They both stopped. Both laughed, awkward and surprised, and charged with tension neither was ready to name.
“Go ahead,” Leo offered.
“I was going to say I should probably put on real clothes.” Junie gestured at herself again. “Before Avine sees me and stages an intervention.”
“That might be wise.”
“And then we can work? On the research?”
“The inn has a library. Avine said we could use it.”
“A library.” Junie nodded, not trusting herself to say anything more complicated. “Good. Libraries are good. Lots of books. Books are… helpful.”
Someone please stop me from talking.
She stood, gathering her coffee and her plate and the tattered remains of her dignity. “I’ll go. Get dressed. Be a person. Meet you in the library.”
“Take your time.” Leo’s mouth curved—not quite a smile, but close. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The words shouldn’t have meant anything. They were a statement of fact. He was staying at the inn. Of course, he wasn’t going anywhere.
But as Junie fled back to her room with her face burning and her pulse pounding, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d meant something else entirely.
SIXTEEN
JUNIE
The routine developed without either of them acknowledging it.
Mornings: Junie stumbled into breakfast, slightly more dressed than that first disastrous day but never quite as polished as Leo. He was always there first, always with coffee already poured, always watching her with that careful, controlled expression that she was beginning to recognize as his version of restraint.
They talked. About the investigation, mostly—the shell companies, the ley line pattern, the encoded recipes Junie was slowly reconstructing from memory. But other things too. Little things. How she took her coffee (black, strong, enough to resurrect the dead). His opinion on Dahlia’s experimental cinnamon rolls (favorable, though he’d never admit it out loud). The way Glimmer had started tolerating his presence without hissing, which Junie privately considered a miracle.
She learned things about him during those mornings. That he woke before dawn regardless of when he’d slept. That he read news from three different cities before breakfast. That he had a tell when amused—a slight crinkling at the corners of his eyes, quickly suppressed, as if joy was a reflex that needed correction.
She learned other things too. The way his voice went rough on his first cup of coffee. The way he watched her hands when she gestured during stories. The way his attention felt like sunlight—steady and inescapable.
Afternoons: They worked separately. Leo had calls to make, contacts to pressure, the whole apparatus of Castellan Ventures to leverage in his hunt for Victor. Junie met with Wyatt about the investigation, with insurance adjusters about her shop, with friends who brought food and concern and not-so-subtle questions about her temporary rooming situation.
“So,” Cassia said on day three, sprawled across Junie’s borrowed bed with her storm petrel preening on the windowsill, “you’re living with the hot lion.”
“I’m staying in the same building as the hot lion. There’s a difference.”
“Is there? Because Narla said his scent has been all over you lately.”
Junie threw a pillow at her. “His scent is not all over me. We share breakfast. That’s it.”
“Uh-huh.” Cassia caught the pillow with annoying ease. “And the coffee he leaves outside your door every morning?”
Junie froze. “How do you know about that?”
“Avine told me about the coffee.” Cassia’s grin was insufferably smug.
“That’s—” Junie searched for the right word. “That’s practical. He knows I’m useless before coffee. It’s efficiency, not… whatever you’re implying.”
“And the pastries you leave outside his door?”
“Dahlia brings too many. It would be wasteful not to share.”
