Page 33

He looked so at home. Not performing, not aware of an audience, just a big man in a warm kitchen making breakfast on a quiet morning. Sunlight came through the window over the sink and caught the edge of his jaw, the curve of his forearm, the flour-white of his shirt.

My hand drifted up and rubbed at my sternum, right over the spot where a slow, persistent ache had taken up residence. The feeling wasn’t the hangover. The feeling was want, plain and terrible and enormous. I wanted this. Not just him, though, god, definitely him, but this. Mornings that smelled like bacon and coffee. Humming. Bare feet on warm floors. A kitchen where nothing was measured for punishment.

Yearning like that could kill a person. I was fairly certain of it.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, Drift turned.

Disheveled did not begin to cover it. Sleep still softened the angles of his face, a crease from the pillow marked one cheek, and his thick beard wasn’t brushed like I’d always seen at the café. He was, without competition, the most gorgeous thing I had ever laid eyes on, and I could not look away. My brain simply refused to issue the command.

“Morning, kitten.” His voice came out low and rough, still gravelly with sleep, and the sound of it did something illegal to my insides.

“Hi.” My own voice cracked like a teenager’s. I cleared my throat. “Good morning. I woke up in your bed. I’m assuming it’s your bed. Please tell me I didn’t join a cult.”

A slow grin spread across his face. “No cult. Though you did pledge eternal loyalty to a bartender’s beard, so the jury’s still out.”

“I can’t believe I said that.” Heat crawled up my neck as I shuffled closer, drawn toward the kitchen island like a moth toward a very large, very handsome flame. “You slept on the floor.”

“You were pretty out of it. Didn’t want you waking up with a hangover with a guy in your bed.” He said it like it was nothing, like men just did that, and turned back to flip the bacon. Grease crackled. “Figured you’d panic less if the first thing you saw was a familiar face.”

The first thing I’d seen was a ceiling fan, and I’d invented three separate criminal conspiracies before leaving the room, but I decided he didn’t need that information.

“Sit.” He nodded toward the stools lining the island. “Food’s almost done. How’s the head?”

“Someone’s playing the drums in it, but the aspirin’s negotiating a ceasefire.” I climbed onto a stool and folded my arms on the cool countertop. “Thank you. For the aspirin. And the water. And the not letting me die in a bar.”

“Anytime.” He slid a mug of coffee across the island toward me, and when I reached for it, his fingers brushed mine. The touch was light, barely a graze of warm skin, and this time, I didn’t flinch. This time I felt the contact travel all the way up my arm and settle somewhere behind my heart like a lit candle.

Drift’s eyes flicked to our hands then back to my face. He didn’t comment. He just smiled, small and pleased, and turned to plate the food.

The breakfast he set in front of me was obscene. Bacon, eggs scrambled soft with cheese, and thick slices of toasted bread that had clearly come from a homemade loaf, glistening with butter.

He settled onto the stool beside me with his own plate, close enough that his knee bumped mine under the counter and stayed there.

“You cook like this every morning?” I asked around a mouthful of eggs that nearly made me weep.

“Wish I could say ‘Only when I’ve got someone worth cooking for,’ but yeah, I cook like this a lot.” He said it easily, eyes on his plate, and I nearly choked on my toast. “Live with a pack of men.”

That explained those doors in the hallway. “I remember you mentioning you cooked for your friends or something like that.”

I took another sip of coffee, and the rich warmth of it spread through me like something medicinal. The mug was heavy in my hands, glazed a deep blue with a chip near the handle, and it was the best coffee I had tasted anywhere, which shouldn’t have surprised me. The man behind it was sitting close enough that I could smell cedar and clean cotton every time he shifted.

Drift’s knee stayed pressed against mine under the counter. Neither of us moved it. The point of contact was warm and steady and completely innocent, and it was somehow occupying about eighty percent of my available brain function.

“Eat your bacon before it gets cold,” he said, nudging my plate a half-inch closer with one finger. “You need grease. It’s science.”

“You and the bartender both cite science a lot for men who make things up.” But I ate the bacon, and it was perfect, crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, and I might have made a small involuntary sound about it.

Drift’s mouth curved. He didn’t comment on the sound, which was gentlemanly of him, but the smug tilt of his beard said he’d filed it away somewhere.

“So.” He leaned back on his stool, cradling his own mug in one enormous hand. “Yesterday afternoon, I was at my brother’s new house. Name’s Blade. He just bought a place over on Birch Lane.”

“That’s nice.” I tore a corner off my toast. “New houses are exciting.”

“New is a generous word.” Drift took a slow sip of coffee, and something wicked sparked in those greenish-amber eyes. “The house is a hundred years old, and every single one of those years is angry about it.”

A small laugh escaped me. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Phineas.” He set the mug down and turned toward me with the gravity of a man about to deliver a eulogy. “The first day we walked in, the staircase moved. Not creaked. Moved. Sideways. Like it was trying to leave.”