Chapter 2
Two
Claire thrust both her arms down and gave a full-strength kick that shot her body to the surface.
She exploded halfway out of the water with an enormous splash that not even the vampires outside the cave would hear over the waterfall.
Ten feet farther into the cave, Tai surfaced too, though less dramatically.
“Sorry to startle you.”
“You didn’t,” she said.
His mouth tilted, but he didn’t call her on the obvious lie.
Tai’s eyes were always noticeable, but they were more so in the dimness of the cave.
Unlike most vampire eyes, which came in jewel tones—purple, blue, green—Tai’s were mostly colorless, not gray but not exactly silver either.
The glint of his irises was constant, as if he had two actual orbs of metal in his head and someone had polished them to a sheen.
Okay, enough. They were just eyes. Watching Claire too closely, taking her measure. “You were here first. I’ll leave you to…” She shrugged.
“Just exploring,” he said.
“Right. I’ll leave you to your exploring.” She pivoted in the water and kicked off toward the sparkling curtain of the waterfall and daylight beyond.
“Claire.”
She wanted to pretend for a moment her hearing was no more acute than a human’s, but of course that ruse was thin. And immature. She turned back. “Yes?”
Tai cocked his head to study her, his face expressionless. “This is what you want? Avoiding each other all day?”
“I’m not avoiding you. I just don’t have anything to say to you.”
He shrugged, one hand skimming the water with a light splash. “And if I have something to say?”
“Well, do you?”
“I mean today, generally, if I have something to say to you at any point.”
“You don’t need to ask about Slake It Off.
You see the accounts every month as is your right.
” A right he was about to lose in the next few weeks, but he’d get no heads-up from her.
He probably wouldn’t try to stop her, but just in case, Claire planned to spring it on him only when she was ready to sign the paperwork.
“You’re doing great,” he said. “Growing profits every month.”
“I’m good at my job.”
He nodded.
“And there’s nothing else we could possibly need to talk about.”
Tai latched a hand onto the back of his neck as if she might actually be getting to him, though his expression didn’t change. “It’s not about needing to talk. It’s about not needing to avoid.”
“Well, like I said, I’m not avoiding you.”
He made a scoffing sound that echoed off the cave walls.
Refusing to snub the best man, engaging politely—all her resolutions evaporated. She slapped the water between them and wished it were something more solid and satisfying.
“Look, Tai, if you really want me to say it, I will. I’m not interested in a friendly chat with someone whose word can’t be trusted.”
The first ripple of a feeling passed over his face, tightness in his mouth and around his eyes. “I honored our contract to the letter.”
So Ryker was right. This idiot still believed the contract was the thing that mattered. “And our dreams for the business? Our partnership and our vision—did you honor that?”
Did you honor our friendship?
“You changed the vision, Claire, not me. You woke up one morning and decided our café and record store was now a blood bar.”
“And I had every right to do that.” Curse it all, why did he still have the power to make her mad? “I own the building—not half of it, all of it. You’re literally an investor.”
“Exactly,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
“You own the building. It was your choice. I never contested the decision.”
“You didn’t bother. You never cared in the first place what I did with the business. It wasn’t a vision to you. It was money. To you, everything is money.”
“No,” he said.
“And you found some other shiny opportunity that would make you even more money, as if you don’t already have an obscene amount of it.”
“No.” His measured tone didn’t change, but his eyes flashed. “I wanted to be part of the original idea, and I wasn’t interested in the new one. That’s it, Claire. You can tell yourself whatever you want—about me, about money—but I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not lying now.”
They faced off for a long moment, the waterfall roaring behind her, both of them treading water so smoothly beneath the surface they appeared motionless from above it.
Tai shook his head. “Do what you want. Avoid me all day or don’t.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t care one way or another, is that it?”
“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
She couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t argue with him at all most of the time; he was so consistent, so deliberate, and at least some of his account was true.
He’d never pushed back when she decided to go for what she really wanted—a community space made by vampires, for vampires, a place they could be themselves… a place Claire could be herself.
But she’d had no way to predict that instead of pushing back, Tai would pull away.
Entirely, overnight, refusing even to meet her at her first appointment with a vendor.
She’d bounced on her toes in anticipation of building her tasting menu, texted him the address, and this man she’d thought was becoming a close friend…
He simply said no. Completely and finally, not about the vendor but about the entire concept.
And all the things she admired and enjoyed about him charred in the flame of her humiliation at being so thoroughly abandoned by her first business partner. Humiliation and…hurt.
“We’re not friends,” she said.
“You’ve made that very clear.”
“But I guess there’s no reason to avoid each other.”
“Okay.”
“Small talk only. For Ryker and Leslie. So their day isn’t awkward.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
As she ducked beneath the water to swim back through the falls, Tai submerged too.
Claire was already changing direction and nearly missed his abrupt posture shift.
Tai’s body balled up, knees pulling to his chest, and one of his hands shot down to grab the side of his foot.
… No, to grab the jaws of the snapping turtle latched onto the side of his foot.
Of course his grip was stronger than the turtle’s, and in seconds he’d pried his foot free.
When the turtle tried to bite him again, Tai caught it by the shell and shoved it away, gently enough not to injure it but hard enough to give a clear message of superior strength.
The turtle glided off through the water, toward a shelter of overhanging rocks, while Tai relaxed in the water, his arms floating out to his sides.
Then he jerked his head up, and his eyes met Claire’s.
He must have thought she’d left the cave.
Tai shot away from her underwater, toward the darker depths.
Claire pursued with no idea why or what she wanted to say.
Even for a vampire, he was a fast swimmer.
She had to work to keep up at all, much less catch him.
But she kept after him, all the way to the back wall of the cave.
When he had nowhere else to go, he bulleted to the surface with a single powerful thrust of his legs and arms.
Claire followed, and they surfaced closer than she’d meant to, only a few feet apart.
Water dripped from his black hair, clung to his thick eyelashes, formed droplets on the sharp points of his cheekbones and the indentation above his upper lip. His steely eyes held hers.
“How long was that turtle latched onto your foot?”
“A few minutes.”
“The whole time we were talking?”
He still hadn’t looked away from her. “About half the time.”
“You idiot, why didn’t you say something?”
“We were having an important conversation.”
“Are you bleeding?” She ducked beneath the surface.
No blood in the water, but the side of his foot already bore a sizable black bruise.
She surfaced in a splashing burst. “Tai, seriously. If you wanted to be all tough and unfazed, you could’ve pried it off you without me knowing. Our feet are plenty strong enough.”
“Strong enough, but less precise than our hands. I could’ve injured its jaws.”
She slapped the water with both hands. “You are unbelievable, Tai Kristiansen.”
A slow smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “You’re actually upset that I got bit by a turtle.”
“Oh, please. You’re not even bleeding.”
“Which you felt the need to check on for yourself.”
“I had a theory your toes must look like worms, for a savvy reptile to bother gnawing on you. Wanted to confirm or rule it out.”
“And what were your findings?”
“Definitely the ugliest toes I’ve seen. Very worm-like.”
“Hmm,” he said, as if deliberately reminding her just how appealing his baritone could make even single syllables.
Her name, for example.
Which did not matter even a little bit.
The moment lengthened between them, and a throb passed through Claire’s chest. They could have been friends. Real friends, comfortable and safe and…and yes, in time, maybe more. But he’d let something come between them—something abrupt and final, a blunt barricade that left nowhere to grow.
“If you knew why, you’d understand,” Ryker had told her.
She’d hissed in Ryker’s face. Demanded to know what possible excuse Tai could have for giving up on their plans.
“Not excuse, reason,” Ryker had insisted.
Then he’d insisted he couldn’t break a friend’s confidence, because in the end he’d simply chosen to side with Tai.
When she was honest with herself, she admitted this had hurt too.
Now here her nemesis was, treading water mere feet from her, still infuriatingly attractive. Here he was with his deep voice and his flashing eyes, freeing his foot from a snapping turtle with enough care not to harm the animal.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s official. We’re not avoiding each other. If we actually need to speak, we can, for the duration of this event.”
He should appreciate her olive branch, but instead his face blanked hard. With his shiny irises he looked almost robotic in the dimness of the cave.
“Understood,” he said.
Then he slipped under the water and swam toward the daylight past the waterfall.
After a moment, Claire followed. When she emerged into the main pool, Tai had already joined Philippa on the side.
He shivered as he grabbed a dark-purple beach towel from one of the haphazard piles of gear they’d all shed. He didn’t look at Claire.
Sometimes she wondered what might happen if she could meet him fresh for the first time, see if their magnetism still worked without the driving force of a dramatic falling out.
But she couldn’t do that, and she couldn’t trust someone who threw her dreams in the dirt and walked away, who missed the hurt she’d shown to his face, who saw her as nothing but the other side of a financial contract.
So just as he claimed to, Claire had told the truth this whole time too.
They weren’t friends.