Natan
Kimmie is choking two feet from my elbow, and nobody in this café appears to consider it an emergency.
Delilah pushes a glass of water at her, which is the worst possible thing to do to someone with a foreign body in their airway, and Kimmie tries to drink it, because she has spent every second I have ever observed her attempting three things at once.
The water comes straight back out. Her eyes are streaming.
The sound she’s making has changed pitch, gone thinner and higher, and that’s the part I don’t like.
I put my palm flat between her shoulder blades, then I hit her.
She lurches into the counter and I hit her again, harder, angled up. Something small and brown shoots out of her and lands beside her plate like a verdict.
She gulps down a breath as Delilah makes a joke about her cakes and hands over some napkins.
I crouch. Kimmie’s face is scarlet from her collarbone to her hairline. There’s water down her chin and the front of her cardigan is wet in a place I shouldn’t be looking at.
She is all curves and cuteness, and I have no business putting my hands anywhere on this woman.
She’s gone thirty seconds later, out the door so fast Jasper has to open it or watch her go through the glass.
He lets it swing shut and looks at me.
I look right back and lift my hand, my meaning clear. What was that about?
“No idea, cousin,” he says before looking across Delilah and lifting a brow. She simply raises one shoulder in a half-shrug and grins.
“What?” I ask Delilah.
She picks up her coffee. “I was going to say you nearly put her through the counter.”
“She’s breathing, isn’t she?”
She flickers her eyebrows at me and sips her coffee, swallows. “You’ll need to be here at seven tomorrow morning. There are ten trays of cinnamon swirl pastries to take across.”
“Fine,” I mutter. “So you don’t need me this evening?” I say this to Jasper, who is still looking at me weirdly.
“No, I suppose not.”
I nod to Delilah, who is still smirking, then head out of the cafe. Unable to ignore the meow that gets fired at me from the ginger cat making circles on the table, I scratch its chin. That one likes a lot of fuss.
I have every intention of going straight to my car and going back to my apartment in the city, but I make the fatal error of looking across to the gallery. It’s after six, and she is still in there, preparing for tomorrow.
My feet are moving before I’ve even sent them the message. The door is unlocked, and this fact annoys me. Anyone could walk in here with nefarious reasons. She is five-feet-five of curvy sweetness and not an ounce of strength to fight a person off.
She’s at the top of the stepladder with a pencil in her teeth and one shoe half hanging from the back of her foot.
“Delilah,” she says around the pencil, “if that’s you, I need you to tell me honestly whether the card is straight under the Ren. I have looked at it so many times, it’s stopped even being a shape and melted into the wall.”
“It’s not Delilah.”
She turns around too fast. The ladder trembles, and I cover the distance in two seconds, catching her as she falls sideways.
“Oh,” she says, from her position cradled in my arms. The pencil falls out of her mouth. “Hi. Hello. You’re in my gallery.”
“Your door was open.”
“It was?” She looks toward it, genuinely confused. “That’s not, okay, that’s not great. Are you going to lecture me? You have a lecturing face.”
“No.” I lower her to the floor and instantly miss the weight of her in my arms. “It seems like it isn’t a usual occurrence. I am going to lecture you about ladder safety, though.”
“It’s fine, you just startled me.” She slides her shoe back on as she says this, which must have fallen off entirely during the fall. Her toenails are painted pale yellow.
“You could have broken something, or cracked open your head.”
She looks at me over the rim of her glasses. “I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t startled me.”
I want to argue with her. Not to be rude or cruel, but because I want to hear her voice.
“I came to check you were okay,” I say, noticing she removed her cardigan. Her dress is pink with white stripes and emphasizes her curvy body far too much.
“Oh,” she says, and I swear she blushes, but I’m starting to wonder if I’m just imagining it because I want her to blush. “That’s nice of you, I’m fine, really.”
I walk past her, looking at the walls, because if I keep standing this close to her I’m going to do something she hasn’t agreed to.
The painting is big. A field, or something arranged to make you think field until you’ve looked for a while, going up toward a gap in the cloud.
She comes and stands beside me. She’s quiet for the first time since I walked in, and I understand that she’s letting me have it without commentary, which is a discipline I wouldn’t have credited her with.
I can see why she has given it such a wide open space. It deserves it. Maybe even commands it.
“It feels like home,” I finally comment.
She doesn’t say anything for long enough that I turn to check on her, and she’s looking up at me with her mouth slightly open and her eyes bright. The room is warm and smells like turpentine and lemon.
“Okay,” she says, quietly. “You can’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Come in here and say the most unexpected thing. I’m opening tomorrow.
I have a very specific plan for tonight that involves a face mask and worrying.
” She’s talking faster. “And you have been holding doors open for me and not saying so much as two words to me until this evening. And I have been extremely normal about it, I think we can all agree, but I’m running out of willpower. ”
“Willpower for what?” I ask, genuinely confused.
She looks at me for a little longer, suspicion in the lines around her eyes, but she doesn’t respond.
I put my hand against her jaw and tilt her face up, taking my time doing it, so she has every opportunity to move away.
“Tell me,” I say, lowering my face so it is only a breath from hers.
Her eyelids flicker over those big brown eyes.
“Tell me, because I’ve wanted my mouth on you since I first held the door open for you at the cafe,” I say.
She is still silent, but her eyes slide to my mouth, then her tongue wets her bottom lip, and it’s game over for me.
My lips meet hers, and I pour every ounce of the last few weeks into it. Because she walked past me in the cafe, talking a mile a minute and looking so full of vibrant light that I’ve been addicted to her ever since.
All of my cousins have commented on it. Eduard thought I’d become attached to the cats after I had to look after them one evening when he first met Sammie.
Jasper put it down to business. Dayan asked me straight up if I’m seeing someone, and Mechislav has a theory that I’m helping my sister purchase a property on this side of the river.
But this is the truth. This woman right here, with her mouth pressed to mine, has been all I can think about for weeks. Months.
Kimmie’s mouth opens for me, and I slide my tongue over her lips until she makes a small sound and twists her fingers in my shirt. My hands stroke down her back and over her ass until I have enough of her in my hands to lift her.
Her legs wrap around my waist, her tits press against my chest, and I walk blindly towards where I saw her desk. Her mouth is hot and eager as I sit her on the desk.
I get a hand under the hem of her dress and up the outside of her thigh. She moans a low, needy sound, her head dropping back.
“Tell me to stop,” I say against her throat.
“Absolutely not,” she says.