staff members took the man out by the arms.
He was shouting a name as they went.
"Cliff knows!
"Cliff knows everything!"
The door shut on it.
Nolan stood in the middle of the room with his pulse hammering and found Ford looking straight at him.
Ford had not moved the whole time.
He had not needed to.
The woman in the green dress was still kneeling, patient and pleased, and Ford lifted his hand to the mezzanine office without taking his eyes off Nolan.
Upstairs.
The office had dark paneling, a leather couch, and a desk with nothing on it but a green lamp.
Ford came in two minutes after Nolan and shut the door with his heel.
"Forty minutes," Ford said.
"Sir?"
"You stood on that rail for forty minutes and watched me.
"Not the room.
"Me."
Nolan could have lied.
He was bad at it, and Ford's eyes were very steady behind the glasses.
"Yes," he said.
"What were you thinking?"
The truth came out in a flat voice, the one he used for reports.
"I was thinking I wanted to be the one on the bricks."
Ford did not smile.
He crossed the room slowly and stopped close enough that Nolan could smell cedar and cold air.
"Say that again."
"I wanted to be told what to do," Nolan said.
"By you."
Ford took off his glasses, folded them, and set them on the desk.
"Jacket."
Nolan's hands were already at the buttons.
He hung it on the back of the chair, and when he turned around Ford took him by the shirt and walked him backward until the desk hit the backs of his thighs.
The kiss was not gentle.
Ford's mouth was hot and certain, and his beard scraped Nolan's jaw, and when Nolan made a low sound in his throat Ford bit his lip.
"Hands on the desk," Ford said against his mouth.
"Behind you.
"Keep them there."
Nolan gripped the edge of the wood so hard his knuckles hurt.
Ford's hand slid down his chest, over his belt, and pressed flat over the hard line of him through his trousers.
"Look at you," Ford said.
"Eight nights.
"Eight nights you've been hard on my mezzanine and thought I didn't see."
Nolan's breath shook out of him.
"Yes, sir."
Ford's fingers found the buckle.
Then they stopped.
He stepped back, and the cold of the room came in where he had been.
He opened the desk's one drawer and took out a photograph, and laid it face up under the lamp.
A tall woman with a sun-bleached braid, laughing into the wind on the deck of a boat.
"That's my fiancée," Ford said.
His voice had not changed at all.
"She left eleven days ago and took something of mine.
"You're going to bring her home."
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