Chapter 13
My day just got even weirder. The list is growing. Jail. Bail. Outlaw biker clubhouse. Ace standing up for me. Now I’m inside this man’s private apartment.
It’s shockingly nice. And there are books.
I was expecting a mattress on the floor and a five-gallon bucket for a night table. No lie.
But this man has kitchen stuff and books.
The room is immaculate. That’s the second thing that hits me in the solar plexus.
The bed is made so tight you could bounce a coin. There are no socks on the floor. Not a single discarded half-full glass on any surface. Not a scrap of random paper anywhere.
It smells clean. Faintly like lemon and plain soap.
“Is this your place?”
“Yes.”
One word answers. He’s good at those. And the other sentences the man says are always heavy with meaning or shock value.
“It’s nice,” I say, still standing a few feet inside the door.
He doesn’t rush me as my eyes feast, gliding over the open-concept living room combined with his bedroom. Finally my attention settles on the kitchen.
“Was this a school?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I say, “The classrooms have been combined into apartments for the club members.”
“Some,” he replies.
Ugh. One word.
I move to the kitchen. It’s a compact galley-style space along the back wall. Pots are hanging from a gleaming copper rack. The man uses cast iron, and all of it is black and slick. Cared for.
A container on the counter holds working utensils. There’s a wooden spoon worn down on one side from a right hand stirring the same direction for years.
But it’s the books that make me move again. There’s a giant case of them along the wall. I walk to it like a woman in a trance.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, and the spine has been re-taped by hand.
The Joy of Cooking, the 1943 wartime one, with the rationing chapter.
A Gold Medal flour pamphlet from the twenties.
The Settlement Cook Book. Church cookbooks, dozens of them, the spiral-bound kind that some Ladies Auxiliary in 1961, probably sold at a bake sale for a dollar and a half.
They’re used. I can practically smell the flour in the gutters of the pages. There will be grease spots. There’s going to be handwriting in the margins in pencil. The writing will be small, square and careful.
I turn around with heat crawling down my limbs. He is standing just inside his own door too, looking worried.
“You must cook,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“Tobias,” I say his name because I saw it on the mail that was stacked on one shelf. Tobias. McKinney. “It seems that you know how to cook.”
His throat works, the thick Adam’s apple going up and down.
“Nobody knows,” he says, watching me carefully.
“Your name or that you know how to cook?”
He skips the question at hand and replies, “Nobody comes in here.”
“Ever?” I ask, shocked.
He nods once. “Correct.”
I look at the shelves again. There are two hundred books. Maybe more. It took him years to collect them.
“Why did you bring me in here?” I ask.
The question seems to break him loose because he moves away from the door.
Tobias, AKA Ace crosses the room. He’s built like a viking and watching him move is hypnotic. And alarming.
Reflexively, I back up until the counter catches me across the hips.
He puts a hand down on the surface on either side of me.
Not touching me. Not once. He just cages me in and stands there. The air around us seems to solidify. I can feel the heat coming off his chest through my dress.
With a shiver, I finally give in and tip my head all the way back to see his face.
“Some of them were my grandmother’s.”
I raggedly swallow around a knot of emotion.
“Twelve of them were hers,” he continues. “The rest I’ve been buying for years.”
His voice has dropped so low I feel it in the counter behind me. “Estate sales. Church sales. Little tables outside somebody’s garage. I put them in a pack and bring them inside.”
Estate sales. My brain buffers at the notion of this beast-man shopping for used cookbooks. People probably ran when they saw him coming.
“This dress came from an estate sale,” I say quietly. “I fixed the torn hem myself. In total, I have twenty-six of them. Vintage, but I wear them to work. Everybody thinks I’m insane.”
His eyes flicker as that dark-blue gaze traces over my face.
“Say that again,” he says.
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
My mouth has gone dry. I can’t remember what I said because he’s warping my brain cells so I just start talking. “Back then they made things properly. Built them to last and for people with actual bodies. I would rather have one thing made like that than a hundred things that?—”
I stop mid-sentence because his eyes have turned from blue to almost nothing, all pupil, and he is breathing harshly now.
Finally he speaks. “You feel that way about a dress. I feel that way about a skillet.”
I laugh. Not the same one as on the motorcycle. This one is shaky, and it dies quickly because he has not moved.
Doesn’t look like he will move either. My heart is coming apart from his proximity. So I do what I always do when things are tense, I talk.
“Okay. Right. So, I’ve got questions.”
“So do I.”
“Mine are procedural,” I warn. “Where exactly am I going to sleep, and whether there is a scenario in which I get my car back, and?—”
He turns me and backs me up.
Ace doesn’t touch me, but he does this by crowding me. He just walks forward, and I go backward again. Until the kitchen wall hits my butt first, then the shoulders.
I’m breathing erratically. Short bursts that feel useless. I stammer, “I’d like to know what happens with my phone.”
He puts one hand flat on the wall beside my head. The thing is big enough to palm two basketballs.
“Vera.”
“What?” I whisper.
“Stop talking,” he says.
He leans down swiftly. That scowling mouth collides with mine and the gigantic biker inhales my reply.
Whoa. Wow!
He kisses like he does everything else. No warning, no hesitation, no wasted motion.
It would have been an invasion by his tongue, but I’m guilty of opening for him.
With a pleased rumble, he takes a deep, rough taste as his hand goes into my hair at the back of my skull and he holds me there.
Oh my lord. I’m being kissed by a man. I’ve never hugged a man before and now I’ve wrapped my body around his on his motorcycle, and he’s kissing me.
No, this isn’t kissing, this is…
A statement.
One I don’t have a vocabulary for.
But my body is on board. Tingling, heating. Nearly weeping with pleasure when he lets out a throaty growl as he deepens the kiss, angling my head for more access.
“Fuck, Vera,” he rasps as he inhales a sharp breath and crashes back into me, teaching me how to take his tongue, how to dance mine against his.
Ace is not gentle, and he is definitely not careful. His six-and-a-half foot body crushes mine. His hands are hot and gripping me roughly. He handles me like I always dreamed a man would.
I get so high from his mouth that I could float away. God, he’s hot. Oven hot. Sexy hot. Everything hot.
Finally he breaks for a breath.
When I come to my senses, my hands are tangled in his shirt. I don’t remember putting them there. I’m holding him tight against me with two fistfuls of cotton.
There’s nothing prim about this exchange.
It’s very clear how much he wants me. There’s no hiding the thickness of his erection. The beast is a tree limb in his jeans. It strikes me in a lightning bolt of realization. This man is hard for me. Me. Six-foot me.
My whole body goes off like a struck match, from the throat all the way down.
He must sense that I’m suddenly on fire because he pulls back an inch to study me with a sly, pleased gleam in his eyes.
My dress has gotten twisted and is showing way too much breast. I could not tell you my own name.
“That wasn’t a question,” I manage to say, sounding gassed.
“Yeah, it was.”
His thumb drags across my bottom lip and his voice becomes all gravel.
“I wanted to know how you taste.”