Chapter 1 #2
Katy ate her salad in the thin winter light and surveyed the empty terrace and finally asked the waiter, casually, while Dionne was in the restroom: “Is Mr. Ventura a regular here?”
Her own voice startled her. She never asked strangers questions. She once let a barista give her the wrong order rather than say something.
The waiter gave her the polite blankness of a man trained not to answer questions about members. “I’m not able to discuss our members, miss.”
“Of course. Sorry. I’m sorry.” Too many sorrys. She flushed and considered her plate.
She left it. She didn’t leave it. She sat in her car after lunch and pulled up the club’s website on her phone and found the employment page and saw the listing for a terrace server, part-time, and her heart rate did something medically concerning.
Amy didn’t need Katy hovering anymore. Katy was nineteen now, finishing junior year, and her school schedule left afternoons free.
She had the time. She had the availability.
She had a reason that she wrapped in a practical excuse and presented to herself like a gift: good tips, flexible hours, a foot in the door at a nice establishment.
She applied the next morning. They called her within a week.
THE FIRST TIME SHE saw Julian Ventura at Haven as a staff member and not a guest, she was carrying a tray of Veuve Clicquot across the terrace and he was sitting at Table Nine.
Corner of the terrace. The spot where the jacaranda threw its afternoon shade and the light came through in purple-gold pieces. Laptop open, iced water untouched, his attention on a screen. He sat alone. He always did.
She didn’t drop the tray. She wanted credit for that.
Her feet kept moving because her body was smarter than her brain, and her brain had gone white and blank and useless.
A year of imagining this moment and she had pictured herself composed, casual, a girl who happened to work at the same club where a man she’d met once also happened to spend his afternoons.
She hadn’t pictured the tray rattling because her hands were full of electricity, or her pulse climbing so high she could hear it in her ears like a second heartbeat.
She served Tables Three through Seven. She smiled at Mrs. Callahan. She refilled Mr. Drummond’s sparkling water. She did her job, and she did it well, and she didn’t glance at Table Nine for eleven minutes.
On the twelfth minute, she glanced.
He was already focused on her.
Not his laptop.
Not his phone.
But on her.
Katy.
His gaze tracked her path across the terrace with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up.
And when her eyes collided with his, he didn’t flinch.
He didn’t break away. He kept her there, pinned, across thirty feet of jacaranda shade, and the heat on his face was the same heat from her eighteenth birthday.
The same dark expansion of his pupils. Only this time he wasn’t shutting it down.
This time he was just drinking her in, openly, like he’d been doing it for a while and had stopped pretending he wasn’t.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
Then his mouth flattened. He dropped his gaze back to the laptop screen, and his hand went to his water glass and gripped it until the tendons stood out along his wrist.
Her lungs forgot how to work. Her skin felt tight and hot, and there was that warmth again, the low pulse in her belly that she’d first felt in her bedroom a year ago replaying his attention, ten times stronger now because he was thirty feet away and he’d just taken her in like that, in broad daylight, and she didn’t know what to do with the information except hold it against her chest and try not to come apart.
She served him for the first time that afternoon. Walked to his table with fresh water, two cubes of ice because she’d noticed him accept exactly two from the server on Tuesday and filed the information in a part of her brain she refused to examine.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No.”
One word.
But his voice was different than it had been on her birthday.
Lower. Rougher at the edges, like he’d scraped it against something on the way out.
And he wasn’t attending to his laptop. He was taking in her hands on the tray, then her wrists, then the strip of skin above her collar where her pulse was hammering so hard she was certain he could see it.
His gaze stayed there. On her throat. On the place where her blood was beating visibly under her skin.
And his eyes went dark again, that blown-pupil heat, and she felt it land on her neck like a warm hand, and her knees almost buckled.
She should have walked away. She was a person who walked away. She was a person who said thank you and have a nice day and didn’t make eye contact with strangers on the bus.
“You haven’t eaten today.”
The words came out of her mouth without permission. She heard herself say them and wanted to dissolve into the terrace stone.
His gaze traveled up. All the way up, from her throat to her face, and the journey across those few inches of skin left a trail of heat so acute she felt her flush climb in its wake, pink blooming from her collarbone to her ears.
His eyes registered her. Not her uniform.
Not her tray. Her. The red hair she’d pinned back.
The freckles across her nose that no amount of concealer could conquer.
Her face, which she knew wasn’t a face that belonged at Haven Country Club, because the women here had cheekbones that could cut paper and skin that cost more monthly than Katy’s rent.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, his voice pitched so low she almost didn’t catch it. He seemed to hear the drop himself, because his nostrils flared and he turned away, annoyed at his own body for betraying him.
“The kitchen does a really good club sandwich. Turkey, avocado, no mayo unless you ask. I probably shouldn’t be recommending things, it’s my first week, I don’t actually know if it’s good. I haven’t tried it. Staff eats in the back.”
She knew she was rambling, but somehow...she just couldn’t stop.
“But it looks good? When it goes past me on the tray?”
His mouth moved. Not a smile, but close, his lips tugging up for a fraction of a second before he killed it. That half-second of warmth made him appear younger, less guarded, and the beauty of it hit her so hard she lost the rest of her sentence.
“You memorize the menu, too?” Low. Almost amused. The roughness was still there, underneath.
“They make us. First week thing.” She was a girl who barely spoke in class, who let group partners present without her, who once whispered her own coffee order so softly the barista asked her to repeat it three times.
And yet here she was, chattering at Julian Ventura about club sandwiches while he contemplated her with those gas-flame eyes and his voice did things to her nervous system that should require a medical disclaimer.
“Sorry. You said you’re not hungry. I’ll stop.”
“And the ice preference?”
He’d noticed. That she’d noticed. The two cubes, not three.
She read his face as he said it. His focus was absolute, almost predatory, and she understood, in the wordless way a body understands heat or gravity, that he was cataloging her the same way she’d been cataloging him.
Every detail. Every tell. He knew she’d been observing him and he’d been aware of her observing him and the knowledge sat between them like a live wire, crackling.
Katy felt the flush climb her neck, felt the heat of it bloom across her collarbone and up to her ears, and she could have lied.
Could have said oh, I just guessed or the last server told me.
She was standing in front of a billionaire in a polyester uniform and the gap between them was the width of a tax bracket and the depth of the Pacific Ocean and the smart thing, the safe thing, was to play dumb and walk away.
“I pay attention,” she said. And then, because her mouth had apparently seceded from the rest of her body and was now operating as an independent nation with no regard for self-preservation: “To you. I pay attention to you.”
The moment she said it, she wanted to take them back. But when her gaze flew to his to assess the damage—
One second he was Julian Ventura, billionaire, recluse, a man who wore his composure like a second skin, and the next his eyes were burning over her face, her hair, her mouth, her throat, with a raw hunger so open and so helpless that she felt it against her skin like heat from a fire.
His hand on the table had gone rigid. His jaw was locked.
His whole body was held so tight she could see the tension in his shoulders, his arms, the tendons of his neck, as if the only thing stopping him from reaching for her was the table between them.
“Julian.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“It’s Julian. Not Mr. Ventura.”
A first name. An open door. Such a small thing, and it went through her like spring through frozen ground.
“Julian,” she found herself repeating, self-consciously, but also...helplessly. Like finally having her first taste of something she had been craving for so long, and finding it even better than she could ever have imagined.
Katy had been saying his name in her bedroom for a year, into her pillow, into the dark, a name she kept like a secret.
But this was different. This was his face three feet away, and when she said his name, his eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there, and she noticed his throat move as he swallowed.
Hard. Like the sound of his name in her voice had hit him somewhere he hadn’t braced for.