Chapter 26 #2
The kitchen was huge. Renovated and definitely modern.
Several lavishly arranged dishes rested on the enormous kitchen island.
Champagne glasses filled with untouched champagne, bruschetta, mini quiches, deviled eggs, prosciutto rolls, mini waffles, other French pastries, as well as fruit and cheese platters.
Normally, the moment I discovered an unsupervised buffet was the moment my heart leapt with joy.
However, I was unable to concentrate on the food because my entire attention was focused on the man who – with his concentrated gaze fixed on the void, an avocado toast in his hand – was pacing back and forth in front of the large window.
His side profile was a sight I didn't want to get used to. The straight nose, the sharp jawline, the way his Adam's apple nestled against his skin when he swallowed, as if nature had carved a work of art from his bones...
I could have stood there all day, but Davian suddenly paused and turned his head in my direction.
It was that moment I tried to capture every time. That moment when he discovered me unprepared. When he hadn't had a chance to put on his trained masks. When every one of his reactions was raw. Uncontrolled. Real.
He didn't seem to have expected me here either.
It was easy to stare at this man. But what was I doing here? He wasn't just out of reach. He was taken. By my half-sister.
Knowing Lorette, she would move heaven and earth to get them married, and my father would certainly not say no if he really had such a good relationship with Davian.
I looked away, trying to focus on the food on the kitchen island instead of the only soul in this world in whose presence I wanted to wither away until my flesh was rotten and my bones had crumbled to dust.
Cookies, melon... blueberries.
His gaze was on me as I reached for the bowl of blue fruit marbles, whose taste no other fruit came close to matching.
“I see, Brittany Richter,” I said, because his stare threatened to throw me off balance.
“What?”
I wandered over to the kitchen counter, set the bowl down, and pulled myself up onto the countertop before picking up the bowl again.
When I looked up, I found Davian still staring at me.
“The woman you ran away from at the gala.” I reached for a blueberry and popped it into my mouth, letting the pleasant sweetness melt on my tongue, trying not to look at Davian. “Her mother wants you to marry her.”
After that night, Brittany had been upset that her date had simply disappeared, and Father had assured her that she had to give him some time.
Sooner or later, the day will come when he asks for your hand in marriage.
“Either you're damn observant...”
Slowly realizing what I had just implied, I looked up helplessly and met slightly narrowed blue eyes.
Shit. How could I have been so careless?
“Or you have something to do with the Richters...”
“The former,” I blurted out, trying not to let on that I was walking a tightrope. “Lor...” I almost choked on a blueberry and coughed. “Mrs. Richter has her eye on you as if you were a diamond in this town full of glass stones. It’s impossible to miss.”
I quickly pointed to the kitchen passageway.
God, Quill. Pull yourself together.
Ashamed, I popped another blueberry into my mouth.
I should get out of here and not confuse this man any further.
Ever since I'd snooped around his study, I'd been wondering why he still wanted me as a friend in his life after all my lies and boundary violations.
Did he realize how unsuitable that term was for everything that already connected us in such a forbidden way after so little time? How unsuitable for the way we touched each other when we forgot which bodies fate had put us in?
“She's my best friend's sister.”
The tension in his voice made me look up.
Davian walked over to the kitchen counter, placed the avocado toast on a plate, then propped himself up on the counter in front of me and gave me a piercing look.
“And she's twenty-six.”
I couldn't help but stare back and sink into a sea of truth that opened up between us like an ocean that I could never cross and that he would never cross.
Not for the nineteen-year-old problem child.
There was pain in his eyes. Pain that I wanted to take away from him, even though I knew that without me, it wouldn't even exist in the first place.
If it weren't for the buffet between us...
Loud laughter reached us from afar, breaking our silence.
Davian cleared his throat and looked down at his plate as if he had lost his appetite.
Desperately, I reached for another blueberry, not daring to look up.
“You look like you haven't slept well.”
The concern in his voice made me look up again.
Little did he know that his voice always drew me to him. That this man had something about him that made him the center of my attention. No matter where we were.
When I was near him, I was nothing more than pure ink, longing to flow through his pen, corrupted by the thought of what lines he would write with me.
A traitorous heat crept into my cheeks.
“I haven't slept at all.”