djinn wars 01 - chosen (23 page)

Maybe I was making too much out of his going rabbit-hunting. It wasn’t as if we wouldn’t be eating a lot of that sort of thing in the future, if it turned out he really was handy with that .22. Then again, making an occasion out of it might make us both feel a little better about our current situation.

That thought seemed to reassure me, so I went ahead and finished setting the table, completing the setup with the long wrought-iron candleholder that had been sitting on the sideboard. It held five pillar candles, and would provide plenty of light.

Candlelit dinners?
I asked myself.
Boy, you really are asking for trouble.

I decided if Jace asked, I’d say it was a good way to save energy.

He returned an hour or so later, Dutchie bounding along beside him, and a very messy bundle of rabbit dangling from a bag in one hand. So he had done the butchering for me, probably guessing that asking me to handle that particular duty would have damaged my delicate sensibilities.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the bundle from him. “I found a recipe with mustard sauce. Does that sound okay to you?”

“Sounds great,” he replied. He was windblown, but looked far more relaxed and happy than he had when he was telling me about how he had left Taos. Getting out in the fresh air and away from the house seemed to have done him a world of good. “I need to get cleaned up. Can you manage things from here?”

In another world, I might have complained about having to do the typical female thing of cooking, now that he’d bagged his bunnies. Actually, though, I was just grateful that he even had the ability to go out and get us food. He knew how to hunt; I knew how to cook. It seemed a pretty fair division of labor from where I stood.

The bundle of rabbit parts was a little bloodier than something I would have gotten from the supermarket, but I wasn’t so squeamish that I couldn’t handle it. I rinsed everything off and patted it dry, then sprinkled the pieces with salt and pepper while warming up some olive oil in a pan. As the rabbit was browning, Jace returned to the kitchen, face and hands looking freshly scrubbed, and asked if I needed help peeling the potatoes.

Okay, so much for my worry about thinking he was going to sit on his ass and watch a DVD of
Die Hard
or something while I labored away in the kitchen.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

He went to work, being sparing with the water, for which I was grateful. So far it seemed as if the well could manage just about anything we threw at it, including daily showers for the two of us, but it never hurt to be careful. I used to take long, hot showers, the kind that would basically kill all the hot water in the place by the time I was done, but once I got here, I retrained myself so the whole procedure only took five minutes. Not the easiest of tasks at first, but things did get sped up when you didn’t have to worry about shaving your legs.

I risked a glance at Jace, thinking I wouldn’t mind having to go back to the whole leg-shaving thing if the situation warranted it. But that day seemed far off — if it ever came at all — so in the meantime, I was pretty sure my five-minute showers were safe.

Neither of us spoke, but it was a companionable sort of silence, him peeling the potatoes, me working away at the sauté pan, following the steps of the recipe. He did stop to ask whether I wanted the potatoes sliced or cut up or whatever, but since I was planning on mashing them, he didn’t have to do much besides quarter them and put them in a pot of cold water.

“Don’t you need milk for mashed potatoes?” he asked.

“There’s evaporated milk in the pantry. It won’t be quite the same, but I think it’ll be okay.”

I could tell by the way his brows drew together that he wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea of evaporated milk, but he didn’t say anything, only went over to fetch the box and then mix up a batch for me. Well, if it was that big a problem, the next day I’d send him off in search of any stray goats that might be wandering the area, looking for a home. Dutchie would probably be ecstatic at the prospect of that sort of expedition.

The dog had definitely latched on to Jace. Maybe she’d been more bonded with Mr. Munoz, back in Albuquerque. Or maybe Jace was one of those people whom dogs tended to love. I didn’t know, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Jace was Dutchie’s new best friend. It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might have, simply because Dutchie had proved herself to be a decent judge of character. If she liked Jace, it must mean he was okay.

It was dark by the time dinner was ready. Jace and I carried the various platters and bowls to the dining room table, and I brought out some matches I’d found in the kitchen so I could light the pillars in their wrought-iron holder. Without my asking, Jace turned off the overhead fixture, so all we had was the candlelight. It danced off the heavy glass goblets, the dark bottle of cabernet that sat waiting to be drunk. The walls in this room were a warm parchment yellow, and seemed to reflect the glow of the candles and multiply it.

“Wow,” Jace murmured. “I hadn’t expected to see anything like this ever again.” Then he shook his head. “Wait — I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like this
before
, either. It looks beautiful, Jessica.”

“Thanks,” I said, my tone almost shy. Now that I was with him in this intimate space, would he take all this for more than I had intended, as some sort of seduction or something?

Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. I pulled out my chair — obscurely glad that he hadn’t offered to do it for me — and sat down. A second later, he followed suit, lifting the cloth napkin I’d set out and placing it in his lap. Then he raised the bottle of wine, which he’d already opened back in the kitchen, and poured some of the cabernet into my glass first, and then his.

“I think we should have a toast,” he said.

“What should we toast to?” Not being dead seemed the obvious choice, but it seemed crass to voice the thought aloud.

He seemed to think about it for a moment, his glass a few inches off the tabletop. The candlelight gleamed against his raven-dark hair, and again I wondered what it would feel like to run my fingers through it.

“To sanctuary,” he said at last.

I was definitely on board with that. Even if nothing ever happened between Jace and me, we had found a quiet haven here, a place to shelter from whatever might be going on outside in the world. “To sanctuary,” I echoed, raising my glass as well and clinking it against his.

A brief silence fell as we both swallowed some of the wine. It wasn’t as heavy as the Montepulciano I’d drunk a few days earlier. I could taste the fruit in it, and thought it was probably a good choice to go along with the sharpness of the mustard sauce I’d made for the rabbit.

Then we both dug into the main dish, which turned out to be excellent. I wasn’t sure why I’d avoided rabbit before this, because I found myself liking the taste.

Good thing, too,
I thought,
because you’re probably going to be eating a lot of it in the future.

And the mashed potatoes actually were fine, even with the evaporated milk, and there was fresh bread and butter and roasted carrots. It really was quite the feast, especially considering I’d had to work with what was available in the cellar and the greenhouse. No more popping down to the grocery store to get that one special ingredient.

“This is…amazing,” Jace finally said, after making some serious inroads into the food on his plate. “Were you a chef or something?”

“Hardly.” I took a sip of wine to cover my embarrassment, cheeks flaming. I really needed to get this blushing thing under control one way or another. “My mother taught me how to cook. That is, she pointed out that it was mostly following directions, at least for the basic stuff. So…that’s what I did tonight. Followed directions.”

“It’s still pretty incredible.” Expression thoughtful, he drank some of his own wine. “So what did you do? Before, I mean.”

“I was getting my master’s at UNM, so I T.A.’d a couple of courses. English — a lot of paper grading, mostly.” I broke off a piece of bread but didn’t eat it, just sort of rolled it between my finger and thumb. “What about you?”

“I graduated from UNM four years ago, then came back to Taos.” He looked at me directly then, as if studying my features, and it was difficult to remain as I was, to not glance away. “We must have been there at the same time, but I guess there wouldn’t have been much overlap. You’d have been a freshman when I was a senior.”

I could have sworn his expression was somewhat regretful, but I didn’t want to read too much into it. That way only lay disappointment.

“Anyway,” he went on, “after that I went back to Taos. I conducted tours at the pueblo part of the time, and the rest of the time I worked on getting my business going.”

“What kind of business?” I asked, after finally remembering to eat the piece of bread I was holding.

“Website and graphic design. I did some work for the local businesses. Mostly advertising stuff. The tours paid a lot better.”

That revelation surprised me. “They did?”

“Oh, yeah.” He got himself a piece of bread, then buttered it. When he went on, he wore a rather sardonic smile. “You’d be amazed how much the tourists were willing to part with. On a good day, I could make around three hundred bucks. White guilt is expensive, I guess.”

I just stared at him, and he hurried to say,

“No offense. But I think that’s part of why they’re willing to hand over a twenty — or more — for a half-hour tour of the pueblo.” His gaze sharpened on me, and again I had to force myself to look back at him directly. “Anyway, I’d say to look at you, you must have some First Nations blood back in the woodpile yourself. Or am I overreaching?”

So that was it — he was just inspecting my appearance in an attempt to determine my own origins. Fair enough. Would he feel better, knowing I had a Native American heritage of my own? “No, you’re not overreaching,” I replied, glad I sounded calm and unruffled. “Family legend has it that my great-great-great-grandmother was full-blood Ute.”

“Even better,” Jace said, a certain warmth in his eyes doing unexpected things to my midsection. “The Ute and the Pueblo were on very good terms back in the day.”

What in the world was I supposed to say to that? Was Jace hoping that he and I would be, as he put it, “on very good terms”? Not that I thought I would be opposed to such a shift in our relationship, but we’d only known each other for a couple of days. I certainly didn’t intend to rush into anything.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I remarked. “At least I won’t have to worry about tribal warfare breaking out in the laundry room or something.”

For a second or two, he didn’t reply, only stared at me, and I hoped I hadn’t offended him. But then he chuckled, reached for the wine bottle, and poured some more into my glass. Still smiling, he said, “No, I don’t think we have to worry about any conflict here.”

It was all I could do not to shiver. No matter what he said, though, I wouldn’t take for granted this current harmony and goodwill lasting indefinitely.

How could it, when we were such strangers to one another?

Chapter Twelve

But somehow, strangely, that cooperation did continue. We fell into a sort of pattern after a few days — rising early, eating breakfast, which was toast or oatmeal most of the time, taking turns with our showers, getting dressed, then doing whatever needed to be done around the place. Jace was full of plans, abetted by some of the books and manuals he found in the office.

“We really should build a henhouse,” he said one morning, about a week after he showed up. “I know people in the area had to have kept chickens. Eggs are a good, steady source of protein.”

“So are rabbits,” I replied, not bothering to point out that we’d been eating rabbit at least every other day. Wile E. Coyote would have been jealous.

“Now they are,” he said. “In the dead of winter, it might be more difficult. But those plans I found for a henhouse look dead easy. We just need to get some supplies.”

“What, you’re a carpenter and a web designer?” I asked, teasing. Sort of. What I knew about building henhouses was roughly the same as what I knew about brain surgery — that is, nothing. I didn’t think I was going to be much help.

He shrugged. “I picked up a few things here and there. It’ll be fine.”

And so, later that morning, we headed down into Santa Fe in search of a Home Depot, which wasn’t as easy as it might seem, considering we couldn’t exactly Google its location. But we found a yellow pages inside an abandoned dentist’s office, and tracked down the store from there. It was a good ways outside the city center, so I was doubly glad that we’d looked it up instead of driving aimlessly all over the place.

Jace had a list of everything he needed, and we “liberated” one of the trailers you used to be able to rent to haul your building supplies home. Thank God my father had invested in a tow package for the Cherokee, even though we’d never actually had any reason to use it. There just never seemed to be quite enough in the family budget to buy a trailer or an ATV.