The Inner Sanctum
Vex
After one last toss, I scoop the meat out of the frying pan and place it in a bowl next to the stove. A wok would have given the chicken a nicer sear, but it looks good.
There’s an odd thunk in the pantry.
Dahlia!
My first impulse is to run in, with gun drawn—I don’t even have one on me. It’s locked in the car—but there isn’t a window or door into the pantry. She probably dropped something. “Dahl, you need any help in there?”
“No. I’m fine.” Her voice is a little strained.
She’s far from fine. What changed in the last couple of minutes?
Dahlia walks out with her arms full of all sorts of sweet things. “I hope you like hot fudge.”
Even the idea of homemade hot fudge doesn’t distract me from her ashen face. What do I do? There needs to be a manual or class on how to respond when a woman smiles at you one minute and looks like she’s ready to pass out the next. If I called Payne, he’d just laugh at me. If I call Barb, she’ll quote some complex medical terminology or hang up. Barb doesn’t do human interaction well.
She should have been a surgeon or a researcher, so that she could stay hidden in her lab all day.
Neither of them can help me now.
“Vex?” Dahlia sets the containers down on the island.
“Yes?” I’m going to give her space. Let her come to me like a street cat. Instead of asking questions to fill the silence, I dump the pre-sliced stir-fry vegetables into the sizzling pan.
The sound of Dahlia moving around the kitchen should be comforting, but it makes the need to demand answers even more intense.
“You don’t think… Just because I didn’t say… I know you don’t plan to kiss me… But...”
She’s still obsessing about that kiss.
“You don’t think…You brought your clothes…I’m not…I’m not easy.”
Easy? “What did you just say, Dahl?”
“Nothing,” she mutters into her chest as she shifts things around on the bar.
If dinner burns, I’ll order something. I step away from the stove and walk right up to her. “What did you say?”
“I’m not easy.”
A snitch afraid of getting caught would have spoken louder than Dahl just said those words. “Are you confused about the definition of easy? Because a woman worth the world, like you, is hardly easy.”
“But you plan on sleeping with me.”
“I do—”
Her head pops up as her eyes fill with shock and ire.
“—eventually.” Slowly, so as not to frighten her, I step closer, setting my hand on the soft silk of her hair. “Earlier, I gave you one of the reasons I won’t kiss you yet. But the main one is because I can see the value of the woman standing in front of me. You’re worth fighting for. You’re worth getting to know. And kissing you is worth waiting until you’re ready. Your worth isn’t based on your looks or how soon you have sex with someone.” I reach out and tap her head, then her breastbone as I say, “Your worth is hidden in your head and heart. If there is anyone unworthy in this relationship, it’s me.”
Oh… Oh… “Mom says never to sleep with a man until he gives you two rings.”
Even though I told her I was lacking worth, Dahlia is thinking about marrying me. That should have me running in the opposite direction. It certainly did when other women tried to talk me into marrying them. A slow grin spreads across my face. “Your mother is a smart woman.”
“Do you like milk chocolate or dark?” She lifts up one bag in each hand. “You had a piece of both yesterday.”
Dahlia notices the little things like I do. She prefers milk chocolate and any candy with fruit in it. “Milk chocolate. Why eat a sweet that tastes bitter?”
“Exactly.” She sets the other bag to the side.
“Dinner should be done in a few minutes.” I turn back to stir the vegetables in the nick of time.
***
“You can cook dinner for me anytime.” Dahlia sets her chopsticks down on the little rest next to her empty bowl. She might not cook, but she knows how to make a plate of food look beautiful.
“Invitation accepted.” This weekend definitely won’t be the last.
“What do you want to do now?”
Kiss you until you’re dizzy. But since that’s not an option, I want to see her library again. Do women invite strangers into their library? I don’t. I hoard my books like a dragon hoards his gold. “Show me your favorite spot in your house.”
“My favorite,” she squeaks. “It’s embarrassing.”
Now, I have to know which room it is. “Show me. ”
“Fine. It’ll just make you realize how boring I am even quicker.” Dahlia stands up and grabs the book off of the bar. “It might take a while if you want to grab a drink to bring with you.” She nods towards my beer.
“Sure.” I follow her up the stairs, keeping my eyes firmly on the stairs. This is it. She’s bringing me into her inner sanctum. The room that makes her feel the safest. It’s going to tell me so much about her. Will it be one of the crafting rooms, her office, or her library? There’s no way she’s going to show me in that safe of hers. And her library is the one room that isn’t finished. For a person as organized and detail oriented as Dahlia, she probably wouldn’t show a room that’s not flawless to a guest.
We stop at the landing for her office and library.
The office it is.
At least that will give me an opening to ask her what she does without her asking any questions that I’m not ready to answer. There’s no way I will ever be able to tell her the truth about my life. Instead of moving towards her office, Dahlia stops in front of her library door.
Is she embarrassed to read books?
“So. Um… It’s just… A mess.” Her shoulders sink down. “I can’t decide how I want to decorate it so… well, everything is everywhere.”
That’s why the room is so different from the rest of her home. “Show me.”
“You aren’t going to—”
I reach out and take her hand. “The only thing that matters to me is why you love whatever is inside that room. I couldn’t care in the least if it’s decorated, or if it’s a mess.”
“It’s a mess. A huge mess.”
“So. Show me your mess so that I can tell you’re a real woman with flaws and not a perfect dream that came to life.”
Her lips form a cute little oh.
I reach past her to turn the knob, but don’t push the door open. That brings our bodies close enough that I could lean down and kiss her bemused lips .
She leans forward… taunting me… tempting me… One little taste of her wouldn’t be so…
Dahlia isn’t ready. No matter how much I want to kiss her, she needs to be ready. “You can open the door now.”
“Door? What door?” Dahlia blinks up at me a few times. “Oh.” She pushes it.
A blush runs up her face, drawing my attention away from the room.
“So… I… um… like to read.”
That’s a bit of an understatement compared to other people. “I see.” But what I want to see are all the spines.
“Every time I start to put them on the shelves, I freeze up.”
“Why?” It seems pretty obvious that books go on the shelves, not all over the floor in boxes or massive stacks.
“Sometimes I want to sort them by color because it looks so pretty. Other times I want to sort alphabetically by author, so it’s easy to find the book I want to read. Then other times I want to have a trophy shelf of all my signed books. Then there’s always the Dewey Decimal System.”
The walls are filled with whitewood shelves and a few haphazard piles of books. “Why don’t you do all of the above?”
“Huh?”
“You use your special edition books as decorations on random shelves. You take all your standalone fiction books and sort them by color. The fiction series can go in alphabetical order. Any non-fiction books go by Dewey.”
Dahlia gapes at me. “That’s brilliant. But what if I forget where a book is?”
“You ask me.”
Dahlia raises an eyebrow at me. “You’re going to remember where every book is on my shelves?”
I’m going to remember every detail about your bookshelves. That’s the gift and the burden of having a photographic memory. “Yes.”
“Seriously? ”
Her crinkled nose and brow are awfully cute. “You don’t store your dried seasonings alphabetically. They’re in order of use. The top row is garlic powder, onion powder, paprika…”
“You remember all of that?”
I remember everything about you. “We should get started if we’re going to finish this before you go to work on Monday.”
“You think it will take that long?”
Not if we did just this. We could probably knock it out in a few hours, but that wouldn’t be fun. “We’ll see. Let’s start by sorting and see what you have.”
Dahlia nods.
Now I get to see what your books say about you.
Several stacks later, the picture from before hasn’t changed. She’s sweet all the way down to her dozens of cozy mysteries and sweet romance books. There’s a deeper side to her tastes too… literary fiction and classics are peppered through the standalones. She doesn’t have any first editions of classics, but the number of signed modern books is impressive.
“Do you think I’m a nerd because I read?”
A sexy librarian works for me.
“Never mind, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know the answer. Do you read?” She picks up and sets the same book down.
Part of me had expected her to ask if I could read at some point. People tend to underestimate me because of my size. They tend to think—to their own chagrin—that I’m all muscles and no brain. “Yeah, Dahl, I read. And it seems that I find a nerd to be very attractive.”
Dahlia’s cheeks turn a soft pink.
Maybe one kiss wouldn’t be bad. She knows I’m not a good guy, anyway.
Killer though I might be, a liar I’m not.
Could I stop after a single kiss?
A single embrace?
Ignore her, even though she’s staring. You’re strong enough to ignore her.
I pick up a book off the top of a new stack .
Dylan DuPress. Dahlia reads mystery? I flip the front cover over out of habit more than anything else since Dylan never signs—“How did you get this?”
“Huh?”
The next book in the pile is another Dylan DuPress book. It’s signed too. How is this possible? These don’t exist. And I tried. Boy, did I try to get a signed set, but Dylan doesn’t ever sign his books. “These.” I lift up book after book. Each and every one is signed with a personalized note.
“Oh…um… I must have won them or something.”
She’s lying. Why would Dahlia lie about a trivial book? Did they date?
There are a lot of books on the pile. They would have had to be together—together. My hands clench into fists as I imagine all the ways I could kill Dylan, a man I’ve never even seen an image of, in cold blood.
I shouldn’t have let Payne do the research. Dylan could be lying in a shallow grave right now, rotting. There would be an investigation when a bestseller like Dylan disappeared, and the world wouldn’t get to finish his latest series. That would be such a shame.
“You like Dylan’s book?”
There it is… all the answers I need. There’s a familiarity and softness in her tone that speaks of a relationship.
Maybe I can wait until after his next release before I kill him for touching what’s mine.
“Dylan DuPress—” Dahlia nods towards the books in my hands. “—do you like the books?”
Not anymore. Right now, I detest them. “They aren’t my favorite.” Which was actually the truth even before I found out about the two of them. “His stories are well written, but he lacks the subtlety that makes for an amazing mystery.”
Dahlia smiles. “Subtely isn’t Dylan’s strong point, but I’m dying to know who the serial killer is. I have a few guesses, but I really want it to be the butler.”
“The butler with the candlestick in the kitchen.”
“Exactly.” Dahlia grins up at me .
“It wasn’t the butler.”
“What? Why would you say that? He was ‘on vacation’—” Her nose wrinkles as she makes air quotes. “—during the first three murders. All of the people that have been killed were rude to him. And—"
“He was picking up flowers for a funeral at the time of the fifth murder.”
“Oh. Oh, I forgot about that.” She sinks down onto the floor. “Who do you think did it?”
“I know it was the grandson. Each of those people stood in the way of him inheriting billions.” It became obvious after the sixth book.
“The tourist he killed in book eight didn’t have anything to do with his inheritance. Nor did the doctor in book twelve.”
Those were the exact reasons that I know he did it. “The tourist was six months pregnant and the doctor you mentioned was a gynecologist.”
“Oh… Oh…” Her eyes widen. “How did I miss that? It all makes sense. You’re good at that.”
“Noticing details is kind of important in my line of work.”
“Oh. Oh.” She hides her gaze from me.
Why did I bring that up? Am I trying to push her away? It’s not like I’m ever going to let her go.
“Vex?”
“Yeah, Dahl.”
“You aren’t going to ever make me think you’re anything less than a hero.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
If only that were true.