Four
FOUR
Mia
THE ADDRESS LUCA texted me was in freaking Ladue —only one of the richest places in the entire damned state . As I drove along winding, wooded roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions, I fought a surprising surge of imposter syndrome.
I’d been here only a handful of times in my life, most recently during a trip to see the Christmas lights at Tilles Park with my parents a few years ago. While driving around the area afterward, we’d laughed at the almost obsessive habit of hiding giant mansions at the end of long private drives, behind so many trees that we mostly only got fleeting glimpses of tasteful white decorations in the heavily branch-shrouded distance. Eventually, we’d given up and gone to a different part of the city for our infusion of holiday cheer.
There were no Christmas lights now. The roads all looked alike—trees and more trees. I was fully reliant on my phone’s map at this point, the cheerful female voice calling out left and right turns until I had absolutely no sense of where I was.
“Your destination is on the left,” the voice said with an air of digital finality, as I pulled up to a paved driveway with a mailbox set in a neat brick pillar with an arched top.
For the last fifteen minutes or so, I’d been silently mulling over the apparent disconnect between someone running a youth center for gang members in East St. Louis while living in a mansion in Ladue.
This, despite the fact that it was A) none of my business, and B) a reassuring sign that I wasn’t about to be kidnapped at gunpoint and sold into sexual slavery. Maybe I’d ask about the apparent contradiction at some point, if doing so didn’t feel too awkward—because as far as I knew, nothing in the area sold for less than a cool million.
This house must have cost a lot more than that. It was huge, my headlights scrolling across a massive two-story Neo-Georgian facade as I negotiated the final turn in the driveway. I parked in the generous circle drive, pausing to take it all in as I wondered once again what the hell I was actually doing here.
Coach lamps illuminated the flagstone walk leading up to the entryway, which was brightly lit by two matching glass lantern-style porch lights. I wavered for a moment before deciding that the only thing stupider than driving all this way to hang out with someone I’d met for, like, fifteen minutes in a singles bar, would be to drive all this way, then turn around and drive back to my crappy house and my crappy husband in Jennings.
I turned my phone off and pocketed it—mostly to conserve the battery, but with the added benefit of ensuring I didn’t end up on the receiving end of a series of increasingly angry ‘ where the hell are you’ texts from Nat. Slipping out of the car, I locked it and pocketed the fob, as well.
No sooner had I started toward the imposing front door than it swung open, a slender figure silhouetted inside.
“Hey,” Luca said, holding it open for me while I hurried up the low steps leading to the porch. “Come on in. Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
“Nah,” I told him, sliding past his thin frame and into an elegant yet welcoming foyer. “I think I startled about half a dozen deer on the way over, though.”
He laughed. “They’re a bit of a nuisance around here. It’s worse in late fall and early winter, unfortunately.”
“Look on the bright side,” I quipped. “If society collapses, you’ll be dining on venison while the rest of us are scraping by on wild nettles and squirrel meat.”
“Hopefully not,” Luca said, waving me down a short hallway. “Zalen’s a vegetarian, and I faint at the sight of blood.”
I nodded, pursing my lips against a smile. “Right. I suppose that would complicate matters in most post-apocalyptic zombie scenarios.”
“Personally, I’m holding out for an alien invasion, with advanced outer-space overlords who are a step up from the clowns running the show currently,” he said. “Here... come back to the kitchen. I can’t offer venison, but I thought if you wanted to watch a movie or something, I could nuke some popcorn for us.”
“Oh, my God—that sounds amazing ,” I said, the words heartfelt.
I followed him toward the back of the house. He led me through a space that seemed a bit small to be a proper dining room in a house this large—though it might have been a breakfast room with its wall of airy windows on one side. Beyond lay a large and well-appointed kitchen. I took it in with a professional eye.
“This place is absolutely gorgeous,” I began, as Luca stretched up to retrieve a packet of popcorn from a high cupboard and popped it into the microwave. He was barefoot, clad in emerald-green track pants and a faded black Depeche Mode T-shirt. His dark hair, which had been artfully messy at the bar, looked more like a slightly squished dandelion puff now. “It’s also huge . Do you and Zalen live here alone?”
It was a guess on my part—but after the way Luca had talked about Zalen being a vegetarian who wouldn’t appreciate the culinary potential of the local deer population, it seemed like a reasonable question.
Luca snorted. “Not alone, no. The house is Zalen’s—he was in corporate finance before... erm... before he came back here and started the Hope Project.”
It sounded as though he’d been about to say something else, then thought better of it. I didn’t comment, but I filed it away as interesting.
He cleared his throat as the sound of popping kernels increased to a steady rhythm in the background. “He has a tendency to... how should I put this? Collect people. In a knight-in-shining-armor way, I mean. Not a creepy serial killer way.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said wryly.
He hooked a shy half-smile at me over his shoulder, and Christ , this man was pretty to look at. The fact that he seemed to have no clue about his own attractiveness made him even more appealing.
“Sorry,” he said. “Some days it feels like I’ve just barely mastered adulting. Learning how to ‘people’ is next on the list.”
“From where I’m standing, you’re doing fine on both counts,” I reassured. “Also, your popcorn is about to burn.”
“ Shit ,” he yelped, whirling back to the microwave to hit the cancel button.
From the smell of things, it was just in time. There might be a few scorched kernels in the bottom of the bag, but the rest would hopefully be fine.
Risking steam burns, my sheepish host tugged the top of the bag open and then shook out his hands to cool them. “Salvageable,” he decided, retrieving a bowl and dumping the popcorn into it. He tossed out the handful of blackened kernels. “Drink?”
“Whatever you’re having, as long as it’s non-alcoholic,” I told him.
He grabbed a couple of sodas out of the fridge, handing one to me and then gathering up the bowl, along with a couple of paper towels. With a jerk of his head, he indicated the direction we’d entered from. I followed him back into the main part of the house. When I’d first come through, I’d noticed a formal living room just beyond the foyer, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the darkened family room further down the hall.
Now, I saw the low flicker of a television coming from inside. Luca led the way in, and I startled slightly as I realized there was a man seated on the sofa, his attention focused on his phone as the TV played some kind of MMA-style cage fight in the background.
He was a very large man.
“Emiel, this is Mia,” Luca said, plopping the popcorn down on a coffee table in front of the couch. “She’s going to hang out for a bit. Mia, Emiel.”
Emiel glanced up from his phone, looking nearly as startled as I’d felt. From his size and appearance, I thought he must be an alpha, but I couldn’t catch any scent from him. There was only Luca’s summery honeysuckle, along with some older background scents from other people. I thought I recognized Zalen’s lime and vanilla among them.
“You’ve had that show on for hours, dude,” Luca said, “and you’re not even watching it. I’m commandeering the TV.”
Emiel grunted. “Okay,” he said easily, rubbing a huge hand over his shaved head.
He rose without another word, his eyes skating over me without quite sticking. By contrast, I couldn’t help staring at the mountains of muscle on display. Emiel was dark-skinned and broad-shouldered, contrasting sharply with Luca’s delicate paleness. He looked like the kind of person who could snap someone in half, but he walked out of the room as meekly as a lamb, not looking back.
Sudden self-consciousness pierced me. “I didn’t mean to evict anyone inside their own home,” I said.
But Luca only picked up the remote and flopped down in the space Emiel had just abandoned. “Don’t mind him, and don’t take it personally. Emiel’s not what you’d call a sociable guy. Besides, he really wasn’t watching the TV. So, we might as well use it.”
Setting it aside, I let some of the tension drain out of my shoulders and lowered myself onto the couch next to Luca with a gusty sigh. I cracked open the soda can and grabbed a handful of popcorn as he navigated to one of the many streaming channels on the home screen.
“Have you seen Red, White, and Royal Blue ?” he asked. “That’s been my go-to comfort watch lately.”
“I haven’t.” I wracked my brain for a minute. “Wasn’t that a book?”
He nodded. “Mm-hmm. It’s a surprisingly good adaptation, believe it or not.”
I shrugged agreeably, reaching for more popcorn. “Comfort viewing sounds perfect tonight.”
He shot me a sidelong glance. “Rough day, you said?”
I wasn’t sure how far into the weeds I wanted to get... not when there was popcorn to be eaten and mindless TV to be watched.
“It was a really bad night at the restaurant,” I said. “And also, my husband is a dick.”
“Yeah,” Luca agreed. “From what little I saw, he kind of is.”
We settled in and started the movie, munching popcorn and watching the deeply unlikely but undeniably appealing gay romance between the second in line to the British throne and the son of a US President.
“God, Nat would hate this,” I muttered, only half aware that I’d spoken aloud.
Luca raised an eyebrow at me. “Not a fan of Hallmark-style romantic comedy? Or not a fan of queer people getting happy endings?”
I flushed as I realized how bad this was going to sound.
“All of it, really,” I mumbled. Then, not sure why I felt the need to try and soften it, I added, “He’s adopted. His mom and dad aren’t exactly what you’d call tolerant people. Born-again Christians. I think they fucked him up pretty bad, in some respects.”
Luca made a considering noise and paused the screen, the two protagonists locked in a passionate clinch inside the tack room at a polo match.
I picked at a seam on my jeans—not looking at him, or at the male flesh on display on the television.
“So... feel free to tell me to mind my own damned business,” my companion said tentatively. “But if you’re so incompatible, and you’re both completely miserable in the marriage, why don’t you leave him?”