CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE WAS PLEADING WITH the espresso machine.
Not the one from the coffeehouse, a different machine, same war.
This one was Italian, chrome-and-steel, installed in the fortress kitchen by Ruby three years ago, and Alexei had used it exactly twice.
But Zia had discovered it on their second morning, and a relationship had formed: one-sided, emotional, and endlessly entertaining.
“Okay, Mariano. I know we had a rough start yesterday, but I believe in us.” She was standing in his kitchen in bare feet and one of his shirts, her hair a catastrophe, her hands hovering over the machine with the gentle, encouraging energy of a woman trying to talk a frightened animal down from a ledge.
“I’m going to press the button now. And you’re going to make coffee.
And it’s going to be beautiful. I have faith in you. ”
The machine hissed.
“No, no, no. Mariano, please. We talked about this.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I know you can do this. You’re Italian. Coffee is in your blood. Just...cooperate. For me. Please?”
Alexei leaned against the kitchen doorframe and watched.
He was already dressed, meetings with the Blood Oval didn’t wait for coffee, but he had come downstairs early for precisely this reason.
The espresso negotiation was the highlight of his morning.
It had been the highlight of every morning since the second day of their marriage, and he was not above rearranging his schedule to ensure he never missed it.
She reminded him of the coffeehouse. Of watching her from the back of a car on the street opposite Beans 4 U, where she’d had the same relationship with an espresso machine she’d named Barbara.
The same gentle coaxing. The same earnest encouragement.
“Come on, Barbara, I know you can do better than this. I believe in you.” And when the machine finally cooperated, the same profuse gratitude, thanking it like it had done her a personal favor, apologizing for doubting it.
He had fallen in love with her somewhere between the apology and the gratitude.
“You’re negotiating with it again,” he said.
She spun around. Her cheeks flushed. They always flushed when he caught her doing something she considered undignified. The blush spread from her face down her neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt, and he wanted to follow its path.
“I’m not negotiating. I’m...encouraging.”
“With a machine.”
“Mariano responds to positive reinforcement.”
“Mariano responds to the left button, not the right one. I’ve told you this.”
She stared at him. Then at the machine. Then she pressed the left button and the espresso poured out smooth and dark and fragrant, and she turned back to him with wide, betrayed eyes.
“You could have told me that a week ago.”
“I could have.”
“You let me beg Mariano for a week.”
“It was informative.”
“Informative.”
“I learned a great deal about your persuasion style.”
She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without looking. She made a sound, half frustration, half laugh, that hit him somewhere behind the sternum with a force he hadn’t been prepared for.
He was across the kitchen before she could blink, taking the coffee from her hand, setting it on the counter, and kissing her.
Not gently. Not with patient restraint. With hunger.
With the specific, targeted intensity of a man who had discovered that his wife’s outrage tasted better than anything the espresso machine could produce.
She melted against him. She always did. Her body’s response to his was the most honest thing about her, instantaneous and absolute. Her fingers found his shirt and gripped, and the small sound she made against his mouth sent a jolt through him that he felt in his spine.
When he pulled back, her eyes were glazed.
“That’s not fair,” she whispered. “You can’t just kiss me to win arguments.”
“I didn’t kiss you to win the argument.” He picked up her coffee and handed it back. “I kissed you because you called the espresso machine Mariano and I found it intolerable.”
“Intolerable?”
“You named it after a beautiful Italian man.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. The flush climbed her cheeks again.
“Are you...” She bit her lip. “Are you jealous of the espresso machine?”
“Drink your coffee. We’re late.”
He was not jealous of the espresso machine.
He was, perhaps, mildly territorial about the fact that his wife had given an Italian name to a kitchen appliance and spoke to it with more tenderness than she spoke to most humans, but this was an entirely rational response and did not constitute jealousy.
Zia was grinning behind her coffee cup. He could see it. He could also smell it, the bright, warm spike of delight that bloomed from her skin when she was pleased with herself.
She was pleased with herself frequently. It was extraordinary.
The drive to the office was his. He had begun driving them himself most mornings, because having her in the passenger seat, her feet on the dashboard despite his opinion about this, her voice filling the cabin, her hand resting on his forearm while she talked about whatever her mind had produced in the last twelve minutes, was a pleasure he was unwilling to delegate to anyone, including Gerry.
This morning she was telling him about a design problem with the V-Series housing.
Something about the polymer casing and heat resistance in equatorial climates.
She talked with her hands when she was excited about her work, gesturing at invisible blueprints, and the passion in her voice, the unguarded enthusiasm for scent neutralization technology, was more compelling than any presentation he had ever witnessed in a boardroom.
“The current casing warps above forty-three degrees Celsius,” she was saying, her hands drawing shapes in the air. “But if we shift to a hybrid polymer...”
“You’re extraordinary,” he told her.
She stopped mid-gesture. Blinked.
“I’m...what?”
“At forty-three degrees. Continue.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her lips parted, the flush returning. Then she laughed, that full, startled, helpless laugh that rearranged the architecture of his chest, and went back to her polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment.
Her phone buzzed in the cupholder. She glanced at it. Her thumb swiped the notification away before the screen had fully lit, and she set it face-down in her lap and went back to talking about polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment.
Different because the design wing now watched Zia with the particular attention that came with her new last name.
Same because Zia moved through the attention like she didn’t notice it, greeting the cleaning crew by name, asking the Fae engineer about her daughter’s recital, complimenting Kirsten’s new haircut with a sincerity that was impossible to fake because Zia didn’t know how to fake things.
That was the quality he had noticed first, from the back of a car across the street from a coffeehouse.
Not her beauty, though she was beautiful, not in a way that had anything to do with symmetry but everything to do with warmth.
It was her transparency. She existed without armor.
Without performance. She was the same person in every room, with every person, and in a world of preters who spent their lives curating their presentation, her authenticity was so rare it bordered on alien.
It was also, he was discovering, a magnet.
The Lyccan delegate from the trade fair had requested a follow-up meeting specifically with “the product designer.” The request was professional.
The way the delegate looked at Zia during the meeting was not.
Alexei sat at the head of the table and watched a grown man lean three degrees too close while asking about dispersion algorithms, and something proprietary stirred in his chest.
He didn’t intervene. He didn’t need to. Zia answered every question with crisp professionalism, oblivious to the leaning, oblivious to the delegate’s interest, oblivious to the fact that her husband was calculating the structural integrity of the conference table in case he needed to break it.
After the meeting, as the delegate lingered to shake Zia’s hand with a grip that lasted two seconds longer than protocol required, Alexei placed his hand on the small of her back.
The delegate’s handshake ended immediately.
“That was productive,” Zia chirped as they walked to the elevator.
“Extremely.”
“He seemed really interested in the hybrid polymer approach.”
“The polymer. Yes. That was clearly his primary interest.”
She looked up at him. Studied his face.
“Are you doing the jaw thing?”
“I don’t have a jaw thing.”
“You do. Your jaw gets tight when you’re...” She bit her lip. The grin was forming. He could see it. He could not stop it. “Oh my gosh, you’re jealous again.”
“I am not...”
“First Mariano, now the Lyccan delegate.” She was beaming. Radiant. Insufferable. “The Prince of Atlantis gets jealous.”
“The Prince of Atlantis,” he told her, pulling her into the elevator and pressing the button for the executive level, “has no reason to be jealous.”
The doors closed. He pressed her against the wall. Her breath caught.
“Because nothing in that room,” he murmured against her ear, “belongs to him.”
He felt the shiver move through her body. Felt her fingers find his shirt, gripping. Felt her scent shift from amusement to something darker and warmer that made the elevator feel several degrees too small.
“Alexei...we’re at work...”
“I own the building.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a valid...”
He kissed her. She stopped talking. The elevator rose.