Strangely — maybe because I’d been fairly caught using Connor’s laptop — I had no desire to do any more snooping. Instead, I wandered downstairs, found a glass in one of the cupboards, and filled it up with water through the refrigerator door. He seemed to prefer bottled water, but I’d always drunk water like this when I was at Sydney’s house and didn’t see the harm.
A clock of burnished copper on one wall told me it was now almost two-thirty. I wondered how long the transaction at the gallery was going to take. As long as it took, I supposed. Since I’d just purchased several large original pieces myself, I knew Connor wasn’t talking about a few hundred dollars here.
I knew I should just sit down on the couch and turn on the TV, and try to disengage my brain for a while. The wards on the apartment were too powerful for me to overcome, and I’d already contacted my family. My available options weren’t what you could call vast.
But that visit from Damon had filled me with nervous energy, and so I went to one of the two large windows on the street side of the room and looked outside. The day was still bright, although I noticed the sky had begun to be dotted with large billowy clouds. More snow on the way? I didn’t know enough about the weather patterns in Flagstaff to say for sure. All I knew was that it was much colder here than in Jerome, and the city got consistent snowfall, whereas in Jerome it was still something of a special event when it snowed and actually stuck to the ground for a while.
The streets below were even busier than they’d been that morning, which made sense. All the shops would be open now. I saw people carrying a lot of bags and packages. Strangely, I didn’t notice much in the way of decorations. In Jerome there were holiday lights everywhere, with a good many of the houses with a single lighted “Ho” in their yards or attached to walls and fences. Just our silly in-joke, a crack about the town’s bustling red light district back in the day.
I realized then that I’d never asked Maisie what she thought about all those “Ho”s with the Christmas lights attached to them. Probably just as well.
But here in Flagstaff I didn’t see much sign of holiday cheer, except in the people themselves, who appeared festive and happy enough. They had friends and families to shop for, places to go, people to be with. It all looked so normal. Then again, the vast majority of the city was normal. I was sort of hazy on Flagstaff’s actual population, but it was of course many, many times the size of tiny Jerome. There, half the residents were McAllisters. Here, even if there were a good many more members of the Wilcox clan than there were in my own family, they’d still constitute a tiny minority.
They could probably get away with a lot, using the anonymity of a large population to conceal them.
Seeing all those people intent on their own business didn’t cheer me up, though. Sighing, I went and sat down on the couch. In that moment, I could only think of the clan elders, returning to Jerome empty-handed, and how disappointed my aunt and Adam and so many others must be. I didn’t see how they’d thought they could ask Damon Wilcox to just hand me over. Maybe they’d thought they could get reason to prevail. Unfortunately, he was the polar opposite of reasonable.
And what now? I had no idea. Damon had said Maya wouldn’t risk a clan war, and if she wouldn’t, that meant the McAllisters’ hands were effectively tied. There was no way they could take on the Wilcoxes without allies. But Maya had also said this wasn’t the end of it. What did that mean?
Once again, I had no answer. There had been clan wars back in what Aunt Ruby had referred to as “the old country,” but she’d been very vague about what such warfare actually entailed. “We left those things behind,” she told me once when I tried to press her on the matter, and that seemed to be the end of it.
However, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that a war between witch clans would no doubt attract a lot of attention, the sort of attention we all — even the Wilcoxes — tried very hard to avoid. So maybe Maya and the elders were trying to see if there was another way to get me back, one that wouldn’t involve magical pyrotechnics. But did they even know where to find me? They’d obviously known where Damon lived, but Connor could be an entirely different story.
As if thinking of him had somehow summoned his return, the door to the apartment opened, and he came in, stopping a few paces away from where I sat on the couch. I still wouldn’t call his expression or posture exactly relaxed, but he did seem a little less tense than the last time I had seen him.
“You made the sale,” I said.
“I did.” He pushed his hair back from his brow. I found myself wondering what those sleek, heavy locks would feel like slipping between my fingers, and once again my heart sped up.
This was getting ridiculous.
“Congratulations, I guess.”
“Thanks.” He stood there watching me for a few seconds, then added, “I’m surprised you’re not watching TV or reading or something.”
“I was people-watching,” I replied, with an off-hand gesture toward the window.
“Maybe you saw my client, then. Uptight-looking jerk in a gray coat, drove off in a silver Audi SUV?”
Despite myself, I smiled. “No, I must have missed him.”
“You didn’t miss much.” Turning from me, he went into the kitchen and got himself some water.
I watched him — really watched him, trying to study his expression, his stance. He was still doing that thing of looking at me without actually looking at me, and while I understood his reason for doing so, it still felt odd, as if he were only partially present in the room.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said.
That did make him raise his head. For a second his eyes met mine before he glanced away. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.” I got up from the couch and moved toward the kitchen, although I stopped in the dining area. That way there would still be a safe distance between us. “Maybe it could have worked, if you’d been honest with me from the beginning.” At that comment his eyebrows lifted, and I said, “Okay, maybe not from the very beginning. I can see why you wouldn’t want to admit you were a Wilcox at the Halloween dance, right when you were smack in the middle of McAllister territory. But you could have told me in Sedona. That’s neutral ground.”
His expression was more than a little dubious. “Yeah, right. I can see that going over really well — me telling you I was actually a member of the Wilcox clan when you were there with your posse of McAllister witches.”
“And you didn’t have a posse of your own?” I retorted.
“No, I didn’t. I really was there with just a friend. My friends — the civilian ones — don’t know anything about…all this.”
“Really?” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. Not that I had a bunch of civilian friends, but of course Sydney knew the score when it came to the McAllisters. I couldn’t imagine having not even one person outside my clan to confide in. It would mean an almost unbearable pressure to keep everything in, to never allow anyone to know the truth about you or your family.
“Really,” he replied, his tone flat.
I decided to leave that aside for the moment, because once again I was starting to feel sorry for him. He didn’t deserve to be felt sorry for, not when he had lied to me and been complicit in my kidnapping. “Okay, whatever. But maybe you could’ve said, ‘Hey, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m the man you’ve been dreaming of for the past five years, and let me drop this illusion so you can see my eyes are really green and that I’m a member of a witch clan just like you. Sorry I’m a Wilcox, but I’m sure we can work this out.’ Maybe if you’d done that, we actually could have. Worked it out, I mean.”
The look on his face had shifted from dubious to outright disbelieving. “That’s a nice fairytale, Angela, but don’t tell me that’s really what would have happened.”
I said softly, “I guess we’ll never really know, will we?”
“I guess not.” He stared at me for a long moment, one in which I didn’t even dare blink. Was he going to move toward me?
Apparently not. He glanced away, then said, “I need to check my email and handle a few things. You know where the TV is.” And he took his water and went upstairs, leaving me to watch his departure and wonder how on earth we were going to survive being thrown together like this.
I really didn’t feel like watching TV, but I didn’t have a heck of a lot of choice. Trying not to sigh — loudly — I resumed my seat on the couch and started channel surfing. He had the full cable lineup, with HBO and Showtime, and Netflix and Amazon Prime video to boot, but I still couldn’t find anything to hold my interest. How could I, when I was here under an even worse house arrest than I’d suffered back in Jerome?
But since Connor didn’t show any signs of reappearing any time soon, I settled for a re-watching of Last Holiday, since I liked the movie and had only missed the first ten minutes or so. Maybe it would help me to escape for a few hours. Maybe.
It actually did take my mind off my worries, so much so that when it ended I was surprised to see Connor standing at the edge of the living room, watching the last of the credits roll. I was also surprised to see that it was dark outside; he must have flipped on the light in the kitchen without my even noticing.
“Good movie?” he asked.
I nodded.
“It’s almost six. I thought I’d go around the corner and grab some tapas for dinner. I don’t cook much.”
I reflected on the irony of him having a three-thousand-dollar Jenn-Air stove and not actually cooking anything on it. All I said, though, was, “What’s tapas?”
A flicker of surprise crossed his face. “They really did shelter you, didn’t they?”
I crossed my arms and scowled at him.
Appearing to relent, he replied, “It’s Spanish food. ‘Tapas’ just means small plates. You get a bunch of different small things to eat and share. It’s good.”
“Okay,” I said, my tone guarded. Not what I would’ve chosen for my birthday dinner, but….
No, I wasn’t going to go there. I’d almost managed to make myself forget it was my birthday. And he was trying to make a gesture, however small.
“That sounds good,” I added.
“I’ll be back in a while, then.” He paused at the closet in the hallway and put on a black peacoat and buttoned it up, then wrapped a scarf with gray, black, green, and white stripes around his neck. For some reason the ensemble just made him look that much more gorgeous, and I had to swallow and look away, pretending to be intent on finding something else to watch.
Without saying anything else, he let himself out of the apartment and closed the door quietly behind him.
Since he’d said he’d be a while, I assumed waiting for the food to be prepared, I wasn’t sure what I should be doing. One movie had been enough for me, and though I supposed I could have gone back upstairs to steal more time on his laptop — maybe checking what those all-important “emails” he’d been reading all that time had been — that didn’t sound like such a great idea.
No, if he was going out to get food, I thought maybe I should do what I could to get the table set for us. Otherwise, our dinner could get cold while he was trying to get everything put together. That seemed like a valid reason. I didn’t want admit that I might be trying to help him out in any way.
I already knew where the glasses were, so I pulled out some clean ones. The next cupboard over contained the plates, and a drawer directly underneath held place mats. In the drawer next to that was the silverware. It didn’t take much time for me to get the table set.
When I was getting out the glasses, I’d also seen wine glasses, but I left those inside the cupboard. Connor hadn’t made any mention of having anything stronger than water to drink. Probably just as well. Sharing a bottle with him might have unforeseen consequences…even though I felt like I could use a glass of wine or two after that confrontation with Damon Wilcox.
Once I was done with the table, I went back to the living room and shuffled through the cable channels until I got to the music-only ones. Judging by what he’d been listening to when I woke up this morning, Connor wasn’t exactly a Top-40 kind of guy, and classic rock didn’t feel right, either. But then I found a station with instrumental guitar music, and since we were eating Spanish food, that seemed like a good fit to me. I turned the sound down a little so it wouldn’t be too intrusive, then waited for him to return.
He seemed to be gone a long time. Maybe the restaurant was busy; it was Saturday night, after all. But eventually, almost a half hour after he’d left, he returned carrying several bags of food, and with a wine bottle tucked under one arm.
Obviously he didn’t have the same reservations about drinking wine that I did.
A flicker of surprise passed over his face when he saw the table, but he only said, “Thanks for getting everything ready. That’ll make things go faster.” He set the bottle down on the kitchen counter and then started pulling small white carry-out containers from the bag and transferring their contents to an assortment of plates and bowls.
There really was quite a variety. I couldn’t tell what everything was, but it sure smelled good.
“Can you start taking this stuff to the table while I open the wine?”
I nodded, again wondering at his ability to act so casual when this was anything but a simple dinner date. But I realized I was hungry, and it seemed best to go with the flow for the moment. Better that than starting a silly argument that wouldn’t solve anything and would only let the food get cold.
Carrying everything to the table made me realize how much food Connor had actually brought. This seemed enough for four people, tapas portions or no. But it did keep me busy, and by the time I’d set down the last bowl — filled with an amazing, spicy mushroom dish — he was done opening the wine and had come to the table with the bottle and a pair of oversized red wine glasses.
The easiest thing to do was sit down, put my napkin in my lap, and act perfectly normal. I left the place at the head of the table for Connor and took the spot to his left. That way I was facing out into the apartment. The windows now were two black mirrors, filled by the fast-falling night of midwinter.
“Ever had malbec?” he asked, pouring some for me.
“Yes,” I replied, and allowed myself a small smile at his expression of surprise. “We take wine very seriously in the Verde Valley, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.” He tipped an equal amount into his own glass and then set down the bottle. “I just didn’t think you grew malbec grapes there.”
“We don’t. But Grapes — that’s a restaurant in Jerome — serves all kinds of wine from all over the world. I’ve tried pretty much all of them.”
“I’m impressed. When I was your age, most of the girls I knew were more into Jell-O shots or rum and Cokes or maybe mojitos if they were being really sophisticated.”
“‘When I was your age’?” I lifted the glass and sipped; the malbec was good, big and fruity, with a velvety feel on the tongue. “What are you, a whole five years older than I am?”
“Something like that.” He raised his glass to me. “Happy birthday.”
I wished he hadn’t reminded me. Was that the point of this elaborate spread, to try to soften the blow of my being here with him and away from my family and friends on my birthday? I almost told him to go to hell, but for some reason I couldn’t force the words past my lips. It was pretty obvious he was doing his best to make things as easy for me as he could, and equally obvious that, while he’d behave as his brother asked up to a point, he certainly wasn’t going to force me into any intimacies I didn’t want.
If only I could convince the hungry, lustful side of my brain that I really didn’t want those intimacies. At least not with a Wilcox.
“Thanks,” I replied, after a pause I was sure he noticed. “So what are we eating?”
Something in his posture relaxed, as if he’d been wondering if I was going to make a scene. If only he knew how close I’d come. “Those are bacon-wrapped dates,” he said, pointing with his free hand, “and this is the tortilla española, which is sort of layers of potato and egg, and those are mushrooms with red peppers — ”
“Okay, slow down,” I broke in. “Where do I start?”
“Try a date.”
I pulled the toothpick out of the morsel, decided it was a little too big to stuff in my mouth all at once, and instead cut it in half and lifted a bite to my mouth. “Holy crap,” I said after I was done chewing.
“You like it?”
“It’s amazing.”
And so was pretty much everything else he’d brought. It might not have been the birthday dinner I’d imagined, but it was certainly better than I had hoped. For a while we just talked about the food, which seemed like a nice, neutral subject. I was careful with the wine, too, making sure I took sips of water in between sips of wine so I wouldn’t lose my head and get tipsy. That, I thought, sneaking a peek at Connor’s black-lashed green eyes as he was focused on setting a slice of manchego cheese and ham on my plate, could get me in a lot of trouble.
Then I asked, “So how long have you had the gallery?”
“About two years.”
“And the paintings?”
“Mine,” he said shortly.
I supposed I should have guessed, but for some reason his reply took me by surprise. On the wall behind him was a study in reds and corals and dark olive, a bent tree surrounded by stark rock. Somewhere near the Grand Canyon, I thought. Like every other painting in the apartment, it was strong and sure, a study of color and light.
“You’re really good,” I said honestly. “I mean, really good. Do you sell your work in the gallery?”
His mouth tightened. “No.”
“Why not?” I asked. “People would eat this stuff up. Do you show in other galleries, then?”
“No. I paint and I hang them here. When I run out of room, I shuffle them around. A bunch are in storage.”
That didn’t make any sense to me at all. Why on earth would he be hiding his paintings away instead of showing them to the world? “But they’re so good — ”
“They’re just for me, okay?”
Somehow I got the feeling that wasn’t the truth, or at least not most of it. I didn’t know either of them very well, but I’d already gotten a sense of the dynamic between Connor and Damon Wilcox. “It’s your brother, isn’t it? For some reason he doesn’t want you to paint?”
Silence for a few seconds. Connor reached out and poured himself some wine, then refilled my glass. The bottle was already more than halfway gone. Finally he said, “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“I try not to.” Ignoring my previous caution, I allowed myself a large swallow of wine. “I guess I’m trying to understand why he’d have a problem with your painting. I mean, if you weren’t any good, okay, but — ”
“The primus’s brother is supposed to be as successful as he is,” he cut in. “Gallery owner is fine. Starving artist? Not so much.”
“As good as you are, I doubt you’d be starving.” I took a bite of ham and cheese, then pointed my fork at the spread in front of us. “Case in point.”
A reluctant grin touched his mouth…his lovely, lovely mouth.
Eyes back on your plate, Angela! I scolded myself. At least there was plenty on that plate to keep me distracted.
“It’s…complicated.”
“It always is, isn’t it?” I speared the last bacon-wrapped date with my fork — hey, it was my birthday — and dropped it on my plate. “I get that he’s the primus and everything, but I’m having a hard time figuring out this whole ‘when he says jump, you ask how high’ thing with you two.”
The grin disappeared. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Of course he didn’t. I hesitated, trying to decide if I should push it, but a second glance at the flat line of his mouth told me it was probably better if I left it alone…for now. But he’d have to open up eventually if he thought he was ever going to have a chance with me.
A chance? What the hell was my brain doing? I shouldn’t be thinking about whether I should be giving him any chances — I should be thinking about what steps my clan members were going to take next, and whether there was any way for me to circumvent the fiendishly strong wards that had been put in place on Connor’s apartment.
“Have it your way,” I said, and recklessly poured the remainder of the malbec into my glass.
A pained expression crossed his face, but whether that was because I’d taken the last of the wine for myself or because he was still irritated with my line of questioning, I couldn’t be sure. In silence he set aside his napkin and rose from the table. For a few seconds I thought he was walking away because he was upset, but then I realized he’d simply gone to the kitchen to fetch another bottle. Not a malbec this time, though; the sunburst on the label was familiar. Arizona Stronghold.
He yanked out the cork and refilled his glass. “Did you email anyone while I was out?”
Talk about your abrupt shifts in conversation. “No,” I said.
One eyebrow lifted slightly. “Why not?”
“Well, the damage was already done, according to your brother. I didn’t see the point.”
It was obvious he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with that statement. He fiddled with the cork, which he’d left sitting on the table, before swallowing some of the wine he’d just poured. To tell the truth, I still wasn’t quite sure why I hadn’t sent another email, except that my family already knew the most important thing — that I was all right — and I didn’t really know what to say besides that. I wasn’t ready to let them know that Connor was my consort, the man I’d been dreaming of for the past five years. Goddess knows what their reaction would be to that little bombshell.
Maybe I could’ve tried confiding in Sydney, but she really didn’t have a grasp on the politics of the situation. She probably would have asked me why I hadn’t jumped Connor’s bones already. Some part of me was trying to figure that out, too — the part that seemed to go into heat every time I stared too long at any one portion of his anatomy.
He set down the wine cork. “I’m having a hard time figuring you out, Angela.”
“You’re not the first,” I said with a shrug, trying to lighten the moment. “I drive my friend Sydney crazy sometimes.”
A nod, and the beginnings of that smile once again. I hoped it wouldn’t disappear quite so quickly this time. “Full?” he asked, nodding toward my plate.
I actually was. That last date had pretty much done me in. “I think so.”
“Well, I hope you saved a little room. I got some dessert, too.”
I always had room for dessert. “I could probably squeeze that in somewhere.”
“Good.” He got up and began gathering up the plates, and when I began to stand so I could help, he waved me off. “It’s okay. You stay put.”
Whether he was being extra conscientious to make up for his brusqueness earlier or because he was trying to make nice on my birthday, I wasn’t sure, but I stayed where I was and allowed him to clear the table. He busied himself in the kitchen for a few minutes, and then he came back out with two slender slices of what looked like flour-less chocolate cake on fresh plates. A lumpy white bag was shoved under one arm.
He put the larger of the two slices in front of me. “I don’t have any candles, but — ”
“It’s fine,” I said hastily. The last thing I wanted was for him to start singing “Happy Birthday” to me or something similarly corny. “The cake looks great.”
“There’s a bakery around the corner. I went and got the cake while they were working on my order at the tapas place.” As he sat down, he extricated the white bag from under his arm and set it on the tabletop. A brief hesitation, and then he pushed it toward me. “I got you something. I know it can’t make up for not being there with your family on your birthday, but….”
Mystified, I set down my fork before I had even taken a bite of cake. He’d bought me a birthday present? When would he have even had time for that? I surmised that maybe he hadn’t actually been at the gallery all the time he was gone. But still, that he’d gone out and gotten something for me —
“You didn’t have to.” The spiteful part of me wanted to say that he couldn’t make up for kidnapping me by buying me a birthday present, but I held my tongue. He was doing the best he could. It wasn’t his fault that he’d gotten sucked into his brother’s crazy schemes. It seemed clear enough to me that he was doing everything in his power to make sure I didn’t suffer any more in the aftermath of those plans.
“I wanted to.”
Now I was the one who looked away first. I’d seen need in those eyes, and desire…but hesitation, too. He wouldn’t force me, no matter what. Of course, with the way my body reacted to even his briefest touch, I thought there wouldn’t be a good deal of forcing involved.
I reached out and took the bag. It was very heavy.
“Sorry it isn’t wrapped or anything. The store was out of gift bags because it was busy today.”
“That’s fine,” I said automatically, then reached inside. Something metal, it felt like, wrapped in tissue paper.
I pulled the tissue paper away and pulled the object out of the bag, then gasped. The silver links gleamed in the low light from the bronze and frosted glass fixture overhead, the turquoise nuggets glowing amidst each of those links. It was a concho belt, the sort of thing I’d always coveted but could never really justify the expense.
Apparently misinterpreting my awed silence, Connor said, “I noticed that you seemed to like turquoise jewelry, so I thought you might like the belt. If you don’t — I mean, if you’d rather have something else, I can take it back.”
“Oh, no,” I told him hastily. “It’s perfect. I mean, I’ve always wanted one, and could never afford it. I just — I’m startled, I guess.”
“But you like it.”
“I love it,” I assured him, turning it over in my hands, admiring the workmanship of the stampings, the smooth bevels around the turquoise nuggets. As I did so, I caught the faint markings on the back of each concho: .925. That meant the belt was solid sterling, not the nickel silver I’d assumed it had been made of. Those kinds of belts were expensive enough, but one of solid silver? It had to have cost him at least a thousand dollars, if not more.
How could I accept such a costly gift from him? But I somehow knew if I refused it, he’d be upset. It would be a refusal of him as well. I couldn’t make myself do that. Despite my best efforts to harden myself to him, to not let him wiggle his way into my heart, I had a feeling he was doing that very thing.
“I’m glad,” he said, and went to take a bite of his cake, acting as if it was no big deal that he’d spent more on that one gift for me than anyone had ever spent on me in my entire life.
I murmured, “Thank you,” and followed his lead, picking up my fork and helping myself to the cake, which was rich and moist and velvety. My head was still spinning, though.
What was the catch phrase from that old Star Trek show?
Resistance is futile.
I was beginning to understand that all too well.