Hair mussed and attention trained on her task, Alix was unbearably adorable. Then Alix turned her attention to her audience of one — Baby, sitting at her feet and wagging his tail while he listened to her repeat the instructions.
Grace’s involuntary swoon was collateral damage. There was no way to shield herself from the drop in her stomach and unsteady knees. Who the hell could resist someone talking so earnestly to a dog?
Grace cleared her dry throat and dropped her bag by the front door before she devolved into a syrupy puddle on the floor. “You sure you want to do that?” she asked when she walked into the kitchen. “Pour coffee into your abused stomach after essentially having food poisoning yesterday?”
“Hey!” Alix’s grin was heart stopping when she whirled around. “I hope we didn’t wake you.”
“With this Food Network audition tape?” she joked. “No, I was up. Why areyouup?”
“Don’t you love getting used to a time change right before it switches again?” Alix set the percolator on the stovetop. “Now I’ll spend a week waking up at the ass crack of dawn.”
“Isn’t that always the way?” Grace countered Baby’s headbutt with an ear scratch. “Here, put it on the edge so the handle doesn’t get too hot.” She moved the cafetera.
“I can’t wait to make a cafe con oat milk for Phyllis,” she said in commendable Spanish. “She’s gonna lose her shit.” She leaned her back against the counter, and Grace had to avert her gaze from her tattooed arms, but a glimpse of the bottom of a thigh tattoo didn’t help. Friends did not look at their friends and wonder whether they could lift them onto a kitchen counter, or perhaps bend?—
Nope.
Grace took over espresso-making duties. She needed something productive to do. Needed somewhere to look other than Alix’s warm, dark eyes. The ones she was going to miss more than she should.
“So, apparently, my mother thought that all meat sins were absolved by having been cooked in avocado oil,” Grace explained while spooning sugar into a metal cup. “She is both horrified and extremely apologetic.”
“Tell her it was my fault.” Alix laughed, hand on her stomach.
“She told you?—”
Alix cut her off with a hand on her wrist. A touch Grace felt like a jolt straight up her arm. That was fine. Totally normal. She wasn’t touched all that often. It was just a totally normal response. It was startling,notexhilarating.
“I knew, Gator,” Alix said in the most somber tone. “In my sober heart, I knew that nothing could make seitan taste like that. Not even a mom,” she added with her hand on her chest. “Choices were made, and they were mine.”
“So you meant to feel like actual death?” Grace raised a brow to signal her disbelief.
Alix bit the inside of her cheek, making a dimple sprout on the opposite side. She maintained her serious expression when she replied, “The consequences were harsher than I anticipated.”
Grace chuckled. “You’d do it again, wouldn’t you?”
Alix moistened her lips, and Grace had to force herself back to the espresso that had started brewing. God, why was there so much crap in the house? It made it so hot despite the running AC.
“My lawyer has advised me not to comment.”
“Smart lawyer.” Grace poured the first drops of espresso over the sugar and returned the cafetera to the stove to finish brewing.
“Oh, you have no idea.” Alix’s voice returned to her usual tone, as if to signal she wasn’t joking. “She’s pretty great at crisis management. Knows how to handle illness of all sorts, and is willing to plunge into a pool in the middle of the night to play with a dog.”
Heat she couldn’t blame on anything but Alix’s words spread over Grace’s chest. It dripped into her stomach and triggered an avalanche of embarrassing flutters. She made the critical error of looking at her. Of indulging in the euphoric feeling of Alix’s attention before forcing herself to stop.
“To be fair, I was defrauded into believing a water rescue was necessary.” She poured the rest of the coffee into the metal cup and delighted in the thick foam she’d created with her aggressive stirring.
At the first sip, Alix closed her eyes and groaned. “God, I’m going to miss this.”
“We can stop somewhere on the way to the airport and make sure you leave with the right tools for the job.”
“I’m sure it won’t taste the same. Something about the Miami air probably makes it particularly good, you know?”
Grace nodded, holding back the stupid grin that wanted to spring on her lips. There wasn’t anything for her to smile at — just Alix.
Sitting by the pool while Baby ran his spirited laps around them, Grace was surprised to find that she wasn’t in a hurry toget home. That she wasn’t eager to drop Baby off at her mom’s place later, even if she was leaving with black fur on every garment.
“I can’t believe it went by so fast,” Alix said, gaze drifting over the still pool.
