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And there was no way in hell I would ever do that.
22
JULIAN
Icould have kicked myself for what I said. Luckily, Willow laughed. But then she didn’t say too much after that. She agreed that O’Conner’s questions about Miller were a promising sign, but she didn’t offer anything else. After we finished our coffee, she rinsed out our cups and went over to the couch with a book she’d brought from Callum’s shelf.
“Good book?” I asked as I sat down beside her. I’d read it in college and liked it.
“Mhmm.” She leaned against me, comfortable and warm. I hooked my arm around her and kicked my feet up on the coffee table. The plans I’d made were fucked, but I couldn’t complain. I had a roaring fire, and after weeks of trying to get a minute alone together, I had Willow all to myself. Snowed in together. Couldn’t leave if we wanted to, and I couldn’t say I wanted to. Her hair felt like silk, the ends falling over the back of my hand. She fit perfectly against me. I could stay like this all weekend.
I could stay like this a lot longer than a weekend.
I closed my eyes and dropped my head back against the back of the couch, letting the thought of permanence permeate. It had been a few years since I’d been in anything long term. The relationships I’d had since had been passionate and brief—the flames leaping high and dying out. Some of them had felt like love, but even those, I’d known the truth. It wouldn’t last long. Something was wrong. The girl or the timing or shit, just me. I searched for that feeling deep inside myself. I was sure I’d find it if I looked. It would be lurking under the contentment, hiding in the shadow of lust. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t find it.
I opened my eyes and looked down at Willow’s head with a frown. Sensing the shift, she looked up and met my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She hiked up an eyebrow and waited. I pressed a kiss to her forehead and leaned my head back again. “Just wondering if Callum has any food in here, or if we’re supposed to hunt a deer or something.”
Willow snorted and looked back at her book. “Callum’s vegan,” she reminded me. “He hasn’t ingested an animal product in sixteen years.”
I stared up at the ceiling beams, feeling Willow’s attention drift back to the Buddenbrooks, a wealthy family that got theirs in the end. She’d like that, I thought, smiling wryly. She was the only woman I’d ever been with who I thought would have preferred me without my family name, connections, and wealth. Too many had cared more about Lewis Productions than Julian Lewis. Some had been indifferent, familiar with the peaks and pitfalls of an inheritance like mine. But Willow—she didn’t like it. It made her uncomfortable. Sometimes I even thought it made her mad, incomprehensible as that was.
No, she was here for me and me alone. No hidden agenda.
And if I wasn’t careful, I was going to fall in love with her.
If I hadn’t already.
* * *
Callum scared the shit out of us an hour later when he trudged over and laid his fist against the door like.a battering ram. Willow sat bolt upright on the couch, my arm falling off her shoulders. She twisted around to look at me, her eyes wide as saucers. “Do you think that’s Callum?”
“Of course it is,” I said, even though the sudden noise had gone through me like a shot of adrenaline.
Moments later, Callum proved us right by letting himself in. He was wearing a parka so big that looked like it could have insulated a small house. It went all the way down to the tops of his snow boots, and he was so covered in snow that he looked twice his normal size.
“Dinner?” he grunted.
We donned our own parkas and kicked our way back through the rising snowdrifts to his cabin. When we got there, he had his small table set for three. Willow and I sat close together, our knees bumping, while we ate what looked like chili and nearly smelled like it, too.
“Like it?” Callum asked suspiciously.
“Delicious,” Willow said. “Is this Beyond Meat?”
Callum looked almost pleased that she’d identified it correctly. They got started on the merits and pitfalls of various meat substitutes that I couldn’t follow. Part of me wanted Willow to bring him back around to the subject at hand, but at least she was getting full sentences out of him. You could finally tell that the man had books inside of him, and his face was just shy of animated.
“Stem cell meat is next,” he said, pushing back his chair and standing up from the table. “You mark my words, Ms. Laurier. Invest now.”
Callum went back to the small bathroom, and I took the opportunity to ask Willow what the hell he was talking about.
“I don’t know how it works, but there’s a company that wants to grow meat from the stem cells of animals.” She nudged me. “Could be an interesting documentary.”
I couldn’t imagine anything less interesting, but then, I wasn’t in the food documentary business. Maybe she was right. Whatever she was, Callum seemed to like it. He’d also liked that she broughtBuddenbrooksback over with her. When he came back from the bathroom, he wanted to talk about Thomas Mann.
“In his early twenties when he wrote it,” Callum said, as if he and Thomas Mann shared a kinship. He looked at Willow, “About your age, I’d expect.”
