A Taste of Ice (9 page)

“Thanks for the ticket,” she said. “It was…an experience.”

“Now I know why I don’t see movies.”

“At all?”

“No.”

“But you watch TV, right?”

He shook his head. “I don’t own one.”

He was trying to say something else to her. He opened his mouth several times, closed it. All she could do was smile encouragingly. He didn’t look at her. “You wouldn’t want to…go for a cup of coffee. Would you?”

A shiver coursed through her that had nothing to do with the fresh, cool air sweeping in from the lobby. “I absolutely would.”

He didn’t exhale in relief or even smile. If anything, he looked even more tense. She pulled on the heavy coat she both loathed to wear and desperately wanted on at all times. As she yanked the red hat—the silly thing she’d grabbed from a clearance bin at the Denver airport—down over her ears, the tightness around his mouth and eyes softened. He watched her for a moment, almost dazed.

They silently walked out of the auditorium.

Outside under the marquee, now devoid of actors or reporters, he zipped up his down coat and tucked his chin under the collar. A line of people stamping in the cold snaked down the entire block, waiting for the next screening.

Xavier nodded across the square. “You mind walking a bit? The coffee shop I’m thinking of is back in the neighborhood, up in the hills.”

“Not at all. Those are always the best places.”

“Your teeth are chattering.”

“Yeah, well, I live in Florida. Haven’t seen winter in, oh, seven years.”

They cut across the main square, circling around the white tents. She kept an eye out for celebrities, mentally ticking how many she’d seen. She hadn’t even been there two days and she was on her third hand. Xavier just plowed through the nonsense, weaving her on an invisible path to a quieter side street behind the three-story Margaret Hotel where she was staying.

White Clover Creek was wedged into a tiny valley, mountains rising all around. Houses and churches cut into the mountainsides, a thousand eyes gazing down into the charming town like an amphitheater. Roads switchbacked up to the neighborhoods, but the sidewalks were a series of stairs that stretched straight up.

When Xavier first started up one of those staircases, Cat thought a little exercise might warm her up. Forty steps high, and she was sucking wind. “How much farther, Papa Smurf?”

He turned, perplexed, and gestured to the next street. “Just up here and to the left a half block. You okay?”

“Air’s a little thin for me. You live here, remember?”

“Oh. Sorry.” That sheepish look of his was killing her…in a good way.

She used the metal railing to pull herself up the final steps.
She exaggerated her weariness, rolling her eyes and sticking out her tongue, and it brought out Xavier’s hesitant smile again. She liked that. A lot.

They stopped climbing at a narrow, empty road,
NO PARKING DURING FESTIVAL
signs stapled to the telephone poles. A stitch had lodged itself under her ribs.

“Over there.” He pointed to an adorable brick ranch house with smoke curling out of the chimney. A small, rectangular bronze sign was nestled between the evergreen bushes lining the front fence:
WHITE CLOVER COFFEE.

Tourist towns were the same the world over, so Cat was prepared for the second looks some of the customers gave her as she followed Xavier to the counter.
A stranger in our midst…

“X!”
A striking woman with a sleek, dark bob smiled from behind the counter, the tiny diamond stud in her nose glinting. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Hey, Jill.” Xavier shuffled his feet. “Large coffee. Black.” He turned to Cat. “What do you want?”

The way Jill’s eyes widened—followed by her slow, sly smile—told Cat that this woman not only knew Xavier fairly well, but that she knew he was gun-shy around women. Particularly tourist women.

As Jill fixed Cat’s cappuccino, the spurt of the milk foamer filling the warm, wood-floored coffee shop, she and Xavier wandered over to the last open table set against the picture window overlooking the town. The table was circular and tiny, and when Xavier leaned on it, it wobbled. Once they’d settled themselves on the purposely mismatched chairs, he stretched out his long legs underneath the table, one on either side of her chair. She was surrounded by him, and it warmed her more than the sun.

“How do you know Jill?” she asked.

“She’s Pam’s girlfriend. Pam, my boss?”

She nodded. Pam, who, upon hindsight, had finagled Cat’s reservation so she could see Xavier. Pam, who had grinned knowingly at her while standing next to him in the kitchen.

Jill brought over their drinks, grinning at Cat the whole time. Then Jill sauntered behind the counter and into a back room.

“Why do I get the feeling she’s going back there to call Pam right now?”

Xavier frowned at the swinging door. “Because she probably is.”

And yet, he’d brought Cat here on purpose. She hid a smile in the foam of her cappuccino.

Xavier clutched his white coffee mug with both hands and shifted on his seat. His inner thighs brushed the outside of her knees. He froze, then jerked away, widening his legs to break the contact. The table rocked again. If awkwardness had a sound, that would be it.

As he turned his face to gaze out over the white-blanketed town, the sun shrank his pupils. His eyes were silver, not gray. Honest to gosh silver.

“You said you hadn’t seen winter in seven years. Where did you live before Florida?”

He had such a measured way of speaking, like he had to think about every single word and perfectly organize his sentences before letting them out of his mouth.

“I grew up in Indiana. Bloomington. Left the day after my eighteenth birthday and I was no longer a ward of the state.”

His mug stopped halfway to his lips. “Why’d you leave home?”

The cappuccino mug seared her fingers but she didn’t let go. “Indiana was never home. Some of my foster families were all right. They tried their best but I never felt a connection, you know? Some other place was calling me, and the second I was old enough, I left to find it.”

He was watching her intently now. After avoiding looking at her directly for so long, he probably wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

“Did you? Find a home, that is.”

She considered that. The day she’d arrived in the Keys on that bus she’d thought so. But something was still missing. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Her turn to break the mutual gaze. White Clover Creek was quaint and beautiful, but she’d been away from the ocean for going on thirty-six hours now, and she could feel its absence in her soul. Aware of how strange that might sound to him, this man she just met, she kept it quiet.

She toyed with her mug handle. “I keep thinking it might
have something to do with my birth parents. Who they were and all. Like maybe if I knew more about them I’d be able to settle this sense of wandering. But I’ll never know.”

“Why not? Aren’t there ways to find out about that kind of stuff?”

She shrugged. “I was dumped at a police station when I was only a few hours old. You probably know more about them than I do.”

“If you wanted to find out about them, shouldn’t you have stayed in Indiana?”

“No. They weren’t there anymore. I can’t explain it, but I could feel it. They had me then disappeared.” She tapped her finger on the tabletop. “You know, a lot of abandoned and orphaned kids I talked with described the feeling of not knowing their parents like a chunk of flesh had been torn from their leg and they couldn’t walk without it.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“Sort of. The others made it sound like their existence wasn’t complete without parents, and if they could just find them, bam, their lives would be instantly fulfilled.” She’d never said this next part to anyone before, and the words came haltingly. “I feel like I’ve been treading water my whole life. Just sort of lost…out there. To me? Finding out about my parents would be sort of like a raft floating along. I could grab on, rest a bit, get to safety. But I always thought that knowing them would be a new beginning, not an end. Not the culmination.”

Xavier set down his mug and started to roll up the sleeves of his blue plaid flannel shirt. His forearms were strong, striated with muscle and tendons. A funny thing to find so sexy. Her gaze traveled up the length of his arms, where his biceps and shoulders pressed against the shirt seams.

“Okay, I spilled.” She purposely leaned on the table to make it jiggle. Those forearms worked to steady it. “Where were you born?”

An easy question, not too personal. But his whole body went rigid. In the silence she could sense him retreating.

“I was born in Nevada,” he finally said, each word deliberate. “I never knew my parents either.”

What were the chances of that? No wonder he’d looked so spooked when she’d asked about his eyes in the theater lobby.

Distress tightened his features. Clearly it had taken courage for him to tell her that. And clearly he didn’t want to say any more. She hadn’t meant to resurrect old ghosts. And she sure as heck didn’t want him to run off like he had on the street yesterday morning and in the bar last night.

“Bah.” She flicked her wrist in a dismissive gesture. “Abandoned kids are the coolest. Parents are overrated.”

The stiffness in him broke, muscle by tiny muscle. He sank lower in his seat. The death grip on his mug slackened. Pain still haunted his gunmetal eyes, but it was melting by the second. Something else started to invade, take over…it was that
want
for her. The hot desire he continually tried to push away.

It struck her, too, fast and intoxicating. It scalded her veins, made the underside of her skin pulse with sensation. Suddenly she was acutely aware of where the hard ridge of her jeans’ zipper pressed against the apex of her legs. And when his thighs closed—barely an inch—to urge her legs together, she felt it even more powerfully.

“I think it’s safe to say”—he swallowed, and his Adam’s apple danced—“that I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

His hungry eyes fastened on her mouth. The softness of his tone touched her in places she couldn’t name.

“Xavier…”

Her voice shot through the spell, a cannonball destroying the intimate moment. It triggered his fight-or-flight response and, like on the street and in the bar, he flew.

His legs opened, releasing her. He shoved his chair back, the loud screech drawing Jill’s curious gaze from behind the counter.

“I have to get to Shed.” He didn’t look at his watch.

Play it cool, casual
. “Really? I thought we had more time.”

“I just realized I need to…” As his voice petered out, his big right hand started to fidget, his empty fingers opening and closing, his wrist bending in a strange rhythm. He closed his eyes and said, slower and more carefully, “Come on. I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

She nodded and stood.

That tourist had really messed him up good.

Each step back down to town hammered the silence between
them. Cat’s head pounded with it. For the first time since arriving in Colorado, she didn’t feel the cold; she burned hot with frustration and curiosity.

Xavier walked several steps below her. He’d almost reached the very bottom, where the sidewalk that led to the square curved around the Margaret, when she stopped. The brick wall of a Mexican restaurant, painted with a giant green margarita, rose to her right. A cinder block wall for the Margaret’s parking garage on her left. They were closed in, a canyon in shadow. She couldn’t help but feel that if she let him walk away from her now, she’d never see him again.

“Xavier.”

He stopped, his back to her, the hang of his head heavy.

“Am I imagining this?” she asked.

He looked over his shoulder, giving her his hard, beautiful profile framed by the surfer hair that absorbed the sunlight. “Imagining what?”

“You and I.”

He briefly squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re not imagining it.”

“So is it the fact that I’m only here for a short time?”

“No.” The word came out strangled and bare.

“Do I remind you of another girl? Of her?”

He hissed. Closed his eyes. Slowly shook his head. “No. Not at all.”

She came down another step. No place to go but forward. She had nothing to lose, and the not knowing gnawed at her.

“Then why are you scared of me?”

He sighed. “I’m not scared of
you
.” Slowly he shuffled around to face her, and with her a step above, they stood eye to eye. “What you do to me…” He put a hand to his chest, curled it into a fist.

Such honesty. It was the first time he hadn’t weighed every one of his words before releasing them. The admission came from his heart. The hard lines that divided his golden eyebrows
revealed the depth of his desire: it was severe, all-encompassing, and it stoked her own.

“What do I do to you?” In the cold, away from the madness of the festival streets, her whisper carried.

He inhaled slowly, as though sucking her words deep inside him. His silver stare shot shivering arrows through her body. “You excite me.”

He was melting her in the middle of winter. “Isn’t…isn’t that a good thing?”

“No. Yes. Ah!” He stumbled back, fingers stabbing into his hair, eyes angled to the salted concrete.

Any other woman might have seen him as damaged goods, high maintenance. But Cat was not most women, and walking away would never satisfy.

“Xavier, I know that I don’t know you—”

“No,” he laughed shortly. “You don’t.”

“But I want to. And I think you want to know me, too. You and me, we’re alike. I can feel it, though I can’t explain it. I think we can help each other.”

“A pity fuck?” he snarled. “Is that what you want?”

“No!” She gasped, but the way he said
fuck
, all gritty and forceful…it ratcheted up her lust. Made her thong rub achingly against the damp part of her that screamed for him.

But where had that come from? A
pity fuck
? Who did he think she was? Dear God, what had happened to him to make him think that’s what she wanted?