water with her fingers. “Sorry,” she said when Julian looked around.
“I do it all the time.”
“It’s kind of fun.”
On the landing of the second floor, he flipped on some lights. “Let me give you a few choices. My bedroom and offices are that way”—he pointed down a carpeted hallway—“and down the other direction are some ordinary rooms with good views. But I think you might like a quirky room.”
“Okay.”
He led around the gallery into a tower with a window seat and stairs going up to a loft. It was furnished with California mission–style furniture, antiques she thought. There was a Frieda Kahlo print on the wall. “This is very good,” she said. “I love this room.”
“I thought so. Let’s have that cup of coffee, and you can get some sleep.”
Elena didn’t move. The lamps were square stained glass, the linens in colors of wine and pale gold and earth. Julian stood a little too close, or maybe she had moved. She wanted to put her hand on his sleeve. Lean in and breathe his smell. Yearning buzzed in every nerve, not like the lust she’d been feeling earlier, but a tangle of lures that seemed to tug on her cells equally, as if he were a giant magnet and she assembled of iron shavings.
She looked up at him and he was looking down, and then he said, “Maybe it will be better if I just let you get some sleep.”
“Okay.” She closed her eyes. Swallowed. “That’s probably a good idea.”
But he didn’t move right away. There they stood, Elena with Ivan’s sinful pomegranate baklava in her hands, Julian with his hat on, his hands loose at his sides.
He said, “You have the most beautiful mouth I’ve ever seen.”
Some instinct of self-preservation, some being of wisdom made her shake her head, take one half-step backward so she could open the box in her hands. “Here,” she said, breaking off a piece of baklava and holding it out to him. “You have to try this.”
Instead of taking it with his fingers, he bent and took it with his mouth, as she must have known he would do. His tongue touched her fingertips; his mouth closed around them.
Elena made a sound. Before she could draw away, he captured her wrist and held her there, sucking on her fingertips.
And then the tastes emerged, all that sweetness and texture, and he straightened. He swallowed. “Wow.” He blinked. “Wow. More.”
Elena laughed, shoved the box into his hands. “I absolutely cannot feed you pomegranates and still go to my bed alone.”
“That’s what I was hoping, actually.”
“Good night, Mr. Liswood,” she said, shoving him out the door. “Don’t wake me too early. I’m sure I’m going to have a terrible hangover.”
He gave her a sideways grin, pointed at a door. “There’s a pharmacy in that little bathroom there. Drink plenty of water.”
“Thank you.”
“Good night, Elena.”
She closed the door. Leaned against it, closing her eyes.
After a moment, when the closed eyes made her feel dizzy, she straightened. It was almost as if this room had been created with her tastes in mind. The carpet was thick, dark brown, like chocolate, and the furniture seemed almost to whisper secrets from long-ago Spaniards, priests and conquistadores and passionate women with mantillas over their hair. The walls were washed a terra-cotta color, earthy and rich. It was a room that made her think of Texas, of New Mexico, of the places she’d left behind. Edwin and Isobel and her mother, and the mother who’d left her.
A sharp, unexpected sense of loss, thickened by drink and exhaustion, rose in her throat. Maudlin tears rose in her eyes, and she recognized, just in time, the beginnings of a snuffling, embarrassing crying jag.
Just don’t, she said to herself.
In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, she found a selection of over-the-counter medicines, one of which was ibuprofen, which she downed with a giant glass of water. It was deadly silent in the rooms without Alvin, and she realized she hadn’t spent a night without him in years.
Glancing at the clock, she saw it was past two. A hollow feeling emptied her lungs. The silence was deep, deep, deep. Empty. In the morning, she would be hungover, but at least this way, she’d have her dog ASAP upon awakening.
She stripped out of her clothes and padded into the shower. The massage and the tequila had helped—if she had a good steam in the morning, she’d probably be in pretty good shape. Humming under her breath, she turned