Edge of Darkness (7 page)

He took it from her, cupped it between his palms, looked down at it. He drew in a breath and exhaled it in a rush. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude. This is none of my business.”

In a barely audible voice, Ember said, “Thank you for saying that. You’re not being rude, though, I am. It’s just…It’s just that I can’t talk about it. It only makes it worse.”

He nodded, still gazing into the mug. “I know exactly what you mean. Consider the subject closed.” He downed the scalding tea in one long swallow and set the mug back on the countertop. “So,” he said brusquely, shoving away from the counter and looking at her with a pleasant smile, “I’m still interested in that copy of
Casino Royale
. You never did quote me a price.”

Equal parts relieved and grateful he hadn’t pressed her and had made an elegant segue into another topic, Ember made an attempt at lighthearted normalcy. “Well, a certain someone ran out on another certain someone before a price could be negotiated, but I’ll let that go. On second thought,” she cocked her head, eyeing his shiny platinum watch, encrusted with tiny diamonds. “Maybe I’ll add a nuisance fee into the price. Say…twenty percent?”

“Twenty percent?” he echoed, smiling widely now. “That’s highway robbery! I should report you to the authorities! Do they have a Trading Standards Institute or a Better Business Bureau in this country?”

“If they do, Antiquarian Books isn’t a member of either,” she scoffed. “With me running it, there’s definitely nothing ‘Better’ about it. It’s practically bankrupt.” The minute the words left her mouth, she regretted them, but too late—Christian had already latched onto them like a dog on a bone.

“The store isn’t doing well? What’s wrong? How bad is it?” He straightened, suddenly imposing with his height, breadth of shoulders, and the electric intensity that came and went with dizzying speed, like a light switch being flipped. At the moment, the switch had been turned to
on
.

“Oh, please,” she said, trying to laugh it off, “forget it. I’m just joking.” Avoiding his intent gaze, she brushed passed him and went into the living room. She looked around the darkened room a moment, unsure whether to stand or sit…Was he staying? What exactly
was
he doing here?

But Christian decided for her when he said, “A joke. Of course. I understand.”

She turned and watched him walk closer, searching his expression suspiciously, on the lookout for any hint of emotion to indicate what he was thinking. But his face was smooth and composed, entirely unreadable.

Damn
. She didn’t want him thinking she was desperate for money. The two most unattractive things to men were women who were one: desperate for money, or two: desperate for love. She was neither. Or if she was, she definitely didn’t want to seem like she was. For the money, that is. Love was the last thing her mangled heart would ever be able to feel.

“Well,” he said, pausing a few feet away, “it’s late. I’ve imposed on you long enough. Thank you for the tea.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

He smiled at that—
anytime
—and something in her chest softened, a peculiar sort of melting. The man was so handsome it made her head hurt. That face. That body. Those
eyes
. Jesus. She had to get him out before she lost her mind and threw herself on him.

She ground her teeth together.
Not desperate. NOT desperate
.
And,
she reminded herself
, I hate him. He’s too pretty for his own good.

“What is that look you’re giving me? Are you by chance plotting my death?” Christian asked, bemused. Her cheeks flamed—caught again.

“I’ve just really got to get out of this costume,” she said, careful to keep her face blank. She crossed the small living room quickly, put her hand on the doorknob. “I think I’m suffocating my poor skin, latex doesn’t exactly breathe. Plus, I’m beat.”

She turned the knob and cracked the door open, as clear a signal as she could give that she agreed with him—it was time for him to go.

He watched her with those preternatural eyes, his gaze taking in her bare feet, the cat’s costume, the tail dangling behind her like a dare. Her expression, so carefully neutral. A slight upward lift curled his lips as if he found something amusing. Leisurely, with his hands in his pockets and his gaze never leaving hers, he crossed to the door and stood looking down at her, mere inches away.

“I’ll see you at the store tomorrow.”

It sounded like a threat. She peered up at him, lips pursed, hating the way his proximity sent her blood into a frenzy. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest she wondered if he could hear it. “Okay.” She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Whatever.”

His smile deepened. “Doesn’t really matter either way, hmm?”

She moistened her lips and shrugged again, looking away.

Then he did the most astonishing thing, something that turned her to stone and stole all the breath from her lungs.

He reached out, touched two fingers to the pulse throbbing wildly in her neck and held them there with the softest pressure, subtly dominant. She glanced back at his face, speechless, and he was looking down at her as if he knew all about her, as if he could read every single thought that crossed her mind.

He murmured, “Secrets are okay. Secrets I understand. But don’t lie to me, Ember. You want to see me tomorrow as much as I want to see you.”

She was pinned in the raw force of his eyes, magnetic, overpowering. Very slowly, oh-so-lightly, he slid his fingers down the length of her throat, skimming the surface of her skin, dipping his thumb into the hollow at the base of her neck, until his hand came to rest in the center of her chest, directly over her heart. He opened his palm over the rings on her necklace and pressed against her breastbone.

Boom, boom, boom
, throbbed her heart. Her traitorous, telltale heart.

“Admit it.”

She bit her tongue. He leaned slightly forward when he spoke and she felt his warm breath brush her cheek. “Ember. Admit it.”

There was fire in his eyes, fire in her blood, fire in the air all around them. She breathed fire into her lungs with each breath, and with each breath felt it scorch through her body, consuming. Dangerous.

She whispered, “I’m not looking for any complications in my life, Christian. And that’s not a lie. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, where I’m…” She faltered, because he was watching her lips as she spoke, looking at her mouth in total concentration. And somehow he’d moved closer. “Where I’m safe.”

The word
safe
affected him, made him hesitate. She felt it in the tension in his body, the slight twitch in the hand he’d pressed over her heart. He closed his eyes for just longer than a blink, then withdrew his hand. The sudden loss of heat against her skin was jarring.

“Of course,” he murmured. He exhaled. “You’re right.”

He didn’t say
I understand.
He said
you’re right
. The difference struck her as important, but she couldn’t pinpoint why.

He stepped back, turned to the door and gave her a small, apologetic smile over his shoulder. “I’ll have to ask you to forgive me again. It seems I’m always off-balance around you.” He exhaled again, ran a hand through his thick black hair. Then with a quiet, “Good night, Ember,” he slipped through the open door and silently, swiftly, disappeared down the stairs.

Ember closed the door and stood in the darkness for long minutes, unseeing, her blood and nerves and thoughts frenzied, her hands shaking at her sides.

I’m always off-balance around you.

Well, that definitely made two of them. And despite feeling very clearly he was somehow dangerous, despite her resolve to dislike him and keep it all business, she was equally certain there was something going on between them. Something her body recognized and to which it responded. Something her mind—always so careful, always so calculating—was doing little to counteract.

“Christian McLoughlin,” she whispered to the dark, empty room, “who are you? And what the hell have you done with my brain?”

The room had no answer.

In spite of his promise, Christian didn’t come into the bookstore the next day.

Ember arrived to work early—successfully avoiding Dante—and spent the day in a state of suspended animation, both hoping he’d walk through the door and dreading it.

Because what exactly was going on here? In the clear light of day she determined it was nothing, that’s what. He was toying with her, he was indulging in some kind of macho ego-trip, the knight in shining armor winking at the poor, mud-splattered village girl before riding up to the castle on his steed to ask for the hand of the princess in marriage. She was a diversion, that was all. A momentary blip on his radar.

At least, she’d convinced herself of that until precisely five minutes to six, when the door to the shop opened and a man walked in carrying the most enormous bouquet of roses she’d ever seen in her life.

Ember couldn’t even see his upper body behind the mass of foliage and flowers spilling voluptuously from the vase. The thick, etched crystal vase, no less. The man took half a dozen careful steps into the shop before halting in the middle of the floor and announcing loudly in Spanish, “Flower delivery!”

Certainly he’d been hired for his acute grasp of the obvious.

“Yes, over here!” Ember called, waving from behind the counter though he couldn’t see her. After several unsuccessful attempts to determine her location by peeking over and around the voluminous spray, he finally turned sideways and addressed her, his face strained with the effort of balancing the enormous arrangement in his arms.

“Roses for a Miss Jones.”

“That’s me.”

His expression registered gratitude. “Where you want it?”

“Uh…” She looked around for a space large enough and spied the round table where Sofia’s book club met each week. “Over there. That would be great, thanks.”

He made his way slowly to the table, going sideways like a crab, until finally he’d deposited his burden to the wood tabletop with a relieved sigh. He turned to look at her, a canny smile on his face. “Somebody is in love, eh?”

Ember blushed to the roots of her hair. “No! No, nothing like that. These are from, er, my, uh, um—”

“Boyfriend?” he supplied helpfully.

Ember’s blush spread down her neck. “NO! He’s a customer! Just a customer!”

His brows rose. His gaze moved around the shop and he saw the handwritten sign Asher had taped to the side of the one of the rare book displays near the register as a joke. It read, “Don’t touch yourself. Ask the staff for help.” The delivery man’s gaze settled back on her and his knowing smile grew wider. Ember had the sudden horrible thought he might be wondering exactly what type of customer she’d been entertaining behind the shelves.

“Thanks again. We’re closing now. Good-bye.” She ushered him to the door, all the while avoiding his sideways glances and cocky grin, and locked it behind him. Once alone she crossed slowly back to the table that housed the ridiculous display of roses and stood staring at it in stupefied wonder.

Lavender roses—dozens and dozens—so silvery pale and silky they glimmered beneath the lights.

There was no card, no enclosure note saying
Hi
or
Thinking of you
or
Sorry I blew you off,
but as Ember stared at the massive display, she remembered something
that made her heart first skip one beat, then two, then stop altogether.

Well-versed in the language of flowers, her mother had often recited to her all the meanings for the different colors of roses they’d grown in their garden at home. She’d had to coax them, of course, the heat and altitude of Taos was an unforgiving place to grow roses, but under her mother’s patient, intuitive care, they’d flourished. Their front yard was a riot of color and all kinds of plants, but the roses that lined the brick walkway to the front door were the
piece de resistance
, and not one bush was the same.

Red meant love, white meant purity, pink was grace and appreciation, yellow was friendship. Orange was desire. Peach was sincerity.

And lavender roses, rare and royal, the most beautiful of them all, meant love at first sight.

“Oh, boy,” whispered Ember, staring at the luscious blooms. “This is gonna get messy.”

“What
happened
to you last night?” Asher shrieked down the phone line. Ember winced and held it away from her ear. “You
disappeared!
I was worried
sick!
”

She’d been back in her flat just long enough to change from jeans to sweats before her cell phone rang. She pretended she wasn’t disappointed when she saw the number on the readout, but when he started yelling at her, Ember didn’t have to manufacture the anger that had her yelling right back.

“I told you I was leaving! You didn’t want to go!”

“What? You never said you were leaving!”

“I pointed to the exit!”

“I thought you had to go to the
bathroom!
I’d never let you wander around the city in the middle of the night by yourself, knucklehead! Do you have any idea how worried I was?”

That took the wind out of her sails. “Oh,” she said, much calmer. “Sorry. I thought I was being clear that I was leaving.”

Asher huffed indignantly. “No,
I’m
sorry! Your vague hand signals were anything but clear, a friggin’ mime would be more obvious! I thought I’d have a heart attack when you didn’t come back! I spent an hour trying to find you at the club until I finally gave up and came home. And lo and behold, there she was! Sleeping like Goldilocks—”

“Wait, I wasn’t in
your
bed. What are you talking about?”

There was a short silence. “I used the spare key you gave me to get into your apartment. I just needed to check and see if you were home. And yes, you were—snoring in blissful ignorance, I might add—so I didn’t have to take that extra Xanax—”

“Asher!” Ember stomped her foot, and immediately felt so ridiculous she was grateful there was no one there to see it. “You can’t just sneak in to my bedroom and watch me sleep! This isn’t
Twilight
, for God’s sake! Do we need to have a talk about boundaries?”

“I wasn’t watching you sleep, I was just checking on you! I just peeked in and then left! Sorry for
caring!
”

Uh-oh. She knew Seriously Cranky Asher when she heard him. This was a precursor to Arctic Cold Shoulder Asher, who could last an indefinite period of time, in which case she’d only have Dante, her stepmother, and the customers at the store to talk to. Keeping to yourself really had its drawbacks sometimes.

Reining in her temper, she blew out an exasperated breath. “Ash,” she said, in a soft, cajoling voice.

“No,” he said firmly, but she still detected the pout.

“C’mon, don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry I scared you. And I’m glad you care. You know you’re my only friend. Who else will put up with my crap? You said it yourself, you’re my fairy godmother, so you can’t stay pissed. I might need you to turn a pumpkin into a coach one of these days.”

There was a low, disgruntled,
hmmpf
, but nothing more.

“I’ll make it up to you. How about…” Inspiration hit. “How about if we watch
Reservoir Dogs
together tonight?” His favorite movies always involved a lot of macho gun-slinging, bromancing, and blood, so he adored anything involving Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, or Quentin Tarantino.

His response to her movie invitation was silence.

“And I can order
tapas
from that place you like down the block.”

More silence. He still wasn’t taking the bait. Ember knew she had to get serious, or risk a pout-fest that could last well into next month. “And…I’ll tell you all about what happened with Christian last night after I left you at the club.”

There was a loud, high-pitched inhalation on the other end of the phone that sounded very much like the noise a vacuum cleaner makes when turned on. She thought her brain might get sucked out through her ear and disappear through the line.

“Christian! Not
the
Christian?”

At her sound of affirmation, Asher said, “I’m on my way,” and hung up.

It couldn’t have been fifteen seconds before he knocked on the front door. Ember opened it to find him in a peacock blue kimono and bare feet, his face slathered in a thick layer of pale green cream.

“Is that moisturizer?” she asked, stepping back to let him in.

He breezed past trailing the scent of cucumbers and lavender. “Pore-reducing mask. It’s wonderful for the skin tone. You should try it.”

“Is that your way of telling me I have a problem with my pores?”

He swung around and his kimono billowed in a bell around his ankles. Arms akimbo, he looked her up and down. “Honey, your pores are the least of your problems. When are you going to let me take you shopping?”

“Hmm.” She looked at the ceiling, pretending to decide. “How about the Tuesday after never?”

“You are
no
fun. Seriously, what’s a fairy godmother good for if she can’t buy you a dress for the ball?”

“
Ball
? There will be no balls, thank you very much. The only thing worse than wearing a dress is hearing the howls of laughter as I do my version of dancing, which looks uncannily like a reanimated corpse during an epileptic fit. So not going to happen.”

“So
that’s
why you never dance when we go out! Well you just need the right teacher, honey! I can teach anyone to dance! Here, follow me.”

Before Ember could protest, Asher had gathered her up in his arms and begun trilling “I Could Have Danced All Night” from
My Fair Lady
, swinging her around like laundry on a clothesline. It didn’t last long because Ember trod on his bare feet so many times he finally released her and limped away, gasping in pain.

“Christ, you weren’t kidding!” He hobbled to the couch and threw himself on it, collapsing with a theatrical sigh to rub his bruised toes. “Were those feet of yours donated from the morgue?”

“I tried to warn you.” Ember flopped down on the couch beside him. “You should have seen the carnage when my mother tried to put me in ballet when I was fourteen. Those poor, poor boys.”

Asher sighed. “Ballet boys. In
tights
. God was good when She thought of that one.” He turned to her with twinkling eyes. “And
speaking
of ballet boys…spill it, sister. Spill it all. And don’t leave a single dirty detail out. You need to make up for damaging my arches.”

Ember blew out a breath, trying to decide where to begin, and then started with when she first saw Christian at the store and ended with the delivery of roses.

When she finished, Asher was sitting with his shoulders hunched up around his ears, clutching the neck of his blue silk kimono, gaping at her through his pore-reducing mask.

“Oh. My.
God
. I knew he was hot, but lavender roses? ‘You want to see me as much as I want to see you?’ ” He fanned himself with one hand. “Scorching, honey. Seriously scorching. I need to go take a cold shower with my George Clooney blow up doll.”

Ember said, “You are a very, very disturbed person.”

He shrugged. “Of course I am. All the best people are. What, you want to hang out with
normal
people?” He shuddered and drew his robe tighter around his neck.

“No, I suppose not. Normal people aren’t nearly as interesting as you.”

They shared a grin. “So what are you going to do?”

Ember’s smile faded. She looked down at her hands, inspected her nails—in dire need of a manicure—and sighed. “Nothing, obviously. It’s your classic
Beauty and the Beast
tale, except he’s Beauty and I’m the Beast. Honestly, I’m sure he’s just in-between lingerie models or something. I can’t figure out why he’s giving someone like me the time of day.”

Asher reached out and brushed a stray lock of hair off Ember’s shoulder. He rested his hand there for a moment, then softly said, “You don’t always have to do that, you know.”

She glanced at him, confused. “Do what?”

He was looking at her carefully, his brows drawn together, his mouth—surrounded by green cream—downturned. “Put yourself down.”

“Look at me, Ash. I’m the poster girl for ‘Average.’ There’s nothing about me that would tempt a man like him.”

“Except there
is
.
You
. You’re a lot cuter than you give yourself credit for, even if you are hiding it behind all those baggy clothes and unplucked eyebrows and scowls. You’re smart, and you’re funny, and you’re not full of bubblegum and bullshit like a lingerie model. Trust me, I’ve known a few. Plus, you’ve got a tight little figure and a very perky set of headlights,” he added, glancing down at her T-shirt clad chest. “If I were into that kind of thing, I would totally do you.”

Ember pulled a face, a combination of
gee, thanks
, and
gross, stop
.

“Granted, that attitude of yours is a little beastly, but if he can see past that, he might be a keeper.”