and the beard she’d felt all over her skin. His lips curved as she went, showing her that rare smile of his.
Not the one he shared like candy. The one he saved. For few and far between moments, when no one else could see it. Or him.
Mine, she thought, though it was dangerous.
And she didn’t need light to see the way his gaze changed. Went from gray to silver in an instant and heated her up inside.
He pulled her closer and rested his forehead against hers, so they could breathe together. Until she thought she might cry.
If she were the sort of woman who cried, that was.
“Caradine . . .” he said, and she didn’t know if he was going to say something else. Or if he was just saying her name, the name she associated so strongly with him that it hurt a little. The name that felt like her, even though it shouldn’t.
But she couldn’t risk it.
She pressed her fingers against his mouth and held them there this time. “Come on,” she said quietly. “I’ll make you something to eat.”
This time, she didn’t wait for him to respond. She pulled out of his embrace and climbed out of the bed, grabbing her clothes as she went.
She dressed as she moved, ignoring the way her pulse pounded at her. And the choir of voices inside her she didn’t want to hear, all of them calling her a coward.
Horatio met her at the end of the short hall, and she calmed herself by leaning over and kissing him on his furry forehead.
Then she went into the kitchen and did what she did best. She heated up the food she’d prepared earlier, because she hadn’t known what else to do with herself after Oz was done extracting every detail of her life from her. An easy savory pie she’d thrown together from the ingredients in his refrigerator and freezer. Beef, vegetables, and a thick, creamy sauce that hinted at curry.
Cooking was better than breathing. Or feeling. Cooking filled all the ugly places inside her. It allowed her to pretend she was whole. Normal.
It let her imagine she could have things she knew she couldn’t.
Isaac appeared in the kitchen. One moment she was alone and the next he was there, leaning against the counter, wearing nothing but a pair of cargo pants low on his hips.
He was enough to give her a heart attack.
And that was if she looked too long at the honed perfection of his abdomen alone. The rest of him was equally problematic.
“That’s creepy.” She threw him a glare, then served up two plates with the briskness she would have used in her café. If it still existed. Another thing she didn’t want to think about, because it also hurt more than it should. “A man as big as you are shouldn’t move so quietly. I’m going to put a bell around your neck.”
She saw a hint of that dark smile. “You can try.”
Caradine slid the plates on the table over by the windows. She wondered if the table, clearly handmade, was his work or if he’d inherited it from a family member. It had that sort of look about it. An heirloom or a piece of personal history.
“Where did you get this table?” she asked when he came and took a seat across from her. “Or did you make it?”
“My grandfather made it.” The expression on his face altered as he looked down, running his hand over the surface, and there was a kind of familiar reverence in the way his palm moved over the wood. It wasn’t unlike the way he’d moved that same hand over her skin. Caradine bit back a small sigh. “Grandpa Gentry was a fisherman, but when he had to wait out one of the sea’s moods, he liked to work with wood. As he got older, he spent more time with it and made bigger projects. Like this table.”
The table was a work of art, tucked away in the kitchen of this faraway cabin. It was an irregular shape, as if to honor the wood itself, the whorls and the knots. This was Isaac’s legacy, Caradine couldn’t help but think. Art. The work of careful hands, polished over time and set to gleam.
Meanwhile, she was a Sheeran. And the work of her family’s hands was death. Blood and bullets. Bombs and guns.
The opposite of art in every way.
Isaac shifted across from her. When she looked up, she wasn’t surprised to find that