Chapter Eighteen
Lake
Baxter had announced his intention to take a shower before meeting me in the hotel restaurant, so it came as no surprise that I’d been sitting there for a while by the time he arrived—or that his hair still curled damply around his neck.
It suited him, giving him a just-rolled-out-of-bed look that immediately sent my thoughts into X-rated territory they had no business occupying.
Perhaps Baxter and I being in a hotel together hadn’t been the best idea. I quickly thought of something else.
“Not Napoleon,” Baxter quipped with a smirk as he lowered himself into the chair opposite and pulled a menu toward him. “Anyone but him.”
“What?”
“If you’re that determined to block me out, I’d at least like something interesting.”
“You know I do that?”
He shot me a look that clearly said, Do you think I’m stupid? “Of course.”
Heat crawled its way slowly up my neck to my cheeks. “I…”
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said lightly. “I know what I do makes people uncomfortable. Makes you uncomfortable.”
“Do you blame me?”
“No.” Baxter returned his attention to the menu. The silence stretched until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Mainly because if I wasn’t talking, I was thinking. And either way, Baxter could read me like a book, so I might as well control what came out of my mouth. “I wish you could turn it off.”
Baxter laughed softly without looking up. “Trust me. So do I.”
“It must come in handy, though.”
“Sometimes.”
“Like that guy in the bar the night we met. The one who wanted to lure you to a dungeon. Think how that might’ve gone if you couldn’t read his mind.”
Baxter made a noncommittal noise.
“What’s it like?” I asked.
He lifted his gaze then. “Loud.” He glanced around the restaurant.
It was only half full, but half full still meant a dozen people.
A dozen people and a dozen minds. He nodded toward a couple a few tables away.
They were eating together, but barely speaking.
“He’s trying to figure out how to broach the subject of them buying a new car.
Something sportier now he’s had a pay rise.
He refuses to call it a midlife crisis.”
“And her?”
Baxter’s gaze flicked to the woman. “She’s thinking about the gardener who comes twice a week while her husband’s at work.
He sees to more than the hedges, if you know what I mean.
He’s fifteen years younger than her husband, so she appreciates the stamina.
She can’t believe her husband hasn’t worked it out yet.
Part of her wants him to, just to find out how he’ll react.
She still loves him, but she feels invisible. ”
“You got all that in the few minutes we’ve been sitting here?”
Baxter nodded. “People’s minds move faster than their mouths.”
“What about everyone else?” It was a terrible question, but when would I ever get another chance to spy on strangers?
Baxter gave me an amused look. “Well, they’re definitely not thinking about Napoleon.”
“They should be,” I deadpanned. “His military intellect, strategic brilliance, and leadership skills were second to none. He had an incredible ability to analyze vast amounts of information and adapt to the chaos of battle.” I got about halfway through my informative lecture before Baxter returned to the menu.
“Did you know he once wrote a romance novel? Only seventeen pages, but still...”
“Didn’t know. Don’t care.”
“His first wife narrowly avoided the guillotine.”
Baxter rolled his eyes. “And we’re back to the guillotine.”
“He used to dress as a member of the lower class and walk the streets of Paris. Ask me why.”
He flipped the menu over. “Why?”
“To ask people what they thought of him.”
Baxter glanced up. “Slightly more interesting. Also deeply self-obsessed.”
“Yeah,” I conceded. “Probably.”
The waiter arrived then, the rest of the evening passing in a similar vein of good-natured bickering that I enjoyed far too much. We both steered clear of discussing the afternoon’s events. After we finished dessert and had no excuse left to linger, reluctance settled in my bones.
“We could go out,” I suggested as we stood. “See what Wakefield has to offer besides a prison.”
Baxter shook his head. “No. I’m tired.”
“Hotel bar for a nightcap?”
He didn’t respond verbally, but his turn toward the lifts said enough.
Disappointment left a heaviness in my chest as I followed.
I didn’t want to be alone. I’d only suggested it as an excuse to spend more time with him.
I didn’t even care anymore that he could read my mind.
Maybe he could make sense of my tangled thoughts when I looked at him, because I certainly couldn’t.
We rode the lift in silence—a charged one. Sexual tension? Something else? Don’t think about sex. Especially not sex with Baxter. Okay, so maybe I did still care if he read my thoughts. And don’t think about Napoleon? Think about Verity. Or lifts. Celebrate the lack of terrible music.
“When’s your next date with Glenn?” Baxter asked.
The question caught me off-guard. “What?”
“Glenn? The man you’re dating. The one you called for help at the cemetery.”
“I’m not… We’re not…” Hadn’t I explained that?
Or hadn’t Baxter simply picked it out of my head?
His mind had been elsewhere at the cemetery, though.
Visiting your grave did that to a person.
And I barely thought about Glenn at all.
Baxter raised an eyebrow when I didn’t finish.
“I told him I didn’t think it would work between us. ”
“Why not?”
“Just… because.”
Baxter nodded as the lift pinged. Our rooms were on the same floor.
His first, and then a long, lonely trip to the other end of the corridor for mine, where I’d watch TV shows I had no interest in until I fell asleep.
Baxter wanting some alone time was completely understandable.
It was more surprising that after meeting his murderer, he’d held it together so well during dinner. He needed to decompress, not socialize.
I slowed as we reached Baxter’s door, the word “goodnight” already hovering on my tongue. Instead, he shoved me gently but firmly forward. I was still struggling to work out what was going on when we reached my room.
“Door won’t open itself,” Baxter said.
I unlocked my room with the keycard. When I pushed the door open, Baxter followed me in, flicking on the light as the door clicked shut. I stared at the closed door for a moment too long, then turned back to him.
He stood in the middle of the room regarding me silently, head tipped to one side, dark curls falling softly over his brow.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I admitted.
“You wanted to keep spending time with me.”
“Well, yes. That’s not a crime. It was that or sit alone.”
“Don’t play it down.”
“Fine. I like spending time with you. I enjoy your company.”
“You could sound happier about it,” he said, somehow sounding accusatory and amused at the same time.
This felt like a test I hadn’t revised for, my head spinning. “You said you were tired.”
“Too tired to go out. Not too tired for other things.”
“Other things?”
Baxter plonked himself on the end of my bed. He leaned back on his elbows, head tipped back to maintain eye contact.
“That’s my bed.” As intelligent statements went, it wasn’t the best.
“It is,” he agreed, wriggling around to make himself more comfortable.
“You have a bed of your own down the hall.”
“I do.” His lips curled into a smile. “Do you have any idea how loud your thoughts have been tonight? About me. My eyes. My hair. My lips. My arse when I went to the toilet. Thanks for the compliments, by the way. No man would complain about a top-three bubble-butt ranking.”
Could a person spontaneously combust from embarrassment? Given the blazing heat in my cheeks, it felt entirely possible. Did the hotel have insurance for such an eventuality? What were their evacuation procedures like? I’d hate to think my embarrassment could endanger the lives of others.
“Spontaneous combustion,” Baxter said, barely holding back laughter. “That’s a new one.”
“Did you know the phenomenon dates all the way back to 1641?”
“I did not.”
“Although 1641 is misleading.”
“Uh-huh…”
“It’s misleading because that’s just the date when a Danish physician published a book of strange medical phenomena titled Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum.
In it, he detailed the death of Polonius Vorstius.
Vorstius was an Italian knight who, in 1470, drank some strong wine and began vomiting flames before bursting into fire.
It’s the first recorded account. Of course, there’ve been many more since then—such as the famous incident in France in 1725, when a Parisian innkeeper was awoken by the smell of smoke and discovered that his wife had been reduced to ashes while sleeping on a straw pallet which had remained untouched by the flames. ”
“And… we’re back in France again,” Baxter said. “You once told me you weren’t obsessed with France. You keep making me seriously doubt that statement.”
“And of course Charles Dickens used it to kill off one of his characters in Bleak House.”
“Of course he did.”
“It was controversial even for the nineteenth century, because many believed the phenomenon to be nothing more than superstition. The literary critic G.H. Lewes criticized Dickens for giving ‘currency to a vulgar error.’” I paused to take a much-needed breath. “And then there was—”
“You want to have sex with me,” Baxter said. It wasn’t a question. Then again, given he’d been reading my mind all night, it didn’t need to be. “That’s what you were hoping would happen if I took you up on the offer to paint the town red.”
“No!” The word almost burst out of me. Baxter raised an eyebrow. “Maybe.” He hitched it a little higher. “Yes.” His lips twitched. “It’s not funny.”
“Oh, I agree. The thought of you and me having sex is not funny at all.” He rose from the bed, his movements sinuous and purposeful enough that I instinctively stepped back as he approached. “Arousing. Delicious. Exhilarating. But not funny. Fun, hopefully—but not funny.”
I didn’t realize I’d been retreating until the wall at my back stopped me. I lifted a hand as he kept coming. “You’ve had an awful day. You’ve admitted yourself that you use sex as a coping mechanism, and that you don’t want to do that anymore.”
Baxter halted, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from him. “Is that what you think this is? Me using you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know what the only thing stopping me from kissing you right now is?”
“That I just talked about spontaneous combustion for five solid minutes?”
Baxter laughed. “Apart from that. You’re lucky I find it cute.”
Cute! He made me sound like a history-obsessed bunny rabbit. When words failed me, I shook my head.
Baxter stepped half a step closer, his chest brushing mine. “That we’ve been here before. The last time I kissed you, you pushed me away. Rejection was hard the first time. It’ll be even harder the second time.”
“I didn’t reject you.”
“It felt like it.”
I thought back to the night we met. In real terms, it had only been a couple of weeks ago, but it felt like a lifetime—like I’d been a different man.
In some ways, I had been. I’d lived in a world where I didn’t know people could pluck every thought from your head, or that someone could be murdered and come back to life almost two decades later.
“We were both drunk,” I said. “You were upset about your suspension. I was upset because Carl ruined my date with Glenn. The timing was all wrong. It would have been a mistake.”
“And now?” The words were casual enough, but the watchfulness in Baxter’s blue gaze said otherwise. “If I kiss you now, what are you going to do?”