“What time is it?” Zara’s head snaps up and she looks around wildly, her gaze bleary.
She’s been lost in the notebooks for hours now, diligently searching for anything that might match the papers I pulled from the fire. The papers I finally entrusted her with.
I also entrusted her with some of the story about the entire situation. Not all of it since she doesn’t need to be burdened with that. But enough to put some of her worries to bed.
I look at my phone. “Nine fifty-two p.m. You’ve been so engrossed I didn’t want to disturb you.”
She peers at me across my office, her at the worktable and me at my desk. “You’ve been here the entire time? What have you been doing?”
“Working.” And watching her as she worked. She has a very kinetic style, tossing her limbs this way and that, sitting across the chair, cross legged, sometimes even on the floor. But not because she was distracted—no, she was so absorbed in her work she never noticed me watching her. Not once did she tease me about anything.
I wouldn’t have minded it if she had.
She stands up, then grabs her lower back. “Jeez. I think I tore something. Or tweaked it. You ever feel like a muscle will just get stuck in whatever awful cramp you put it in? I’m going to be stuck half tilted over like this, I know it.”
But she’s already stretching out her kinks, going quickly but gracefully through some kind of yoga flow. I realize I’m staring, but I couldn’t look away if you held a gun to my head. I’d say she’s swanlike, but it’s more like an overcaffeinated swan, moving with a fierce purpose, nothing wasted.
Suddenly our gazes catch. She sees me looking… and she doesn’t look away. Still moving, she holds my gaze as fiercely as she does everything else.
“So, you were just working?” she asks huskily. She dips into a back bend that presses her breasts up and out. God, but they’re lovely.
“There’s always something to do.” Although if I had to name anything I’d been doing for the past few hours, I couldn’t. My thoughts are nothing but her.
“Do you usually stay this late?”
“Later.”
“When do you find the time for literally anything else?”
“I make the time for what I want.”
She goes still. Her hands are in the small of her back, highlighting the small, sweet curves of her hips. And glory be to God, she’s not wearing a bra today, because her nipples are poking through her thin shirt as proud as you please.
“Really?” Her voice quivers.
I get up, snag my jacket from my chair. She watches my every move hungrily. “It’s a question of time management. If I want it enough, I make it happen.” I hand her bag to her. “You need to eat.”
“I do?” She blinks. “Right. Um—”
“You’re coming home with me.” I planned on taking her out somewhere, but after seeing her stretching routine, I can’t hold back any longer. I’ve held out and held out, but I can’t anymore.
She’s too much, in all the best ways.
“Unless you don’t want to.” I keep my voice low, steady. I want her to say yes more than my next breath, but she’s skittish, hard to hold on to. After what I told her today, she might be even more eager to fly away from me.
She gives me a look that could light ice on fire. “Of course I want to. I’ve wanted to since…” She bites her lip.
“Since?”
“Oh, you are going to be such a bastard about this,” she mutters. “Since I met you, okay? But you’re also insanely infuriating, and there’s the whole weird notebook situation and… Well, all those things still apply.”
“But?”
“This is what I’m talking about.” Her cheeks are flushed and her hands are waving. “You’re doing it right now.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“That’s the point. You withhold until there’s this massive space in front of you that I have to fall into.”
I take her arm, pull her close. “You know that when you fall, I’ll always catch you.”
I kiss her then, putting all of my own frustration and need into it, filling the space she’s falling into with my own bottomless desire for her. When I said I’d make time, I’d make all the time in the world for her. I could make an eternity for both of us.
Except it can’t be eternity because of all those things that still apply. So I’ll take the time I can with her.
Her breasts press into my chest, her nipples hard, needy points against my skin. I could slip my hand under her shirt and feel them under my palm, no barrier between us. My cock hardens at the idea. I kiss her more deeply, more urgently, until I’m panting for breath. But even then I don’t want to break the connection between us.
Finally I force myself to stop, to think. If I keep going, I’m going to push her to the floor in a second. And she might let me.
“Do we really have to eat?” she asks with reddened lips.
“Don’t tempt me.” I pull her to the door. “You’ve been working for hours. You need rest. And food.”
She looks behind her. “The notebooks?”
I stop dead. Fuck, how could I forget about those? “I’ll take care of it.”
“I didn’t make any progress,” she says as I gather everything up. “But there are some phrases that are… sticky. Like ‘bird and brown.’ Does that mean anything?”
I pause with a notebook in my hand. “Bird and brown.” My mouth wants to keep saying the phrase for some reason. “No. I’ve never heard that before. What book was it in?”
“The last one.”
Tynan’s notebook. I didn’t tell her which notebook belonged to who. I figured it didn’t matter for trying to solve it. But…
I shove everything away in my office safe and slam it shut. If “bird and brown” meant anything, I would know. It’s just more nonsense designed to drive me crazy.
Maybe the entire thing, all six notebooks, are just gibberish. Random words Ira put down to fuck with us from beyond the grave. It’s as plausible as any other ghost from the past we’ve been chasing down.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad,” Zara says quietly. “It’s only the first pass. I could make progress next time.”
“I’m not mad at you.” I double-check the safe, then turn to face her. “I don’t do well with unknowables. Or metaphors. Or similes. Or any kind of figurative language.”
She tilts her head. “Really? Like, everything I work with every day… you don’t get.”
The old familiar feelings of insecurity come rushing back even though I’m not that kid anymore who didn’t understand, who couldn’t grasp it. I’m a billionaire now, for Christ’s sake. What do I care if some poem about snakes being ribbons makes no sense?
“I said I don’t do well with it.”
“Yet you minored in Russian lit.”
Our eyes widen at the same time.
“I never told you that.” I stalk toward her.
To her credit, she doesn’t back down. “Google is a powerful thing. You can find almost anything about anyone.”
That’s not true, but my minor in college isn’t exactly a secret. Still, she must have really dug down into some profiles of me to find that.
“Okay.” I come so close there’s barely an inch between us. “I minored in literature. Because I wanted to understand. In school, people raved about all these allusions and inferences and how this really meant that, and I never saw it. In Shakespeare, I couldn’t see the wordplay. In Invisible Man…” I shake my head. “How can everything in a book mean something else?”
She’s trying to hide her smile, which only infuriates me more.
“I’m not laughing at you,” she says, putting a hand on my arm. “And while Invisible Man is utterly genius, I can see how it wouldn’t have worked for you. But I’ll let you in on a secret.” She rises up on her toes, her breasts brushing my chest. Her hand cups my ear. “Most of them don’t know what it means either. They’re making it up.”
“What?”
She nods. “Literary criticism and interpretations are an art too. There’s no final, definitive, yes-this-is-it meaning of a book. There never can be. Oh, professors speak and write as if their reading of a work is the end all and be all and never to be questioned, but… it’s not. And a lot of the times, the critic is reading in their own bullshit, rather than whatever the author meant to put in.”
It’s like a weight has been lifted off my brain. “How did I never know this?”
“You haven’t hung around enough writers,” she says as if it’s just that simple. “I mean, poets, we can really jam some symbolism in there. Just cram it on up in each syllable. But your average novelist? No.”
I stare down at her, torn between laughing my ass off and kissing her senseless. “So everyone else is spinning bullshit except for you?”
“Yes,” she says without hesitation.
I know she doesn’t really mean it and that she’s only saying it to get me to laugh, but it works anyway. She can push my buttons, good and bad, like no one else.
“Now that we’ve cleared that up,” I say, offering her my arm, “should we go feed you?”
“Happy to help.” When she tucks her arm into mine, it feels so right my head spins.