Chapter 7 #3
While he stacked plates in the sink, again shutting down her offer to help, Gabi took quick glimpses at his ass while trying to figure out how to move them into deeper territory.
It didn’t make sense—obviously—to want more when their relationship had the shelf life of a farm-stand peach.
But he’d had a second glass of wine, his smile had mellowed, deepening a dimple in his cheek she wanted to sample with her tongue, so…
It was time to find out what made Dallas True tick. Even if it went against the plan, she couldn’t fight her nature. She was inquisitive. Sue her.
Gabi traced her finger around the rim of her glass, then brought it to her mouth to suck off a drop of wine.
Glancing back, Dallas’s hand clenched around the dishrag, his chest lifting.
Before he recovered, Gabi dove in. “You mentioned a skirmish at work.”
“Wow,” Dallas murmured, the corners of his impossibly sexy lips tilting. “I owe you an apology. I had you pegged as snooping before dinner.”
“Please, I’m a Southern girl.” She took an indifferent sip, hoping she didn’t look half as interested in his answer as she was. “I wait until dessert.”
His mouth twitched, but he turned away, reaching into the freezer. “Good thing I made that low effort. Less time for cross-examination.”
“I’m intrigued,” she said, thinking she might have to hate him a little if he could bake on top of the rest.
“Don’t be. It’s nothing like those dream things you make.
Ice cream. Hot fudge. A simple design.” He pulled out a carton of vanilla, then bent for something in the refrigerator, slower than he had before, careful with the ankle though he hadn’t mentioned it once.
“If you’re the kind of woman who can be trusted, I might add whipped cream. ”
“I’m absolutely not to be trusted with anything involving sugar.”
“Good to know.” He set a small saucepan on the stove and dropped in a pat of butter, then chocolate, then something from a jar. He kept his eyes on the pan, not on her.
Which was answer enough about his indecision.
Gabi watched his broad shoulders flex under the mellow light. Sometime after dinner, he’d changed the CD, and Billie Holiday drifted through the kitchen, her world-weary voice threading through the hiss of melting butter and raindrops tapping the windowpanes.
“So?” she asked gently. “What happened?”
“Like I mentioned before, I’m on a professional reprieve.” The statement came out flat. Too flat. “I made a mistake. A stupid, ambition-driven mistake.”
“Everyone who wants something badly enough goes a little stupid sometimes.”
“Generous revision, Wilder.” He stirred the chocolate as it softened, his profile turned away, probably the only way he was going to talk.
“I wrote for anyone who’d take me at first. Wire services, papers that paid late, papers that didn’t pay enough.
A twenty-two-year-old kid can sleep anywhere, anytime.
Or not sleep at all. Eventually I was doing steady work out of Sarajevo.
Some AP, some Reuters. The Guardian when I could sell them something with teeth. ”
Gabi tried to picture him and couldn’t. A gorgeous guy in a kitchen with his glasses sliding down his nose, making hot fudge in a ragged T-shirt and beat-up jeans, yes.
That same man in another country, under shellfire, filing stories from places she only saw in broken pieces on the evening news?
No. Sleeping God knows where and learning which sounds meant run?
She couldn’t make the two versions of him fit.
“And the skirmish?” she asked, drawing him back. She did the same dance with Sam when something had gone wrong at school.
Dallas laughed, because she wasn’t letting go. “Skirmish. That’s my word, because I’m charming.”
“That’s your word because you’re slippery. The charm offensive is how you get away with it.”
He glanced over, and she could tell whatever answer he’d had ready didn’t make it out.
That she’d surprised him. His eyes caught on hers and stayed there, green and gold-flecked, the humor thinning into something hotter.
As if he was deciding whether to deny her point or come around the island and prove it.
Suddenly, she very much wanted him to prove it.
“Careful,” he said, his voice going rougher around the edges. “I may start believing you’ve somehow got my number.”
Gabi’s pulse gave one hard, stupid kick, and for a reckless second, kissing him seemed less like a terrible idea than the best thing she’d done all night. All year, maybe. She couldn’t remember the last time wanting someone had hit her this bluntly, with no room to pretend it was anything else.
Dallas looked down at the saucepan, but not fast enough.
She saw the way his hand tightened on the spoon, the way his mouth flattened, the way he seemed to catch himself right at the point of doing something neither of them could laugh off.
Then the shutter came down. He slid his glasses to his brow, rubbed the bridge of his nose, suddenly looking much older.
“I should have known,” he said, stirring once, twice.
“That’s the part that got me pulled. Not the blast. Not the stitches.
Not the ankle. My editor’s seen worse from me.
” His voice stayed even, which somehow made the next thing he said harder to hear.
“Trouble is easy to spot if you know what to look for. If you’ve been trained to know, and I have.
If you’re not exhausted, hungry, arrogant, and thinking about the lead paragraph instead of the man standing ten feet away who’s about to leave a suitcase with an explosive inside.
I had a kid with me. Sixteen. A runner. Local boy.
They know the alleys, the checkpoints, who’s talking, who isn’t.
You pay them for information and tell yourself that makes it business.
Ten seconds more, and I could have gotten him killed.
I only went there to get him out, which was viewed as a mistake, too. ”
Her stomach clenched, her fingers curling around the lip of the island. “Dallas.”
“The guy with the suitcase had shaved to fit in,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken.
“That was the tell. The hotel was mostly military, some journalists, aid workers coming in and out. You learn to look at shoes, hands, coats, who’s sweating when it isn’t hot.
But he’d shaved that morning, or maybe the night before.
Lower half of his face was pale. Too pale.
Like the beard had come off and the sun hadn’t had time to touch the skin underneath. That was the damned tell.”
He nodded toward the window, though there was no sky to see, only rain and his reflection. “No sun on it yet.”
A small ache opened in her chest before she could guard against it.
“I saw it. I did. Just not fast enough to know what I was seeing. Like a gut reaction before my brain engaged.” He turned off the burner, but his hand stayed on the knob.
“Someone shouted. Maybe me. I moved because everyone moved. I pushed the kid, Rafael, out ahead of me, thank God. Then the lobby came apart.”
The kitchen seemed to vibrate, cozy and too protected for the disturbing things he’d just shared.
The opposing scents of garlic and chocolate in the air.
Rosemary on the cutting board. Raindrops on the windowpane.
Dallas standing there making sundaes while he talked about a man, a suitcase, and exploding rooms.
“Dallas.”
He reached for bowls like he hadn’t heard her. Or like he had, and couldn’t afford to hesitate. “For the record, this should be served warm enough to compromise your good sense.”
Gabi slid off the stool before she decided if she had the right.
He glanced over, bowl in one hand, his bad ankle angled back, most of his weight riding on the good leg.
His mouth had gone hard, but his eyes were cut green crystal behind glass, that hazel ring glimmering in the pendant’s light.
Trouble enough on its own. But the whole battered, stubborn, beautiful mess of him reached past every defense she had.
“Don’t,” he said, firmly enough to tell her he meant it.
Gabi stopped halfway around the island. “Don’t what?”
“Look at me like I need fixing, like I’m so fucking fragile I’ll come apart. My family is doing that right now, and I don’t want it from you, too. You’re the only person who’s going to hear this story.”
Frustration burned through the lingering ache. Good. Frustration she knew what to do with. “Bad news is, I have a son who withdraws when his emotions get the best of him. I know that trick,” she said, climbing back onto the stool.
Dallas’s jaw flexed. For a moment, she thought he might argue.
Because he’d given her what she wanted, and now she’d had the nerve to ask for more.
Instead, he picked up the sundaes and came around the island.
Gingerly, because of the ankle. Deliberately, because of everything else.
In a move that felt distinctly like a challenge, he took the stool beside her and turned it enough that his knee angled between her and the island—not trapping her exactly, but close.
Making sure she was close enough to breathe him in: chocolate and rain-damp cotton, the hint of wine on his breath. Close enough to want.
“You hate it,” she said. “Being sidelined.”
“I’m not good at it. At being still.” His eyes held hers. Guarded, but daring.
As the air around them pulsed, Gabi glanced at his hand resting on the counter between them.
Long fingers. Slender, like a pianist’s, except for the jagged scar across one knuckle.
At the edge of his sleeve, black ink curved over the muscle of his forearm.
A compass rose. Something a young man would get when he believed choosing a direction meant he controlled where he’d end up.
She put her hand over his before she could talk herself out of it.