Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 5

  In the quiet part of her ear, she thought about how her name, her whole name, Destiny, would sound from his mouth, with his accent, when she pulled slowly away from that kiss, when she slid her fingertips from his bristly face to the small curls at his nape. Scraped her nails against the skin there.

  She remembered how his eyes had gotten tight at the corners, almost squinting at her, almost looking away, just those few times, but how she would also catch his gaze soft and open.

  She wanted to know what he was thinking with each of those looks.

  She wanted to take one of his big hands in hers and trace around his coarse first knuckle, all the way along the band of muscle to his elbow.

  She wanted to watch him draw, not with furtive glances as she hurried by him in the library, but when they were alone and with long, drinking looks. She wanted to watch his left hand bend over his pencil while he traced designs on the paper, see how his right hand held the paper down and how his lean hip pushed into the worktable.

  As the nighttime spring air cooled the interior of the limo, she was glad it was getting dark. She was glad Sarah and PJ were occupied with their gossip. She was glad her face would be indistinct to her brother and sister, that there was no way they could guess she was contemplating secrets. She liked that they didn’t know, for a little while longer, that she was celebrating what felt like the beginning of something. Part of a big family in a small neighborhood, she wasn’t used to having secrets.

  It felt decadent, luxurious, expensive. This feeling more than made up for the months of material poverty and draining worry. Des played with the hole in the knee of her jeans, shivering a little when she tickled herself just as a cold eddy of air swirled through her hair. She wanted to laugh but compressed her laugh into a solid gold ingot to rest in her belly, warm.

  She imagined the limo was a boat, and she was floating on the sea. Instead of the familiar crowd of identical houses, glowing from the inside with electric lights, wafting the aroma of dozens of dinners into the air, it was the whole wide world around her. Rocky coasts. Lighthouses. Cities that looked like spilled glitter and gave way to misty, rustic villages.

  She liked it. She let her body countersway against the waves. Drifted. Wondered when the wind would pick up.

  Chapter Five

  “You gonna ask your girl to lunch?” Phil had the facsimile of the original plans for the center panel unrolled on the table, copying measurements to compare to the ones he had spent the morning carefully taking from where the panel would go.

  Hefin watched Phil write the numbers onto graph paper and took a sip of tea.

  “Is that one of my pencils?”

  Phil glanced over at him and made quite the show of examining the pencil as if he hadn’t seen dozens of them before, in Hefin’s art box, on the worktable. “Just looks like a pencil to me. Don’t see your name on it.” He kept writing with the soft lead, smirking.

  Hefin picked a golf pencil up from the table, handed it to Phil, and held out his palm.

  “Jesus, Hef, you’re so weird about stuff.”

  “Don’t call me Hef.”

  “Like I was saying.” Phil ran the tip of the golf pencil through his collar-length blond beard, as if to sharpen it. Or maybe detangle the beard. And Phil wondered why Hefin didn’t want him using his pencils.

  Hefin used his pencil to make another mark on the eight-by-eight-by-four-inch block of oak he was going to start to carve today, as soon as he could feel the caffeine and sugar do its work. This piece would have a captured chain looping from a vase in relief, with carnations, the Ohio state flower, in both the foreground and background, spilling from the vase. An easy piece of oak to ruin, in other words.

  It made Hefin think of his dad, who was a deft hand at captured chains, captured balls, other bits of carving showmanship that still earned him a nice commission for his Welsh love spoons, sold in the tourist shop of the famous Aberaeron Harbourmaster Hotel.

  Hefin grabbed the back of his neck and rubbed a finger over the wood. He could hardly feel the grain under his callus. When he first came to the States with Jessica, his hands had been soft. His big plans and his work used his head, not his hands.

  Jessica had loved his father’s spoons, decorated their tiny stainless-and-granite condo kitchen with the intricate pieces bearing wax-rubbed hearts, chains, captured balls, crosses, and fancy finials. He tried to explain to Jessica, once, the lexicon of the carvings, why a spoon might have a cross over two entwined hearts and a chain. To explain why it was so overwhelming to see so much of his dad’s carving in one small place, as if she had decorated with pages from his diary.

  She had never known that he had learned to carve, too. All the men in his family did, just like they learned to sail. His dad would be horrified to learn that Hefin had never carved his new wife a love spoon, might even say it accounted for their divorce.

  Maybe it had.

  Maybe if he had worked over a fair and straight piece of wood, thought about what he wanted to say to his lady love, if he wanted to use the old style or the new, then sanded into the small curves of the finished piece with ever finer grades of emery, rubbed in wax, left it for her on her pillow, maybe he’d have something warmer than the memory of Jessica—near less than that, now.

  Maybe this had been a pearl he’d missed. Something else he dropped behind him, into the sea, when he left.

  He looked away from the wood and into the three-story atrium, filled with marble and art deco flourishes. Some other man, a hundred years ago, had seen his ideas made solid, clad in marble from quarries an ocean away. He wondered what that man’s father taught him, if he had listened.

  “So are you?” Phil nudged him with his shoulder just as he was taking a drink of tea. Hefin quickly stepped back so he wouldn’t splash the wood.

  “Am I what, Phil? And can you really be so chatty while working out the numbers?”

  Phil laughed, the bark echoing in the atrium. “Chatty, am I? Guess I am, to a man who has a demonstrated daily word quota smaller than the number of holes in his belt.”

  Hefin grunted.

  “Exceptions made, of course, for a certain redhead.”

  Oh Jesus. “I’m missing my larger parting tool. Just going to head to the back for a minute.”

  “You’re never missing a tool, Hefin Thomas. Your parting tool set is wrapped under the bench where it always is. You just don’t want to talk about the redhead.”

  “I did. I left a bigger one in the back.” Hefin started walking away because, yeah that’s right. He had no cause to talk about Destiny. He started toward the repurposed conference room, and was halfway there, convinced he really was after his larger parting tool, but of course his whole set was wrapped up neat at the bench, as always.

  He also remembered too late that Des would be back here somewhere.

  He stopped in the middle of the staff access hallway, his heart suddenly a bit fast. He couldn’t go all the way back to the conference room because he’d have to walk by the area where Des might be working, and he didn’t want to bother her.

  Didn’t want her to think he was looking for her, more like.

  Turning around would just feed Phil’s teasing.

  He took a long drink of tea he barely tasted. It went down the wrong way, almost immediately, and he spent a long minute trying to clear his pipe without making any noise.

  He’d seen her come in this morning of course. Phil was teasing him because of the moment he had stood, arrested, watching her walk in wearing a skirt, a small blouse, both pretty, but it was more that he had never seen her in anything but jeans and woolly jumpers. The weather had been warmer, and her legs and arms were bare.

  Those golden freckles were everywhere.

  He watched her stop at the security desk where the guard had stopped her to give her an employee badge. He looked at the freckles gathered in the hollow between her shinbone and the curve of her calf. He looked at how they gilded her long, skinny arms, clustered over her col
larbones.

  They were beautiful. They made her limbs seem more naked, somehow, to be so decorated—drawing attention to the translucency of her skin and all the places he would put his mouth if she were his.

  Which of course, she wasn’t.

  Her bright hair was loose, straight as a pin, with fine glowing pieces of it lifted from her scalp with static.

  He had watched her smile at the guard and remembered the freckles that had ignored the boundary of her lip line, small ones that had sifted themselves into the pink of her lips, themselves.

  He had thought about those freckles, in particular, last night.

  Then she had started to walk toward the entry into the library proper, which would have taken her right by the work site, where he was standing, staring at her like a schoolboy who’d found the door to the ladies’ locker room open.

  So he had stepped under a scaffold and pulled a tarp down over the structure, and stood still, ignoring the blush racing up hot from his neck and trying to focus on a small hole filtering light through the dark canvas.

  He hid, it was true, he had hid from the ginger corona of her hair and the gorgeous obscenity of her freckles and her gray gaze that would look for him because it had been looking for him for weeks, just like he had been putting himself in the line of her regard, hanging about the workbench in the mornings, waiting.

  But that was before he knew how she smiled at him, the overlapping incisors and overwhelming sweetness of it. Now he had an instinct to hide from how she spoke to him, in questions and in thanks. Of course, hiding had told him everything he didn’t want to know about what he had really noticed about Des Burnside. It wasn’t her freckles and gray eyes either. Not even her backside, round and curved away from her straight back.

  He had noticed her interest in his interest, what he hadn’t been able to completely hide from her yesterday.

  He had stood under the scaffold, draped in the canvas, burning with frustration at himself, at Jessica, at his stony crumble of dreams, at the entire state of Ohio. He had listened to the tap of her shoes get closer. Had listened to the tapping stop at the work site, and like a child, he had held his breath until she moved on.

  Now he was standing in an empty hallway, eyes streaming from silently choking on tea, unable to make a simple decision about where to walk because he was afraid of talking to a girl.

  God, though, those heartbeats in the dark, when he felt a few strands of her hair tangle in the bristles on his face, heard her fast breath. Was close enough to catch how her skin smelled warm under its veil of white soap. He had wanted to know if he laved his tongue over her pulse, would there still be a trace of bitterness from the lather.

  Hefin stood in the hallway. Tightened every muscle in his body, let them all go.

  Des was a woman, that’s all. Smart and sweet, gray-eyed and skinny, prone to tears and questions.

  He was a Welshman. Land of dragons and rugby.

  He would be fine.

  Instead of the conference room, he decided to face the dragon and pushed through the double doors that led into the suite of cubicles where he had a desk for no reason he could fathom except it was a good place to keep his lunch and tea. If Des was here working, well, he was too, and wanted his lunch pail, besides.

  Slay the dragon.

  He made himself take long strides to his desk, not looking left or right, then stopped, near tripping on his shadow.

  She was sitting at his desk, fingers flying over a laptop, ginger hair twisted onto a pencil making a pinwheel of escaped strands.

  Her nape was freckled.

  He looked down at the file drawer that held his lunch pail, the drawer that was currently guarded by her bare leg, the outside of her cotton-covered thigh.

  He could see the thin band of her bra through a haze of apricot-colored blouse—he could even see the wash tag from her bra stuck out at an angle from where the clasp would be, and this somehow made its reality as sharp as if he were in the process of removing it.

  He walked a step backward.

  Her fingers stopped on the keyboard, and she turned around.

  Her smile was near twice again cuter than it was yesterday.

  “Hefin! Hi.” She twirled to face him in the office chair, and now he was faced with the torture of her knobby, freckled knees. Torture, because he wanted them in his hands. He wanted to move them apart.

  “Hello, yourself, there. I just …” He gestured toward the file drawer, certain he’d said out loud what he needed.

  She looked in the direction of the drawer, but her auburn brows knit together.

  “Sorry, do you need your desk? Carrie said you never used it and there wasn’t another free?”

  “No, I just was gettin’ to my lunch there. In the drawer.”

  She leaned over, the collar of her blouse coming away from the pretty expanse of her sternum and pulled the drawer open. “In here? I smelled something awesome all morning.”

  He finally stepped forward to where she was bent at the waist in her chair, which made everything at least a thousand times worse. Now he could see her bra from the front, could see that it was white and plain and the cups too loose over the top of her breast, could in fact see the very small swell of her breast and the edge of its pale peach areola.

  Her breasts had the palest freckles of all, like gold leaf shattered over porcelain. He ignored the heavy, dark pulse in his prick.

  She sat up, holding his takeaway bag. “This it?”

  He took it, glad he had placed a large order. The big bag of food could be held in front of himself strategically. “Ah, there’s actually a lunch pail there, too.”

  “This one?” She leaned over and Hefin closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was holding out his lunch pail. He took it, careful to fit his fingers away from hers on the resin handle so he wouldn’t touch them.

  “Great. I’m sorted then. I’ll leave you to it.” He turned to go, anxious to get somewhere he wouldn’t need to remind himself to breathe.

  “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “What’s in your lunch, I mean. I’ve been inhaling it all morning, practically eating it by smell.”

  He looked down at the plastic ThankYouThankYou takeaway bag as if he had never seen one in his life. “Oh. Pancakes.”

  She laughed. Reached back and pulled the pencil out of her hair, and he helplessly watched it tumble in corn-silk heaps around her face. “You brought pancakes for lunch?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “All that’s pancakes?”

  “I hope so, that’s what I ordered.”

  “A lot of pancakes.”

  He couldn’t stop the smile, but kept his gaze on a place on her knee where he could just see a faded ink pen heart. “I like pancakes, I suppose.”

  She laughed again. “I guess so.”

  Just a woman. “Listen, do you get a lunch? There’s a nice place to sit when the weather’s warm like this. I may share these though it’s unlikely.” He didn’t look at her. Until she was quiet for such a long beat he couldn’t help it. She was looking at him, a small smile curved over the point of her chin.

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  He watched her pull a cardigan from her bag and put it on, the pretty blouse lifting at her waistline with the movement, flashing a ribbon of her pale middle. She also grabbed a crumpled brown paper lunch bag and a bottle of water. “Let’s go then,” he said.

  She grinned, and in her fancy, girlish work clothes that open grin made her look fey and possible. He couldn’t fathom why he couldn’t stop having these impulses around her. Why he would awkwardly transfer his bags and lunch pail to one hand so he’d have one free to press a little against her back, right along where her bra band was, to guide her through the doors.

  They walked in silence along an access tunnel that followed the edge of the parking garage until they reached the outlet onto a path that led to Celebration Park. It was an orderly green space with different sections
representing different parts of the world, and he led them to the Scandinavia section where bright red modern-looking picnic tables were set into a grove of conifers that broke the wind coming off the lake to the west. When he sat at the tables, the height of the knoll of this area made the lake look infinite if you blocked out the downtown buildings all around it.

  He liked it here, and he had taken Des here.

  “I haven’t sat up here before.” Des settled into the bench seat right next to him, so they both had a view of the lake. Her hair looked like hot embers in the direct sunlight, a hundred different shades of red and orange and blond. He turned away to stare at the lake, but the brightness of her hair bothered his periphery. “I had no idea there was a view of the lake from this park.”

  He focused on unpacking his lunch, unscrewing the lid from his thermos. He tipped his head in her direction but kept his gaze on the table. She had smoothed out her brown paper bag on the table’s surface as a place mat for a sandwich and an apple cut into neat wedges. “Are you from Lakefield?”

  She laughed, and he couldn’t help it. He looked at her. She was tucking her hair behind her ears with both hands. God help him, she had freckles on her earlobes, in the creamy whorls of her ears. “I was born there.” She pointed at the tall main building of Lakepoint Hospital. Then she twisted around to point behind them. “And I grew up in that neighborhood way over there. The one where you can see the church steeple in the middle of all those tiny houses.” She shifted in her seat again and rose a bit. “And then I went to college way over there.” She gestured to the roofs of the Lakefield State University buildings they could barely see through the breaks in the downtown buildings. She sat back down, making his heart stop when she smoothed her hands over her arse to tuck her skirt under her. “You can literally see my entire life from this spot.” She looked over the panorama again. “A whole life lived.”

  He caught her eye then and was surprised to find her expression so solemn. Those straight auburn brows of hers knit and she looked away, to the view of the lake.