It wasn’t until they pulled into the White Clover Creek bus stop on Groundcherry that he realized that, through it all, the Burned Man had stayed completely silent.
A world of possibility bloomed inside him.
Xavier was a book of a million pages, written in teeny tiny type.
One that Cat could read from now until the end of time, and she’d still never fully understand him. The amazing news was, he’d finally allowed her to crack open the cover. Now she was pretty sure it hadn’t been just a broken heart that had messed with his head.
When they disembarked in White Clover Creek, the bus driver gave no indication he knew what had happened in the back. And really, at that point, Cat couldn’t have cared less. She was flying high and the world moved below her in a slow gelatin haze.
Xavier took side streets, coming up on the Margaret Hotel from the side. As they stood at a corner waiting for a legion of golf carts trucking camera equipment to pass, she said, “I’ll get the opening invitation to you. You’ll need it to get in—”
The sudden way he turned to her, the fierceness with which he pulled her into his body, made her hold her breath, waiting for the heat of his mouth. He didn’t kiss her though. He wanted to—he stared hungrily at her lips—but he instead just pressed his forehead to hers. He touched her face, his eyes closed, his fingers searing lines over her cheeks and jaw and neck.
“This,” he murmured, “is more than sex for me.”
His voice moved over and around her, as hot as a current of ocean air. A cryptic statement, but she suspected what he meant. Secrets decorated his soul like tattoos.
“It is for me, too,” she said. He seemed to be her truth serum as well.
“No.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“I think I might. At least part of it.”
“But not all.”
She pulled back a bit and forced him to look at her. “You can tell me.”
He barked out a laugh. “Not likely.”
At that, she fully stepped out of his embrace.
Regret darkened his eyes. “You’re going to leave. I’m just protecting myself.”
Sadly, that made sense. And if she had any sense of her own, she wouldn’t allow herself to want this man in the way she did.
With a sigh her gaze drifted across the square, with its mass of tents and noisy mob that would disappear the same day she would. Today they lived in a temporary world, and to him, she was a part of that.
He said, “You’re worth more than a quick fuck.”
Her focus snapped back to him. It was crudely put, yes, but she appreciated his frankness. “Thank you for saying that. I wish more men would be that honest.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not most men.” He looked everywhere but at her.
“No. You most certainly aren’t.”
The train of golf carts passed and they crossed the street to
the hotel. Over the din of the mingling crowd and the slam of taxi doors, she heard her name.
Michael pushed away from where he’d been leaning against a giant gold urn stacked with evergreen boughs and decorative plastic film spools. As he came over to her, he dropped the phone from his ear.
“There you are.” His keen blue eyes settled on Xavier, who’d stiffened.
“Is it eleven already?” she asked Michael.
“Just about.” He was notoriously on time. She should have guessed.
“Oh, Michael, this is Xavier.”
Michael held out his hand and said, all smooth silk, “Xavier, how are you?”
A weird moment or two passed before Xavier took the hand, his face completely blank. “Michael Ebrecht?”
“Heard of me?”
She wondered if Michael practiced that particular smile in the mirror—the one secretly designed to patronize.
“Only from Cat.”
Michael’s smile started to strain. “You here for the festival then?”
“No.”
When Xavier didn’t offer any more, Cat piped in, “He lives here.”
“Ah,” Michael said, as though that answered a lot. Maybe in his mind, it did.
Cat was quickly starting to hate this situation. She hadn’t realized she’d created a whole separate world around Xavier, but now that he’d met Michael, the melding of her universes did not feel right.
“Lunch with that actor of yours today?” she asked Michael, drawing his eyes back to her and away from Xavier.
“Not my actor yet, but yes.” Michael rubbed his gloved hands together. “He’s an up-and-comer. Starring in that Olympics film coming out in July. Just moved to L.A. Big empty house that needs artwork.”
She nodded. Dual purposes to her presence, always. Sell her art. Use her to sell what he needed.
“Can you give us a second?” she asked him.
“Absolutely.” Michael whipped out his phone and ambled back to the urn.
Xavier’s eyes darkened to the color of iron, his pale eyebrows drawing down and in. “He wants you.”
Cat blinked. Whipped around to watch Michael. He clutched the phone and gestured tersely with one hand. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Don’t be naive.”
She drew back, a little offended, and lowered her voice. “I’m not being naive. We’ve known each other for a couple of years now and he’s never made a move. Never even suggested anything. He’s been perfectly professional.”
“He wants you, Cat. He’s dying for you.” There was an ugly twist to his words. Even he looked thrown by it, like he didn’t know what to make of the emotions inside him.
Cat scrutinized Michael, who still hadn’t looked back at her. “How do you know?”
“Believe me. I know.”
“How?”
Xavier shifted on his feet. “Aside from the fact I’m a guy? He stared at your mouth. At where I kissed you. He saw that, didn’t like it.”
“He acts like he doesn’t care.”
“That’s all part of it. He wants you to think that.” The balls of his fists bulged in his coat pockets. The clench in his jaw sharply tuned the angles of his face. “Are you used to guys just coming right out and hitting on you?”
Pretty much every day at work. Nothing like men away from home drinking alcohol on an expense budget to bring out the flirting. She looked Xavier in the eye. “This conversation is making me uncomfortable.”
“I’m sorry, but I think there’s all sorts of shit going on with him below the surface.”
“I said, it’s making me uncomfortable.” She leaned closer. “Considering what we did today, I think you’re just being hypersensitive.”
He exhaled and studied the sidewalk, looking regretful. “You might be right. Man, I hope you’re right.”
This time, when he yanked her to him, he did kiss her.
One arm around her waist, the other gripping the back of her neck, the kiss was condensed passion. Possessive. All the tension in his body came through in the force of his lips, and she nibbled at it, trying to take it from him. The taste and heat of him erased the world around her, which had been his intent, hadn’t it?
He shoved back with a fierce grin. Wicked desire burned behind his eyes—the kind she’d witnessed on the staircase. The one tinged with pain. He rubbed his temple, eyes shooting across the snow like he saw someone he recognized—someone he hated.
He dragged one of his knife-nicked fingers down her cheek, then skirted around her, and crossed the square toward Shed. Stunned, set aflame and left to burn alone, she watched him go.
When she turned toward Michael, he was already staring at her. And it was then she saw exactly what Xavier was talking about.
Ten in the morning and Xavier hunched over Shed’s burners,
three pots for sauces already going, his lunch
mise en plac
e taken care of. Another small pot of a doctored soup simmered silently and secretly in the back. When he was done tinkering with it, he’d hand Pam a tasting spoon. Something about it still wasn’t right, and in the three days since he’d spoken to Cat, he had yet to figure it out. How fitting.
Jose was working back in the meat cooler and Lars hadn’t punched in yet, so when footsteps crossed the tiled floor toward him, it could only be Pam.
“This came for you,” she said.
Xavier looked up. She held a delicate silver envelope between her fore and middle fingers. The embossed Drift Art Gallery logo stared back at him from the flap.
She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want it?”
He eyed it for a few long moments before indicating the corner of the workspace with his chin. “Just put it over there.”
“You’re not actually thinking about not going, are you?”
How the hell did she know what was in that thing?
“Small town, Xavier. A million and two outsiders visiting, but still the same people behind the scenes. Wasn’t hard to figure out who Cat was, once I walked past the gallery and saw her name. And the fact that she had dinner here with Helen Wolfe.”
He gave the steak sauce a slow turn with a wooden spoon. “I was wondering why you or Jill haven’t mentioned her yet.”
Pam carefully set the invitation where he’d said and leaned
into the counter, overlooking his work with a frown. “You haven’t figured it out?”
“Figured out what?”
“Why we tease? Why we try to set you up all the time?”
His turn to frown. “Because you’re a control freak?”
Her head bobbed side to side. “Well, that, too.” She edged closer, arms crossed over her chest. “You have no idea how women react when you walk past. How they watch you.”
Oh man.
He turned away, giving her his back as he took the long way around to the dish washing station.
“We tease,” she called across the center island, “because we see it and you don’t. But now that you’re with someone—”
“I’m not
with
Cat.”
“—there’s no fun in teasing. And because you actually look semi-happy for the first time since you came here.”
He swiveled back around.
She snorted. “Come on. You didn’t think you’d actually done a good job hiding all that shit that eats at you, did you?”
“Pam.” He moved around the island, the hanging copper pots hiding half his boss’s face. “Is this about my work? Because if it is—”
“No. It’s about you. We all have ghosts, Xavier.”
His knees wobbled at the mention of ghosts but he drew himself up higher to compensate.
“Someone screwed with your head a long time ago. I get it.”
Try hundreds of someones. And one really nasty one in particular.
She slapped the counter. “You need to unscrew it. Like, before you die.”
He snapped the towel from his shoulder and wiped down an already-clean station. “Easier said than done.”
“No. It’s not. You just do it.”
He tossed the towel back over his shoulder and challenged her with a stare, hands on his hips.
“Goddamn it, Xavier. You’re a fucking genius. This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier to say if I were trying to get you out of my kitchen.”
Something tiny and sharp started to gnaw at his gut. “What whole thing?”
She threw her arms out in a wide vee, palms raised to the sky, a mirror of the frustrated gesture she threw at her cooks on overbooked nights when she so rarely lost her cool. “Why are you still here? Why? Why on earth don’t you have your own kitchen?”
He picked up a spoon, poked at the stock. “Don’t want one.”
“How can you be such a fucking amazing cook and not want your own kitchen? What’s the point of creating your own dishes if you don’t want to be chef?”
“I’m happy here.”
She stomped to the little cooler where the cooks stashed their bottled water. “No, you’re not. You’ve been a moping mess since the day you started. A fucking brilliant moping mess, but a moping mess.” She cracked open a water bottle and downed it.
Most cooks didn’t want to work the line forever. You didn’t learn how to blend flavors and obsess over presentation if you were only going to cook other chefs’ food.
He shook his head, the rough tail of his tied-back hair swishing his shoulders. Pressing both palms hard and flat on the counter edge, he gave them all his weight. Pam hadn’t moved. Just stood there, waiting for his answer.
“I found cooking,” he told the stainless steel, “in a really ugly, dire time in my life. I love the repetition of the line. I need it. I’m scared that if I let it go, this thing I’ve come to know so well, I’ll lose everything I’ve won.”
Raising his head, he looked through the glass partition at the front door. He could still picture Cat entering through it that first morning after following him from the street. Pam came to his side, keeping the distance she’d learned he needed.
“You’ve changed over the past few days,” she said, softer, “since you met Cat. For the better. Your work is even more inspired. Shit, I’m actually scared to taste that soup you’re trying to hide from me because I’m sure I’ll have to make room for it on my menu. I see what’s happened to you since Turnkorner started—”
“She doesn’t live here, Pam. She’s leaving.”
“And that’s stopping you why?”
Because he told himself that morning of the movie date that Cat would only be a means to an end. That she would help him
figure out a way to be normal. She was a moment in time. That’s all she could be, when it came down to it, and he had to remember that.
“Because you’re right,” he said. “I do have some shit to work out, and I don’t want her involved.”
“Too late, Romeo. She’s healed you some already. You’re just too focused on that station in front of you to see it.”
No, he saw it. He felt it on every inch of his skin, in every pulse of his blood, when he remembered how he’d made her come and the Burned Man hadn’t said a damn thing.
He inhaled deep and long through his nose. “I can’t rely on just a few days. I’ve been living…a certain way for so long that to change my thinking is…hard.”
“I get it. I totally get it.” She nodded so vehemently he wondered what events in her life had made her so understanding. “But the thing is, you
are
changing. And you can either accept that and move forward or retreat back into my kitchen where I will be glad to chain you to your station and keep you working for me until I retire.”
This was the longest the two of them had ever spoken. It was cathartic and exhilarating and the most frightening conversation he’d ever had.