Michael trailed after her, his expression ominous. “Come on, Cat. Don’t go.”
“Isn’t Lea supposed to arrive tomorrow? What would she think, if she saw you clinging to me like this?”
“I’m not clinging,” Michael snarled, then looked up and caught sight of Xavier by the door. “Oh. I get it now.”
“No,” she cast over her shoulder. “I can’t imagine you do.”
She approached Xavier with a guarded expression. It made sense, given how he’d treated her—confused her—earlier that day. “Hi,” she said, her voice cautious.
Michael stood just behind her, torso tilted forward as though his cocktail glass weighed forty pounds, chin jutting out in a challenge. “Don’t fuck him again,” he slurred.
Xavier’s whole body snapped to attention. Rage started to build inside.
Cat, to her beautiful credit, just turned and told Michael, “You don’t get a say in who I do or don’t sleep with.” But when she faced Xavier again, he saw how unsettled Michael’s words had made her. “Can we go now?” She slid one arm into her coat.
“I built you, Cat!” Michael lunged, grabbed her shoulder and spun her back around.
Crimson, the angry red of flame, shot across Xavier’s eyes. Three years of punching a bag in his basement and he was finally going to be able to substitute in the real thing. And what better target than this cocky asshole.
Xavier barreled forward and rammed his elbow into Michael’s breastplate. The two men shot across the hall and thudded into the far wall, jostling a delicate table and sending the lone picture frame on it to the dark wood floor with a crack of glass.
Michael was drunker than he had been at the gallery opening, and it took him a second to figure out what had actually happened. That Xavier was hunched over him, ready to pound him to dust. Michael swept around the arm that held his cocktail glass, meaning to smash it over Xavier’s head, but Xavier easily blocked him. The glass hit the floor and shattered.
“I’ll fuck you up,” Xavier gritted into Michael’s face, “if you touch her again without her consent. Don’t think I won’t.”
“You’re insane. Who the hell are you anyway? Don’t you know—”
“I don’t give a shit who you are. You’re nothing to me. You treat her like you own her, like she owes you, I come after you. Plain and simple.”
Michael’s eyes drifted to where Cat now stood by the umbrella stand. Helen had rushed over—along with the rest of the party. The music had stopped.
“Cat,” Michael said. “I’m just trying to get us back on track. The things we can do—”
“She’s not yours,” Xavier said, low. “She never was.”
Michael sagged in Xavier’s grip, throwing up his hands. “Look, she can do what she wants. Sorry for the misunderstanding.” But the look he threw at Cat was pure possession.
Even though it killed him, Xavier let Michael go. Xavier crossed to Helen, glass grinding under his boots. “I’m sorry about your floors. And the picture. I’ll pay for them. I’m good for it.” Helen watched him warily, her fingers tightening on Cat’s arm. Xavier cleared his throat. “Cat, will you come with me?”
“You don’t have to,” Helen said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“I’m not the bad guy here,” he told Helen.
When Cat looked at Xavier, a lovely clarity crossed her face. Kind of like the moment on the ice when he’d kissed her.
“I don’t have to,” Cat told Helen, “but I want to.” With a gentle pat, she removed Helen’s hand from her arm. “I want to keep working with you, Helen, but as of now, I’m severing my professional relationship with Michael. This has no effect on my work. I want to sell. I want a career. And I want you to be part of it.”
“Cat. No.” But Michael protested to deaf ears.
She opened the front door and stepped out into the night. Xavier followed. Out on the porch, they faced each other and listened to the party rumble slowly back to life.
“Who’s Lea?”
“His girlfriend, I guess. Or the closest thing he has to a girlfriend. I’ve never met her, but she follows him to different cities. He probably has a bunch of women like that. Why he wants me, I’ll never know.”
He just stared. “Are you kidding?”
She looked into his face, dark eyes wide as new moons. Then she slowly shook her head and zipped up her coat. “You confuse me,” she whispered.
All he could see was her. All he could think about was how her body had felt under him. Over him. Around him. The body of his enemy.
The beautiful Ofarian body that had kept the Burned Man at bay.
This was it. Why he’d come. Except that he really wanted to talk about this morning first. He owed her some form of an explanation, some context for all the other shit he was about to dump in her lap.
He swallowed a huge gulp of icy air and drew strength from
it. “I haven’t slept with anyone in over three years,” he blurted out.
Her head swiveled around from where she’d been contemplating the snowy birdbath. Her mouth dropped open.
“By choice,” he added. “And you’re the first woman I’ve ever touched twice. You’re the only woman I’ve ever
wanted
to.”
“Seriously?”
“I need you to know”—he felt his throat start to close up—“that my issues, how I acted this morning, are not because of you. It could never be you.”
“I’m confused. Is that why you came here tonight? To tell me this?”
He stared hard into her eyes. “No. There’s much more. Stuff I don’t want to say here, in the cold.” He started down the steps.
“Where are we going? Back to your house?”
Grimly he remembered the awful image of the Burned Man, sitting on the couch like he owned the place. Maybe he did. “No. Not there.”
He took her to Shed.
The heat in the restaurant had been turned down to sixty-two, but it was still a hell of a lot warmer than outside. Emergency exit lighting glowed red over the main door and the delivery door in the back. A single can light streamed down over the center table—the one Cat had eaten at with Helen that first night.
The booths along the outer edge of the floor sat in blackness. He moved over to one, feeling comforted by the shadows, shedding his coat as he went. When he didn’t hear her following, he tossed his coat onto a bench and turned around. She was standing near the hostess stand.
“Why am I here?” During peak hours she would have had to shout to have been heard. Now, in the wee hours of the morning, her murmur carried excellently.
He ran a finger around the rim of a water glass. Though it was empty he could picture it full. Could picture Cat’s graceful finger moving the liquid around.
“You’re here,” he said, “because I know what you are.”
It took a long time, but she began to cross the restaurant toward him. “You know
what
I am?”
He laughed, though there was nothing funny going down
at all. “It actually crossed my mind, the first time you ever talked about your paintings. About water. How much you loved it.”
“What are you talking about?” Her steps slowed. “What do my paintings have to do with this?”
He ignored her question. “I actually
thought
it, and I pushed it away. I told myself it was impossible, that I was imagining things. That it was my past finding new ways to haunt me, since I’d given up sex. And then you did that thing this morning. With the water.”
She gasped. “But I don’t know
what
I did, what that was.”
“When you did it, when you spun the water and it followed your finger, I knew for sure what you are. And it changes everything, Cat. It takes what I feel for you and spits on it.”
His eyes closed. His hands made fists at his sides. He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t admit it out loud.
“What am I?”
His eyes flew open and she was standing right in front of him. Her big eyes were made brilliant by unshed tears, and there was terrible panic behind them.
“Oh, God, just tell me. What do you know about me?”
Goddamn selfish bastard. Of course he could tell her. She needed to know to fill the emptiness she’d spoken of. To find the home she’d always wanted and to learn why water tormented her. To protect her mind from turning on itself. To give her shelter among her own people.
He was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. He would tell her because, out of all the women in the world, she’d been the one to give him the dream of love. And if he couldn’t have her, at least he could walk away with that.
So he drew a deep breath and just…said it. “You’re a water elemental.”
She stared. And stared.
“A water elemental.” Her voice flattened. Her gaze switched to someplace far away.
He licked dry lips. “You have magic, Cat.”
“Magic…”
“Real magic. Not jester street-performer magic. It’s trying to get out. It wants you to communicate with water. And the water wants to be a part of you.”
She was so still, so quiet.
“What you are…your kind is called an Ofarian.” The name lodged like a nut in his windpipe, and if he didn’t expel it, he’d die.
“Ofarian,” she whispered, drawing out each syllable. “That’s insane. You know this sounds insane, don’t you?”
He just nodded. She staggered away, collapsing onto the bench of booth six. She looked at him for a long moment, and he saw the doubt cross her face.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You’re a different kind of human. Changed. Different. What’s called a Secondary.”
He took a deep breath. So did she. He let her sit there and think, work it all out. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Ofarian,” Cat said to herself. And then, “Water elemental.”
Maybe saying the names out loud might actually make them true. Or believable.
She looked up at Xavier, who was watching her without emotion. Could have been that he was seriously, medically crazy. Except that she knew he wasn’t. He was injured, deep down, and wounds you couldn’t bandage never truly healed.
She had
magic
? Connected to water?
Some part of her—a very large part of her—believed him. The part that twitched and hummed and stretched whenever she touched water. The part that wanted to be explained every time she set a brush to canvas.
The part that knew she’d manipulated the water that very morning.
“Tell me more.” Her voice was scratchy.
He drew a shaky breath, looking like he had to psych himself up, then nodded. He walked past her, snatching a water glass from a table. He went into the kitchen. She heard him clanking around. He didn’t turn on the light. An unseen faucet blasted on then turned off. He reappeared, coasting across the dining room floor holding a half-full glass of water straight out from his body like it might burn him. And given his reaction to what had happened that morning in his kitchen, maybe he did actually believe that.
She felt suspended in time, hanging there, waiting for him to speak. Anticipation spiked her heart rate and made her mind swim. It hit her that her reasons for coming to White Clover Creek had boiled down to this moment. Perhaps that was what
she’d felt on the street that first morning; she’d sensed Xavier’s importance to her.
“Take your coat off.” His lips barely moved. “We might be here a while.”
She did as he said, laying the coat across the booth bench. When she straightened, his hot gaze was making a slow path over her body. She recognized the lust; she’d seen it plenty last night as he’d peeled her dress off. As he’d stared at her spread legs. As she rode him until they both shuddered.
Only now there was terrible pain behind it. Like he hated her and wanted to screw her at the same time.
Then he blinked it away. He set down the water glass on the table and gave it a nudge. “Put your finger in it, like you did this morning.”
She couldn’t deny it; excitement purred through her. Excitement and trepidation. She covered the top of the stemmed glass with her hand, then crooked her forefinger into the bowl so just the tip of it broke the surface.
There it was. That curl of emotion swirling up, greeting her. Inviting her in. She gasped; Xavier grimaced.
“Now repeat after me,” he said.
He spouted a short phrase in a language that sounded like water burbling over rock. Even though he struggled with some of the sounds, she repeated them back with ease, word by glorious word.
The magic exploded inside her.
It rushed in to fill the holes the major questions of her life had gouged out. It flooded her senses and took control of her muscles. Her legs felt weak and powerful at the same time; her mind both wandering and more focused than ever. Her heart was too large for her body and not nearly big enough to contain everything she felt. The water held out its lovely arms and took her into its embrace.
She was home.
Her eyelids fluttered closed and she
listened
.
Cat
.
Her name drifted all around, the sound melodious but also anguished.
“Caterina.” It wasn’t the water speaking. It was Xavier, and he was calling her back.
With great effort she opened her eyes.
“Look at what you did,” he said.
She glanced down and gasped. There was no more water in the glass. In a thin, glistening stream, the liquid wrapped ribbonlike around her bare forearm, snaked with gorgeous precision over her elbow, and swirled around the cap sleeve of her gold party top.
She could not feel the water on her skin. It made no damp lines. Yet she
sensed
it, its power and voice seeping into her. When she moved, turning her arm to stare in wonder, the water moved with her. It waited for her to command it, the loving master and willing slave.
And then suddenly, horribly, it was too much. Too scary. Too strange. The awe crashed and burned, and she was just a lonely girl from conservative Indiana wearing an eerie bracelet of water. She shook her arm. It wouldn’t come off. She shook it harder, panic setting in.
“Get it off me. Oh, God, get it off.”
“Easy, easy.” Xavier reached out but didn’t touch her. “Say this to release it.”
He had to give her the new words twice, because the freak-out drew whines of fear from her throat and she couldn’t hear over herself.