“You’re not here to work, Bliss,” Asher said. “You’re my guest, and it is I who should be serving you. But since I am, as we have seen, a disaster in the kitchen, I’m afraid we’ll have to forgo the sweets.” He flashed a grin. “I can, however, offer you some rather decent coffee—I promise you, my coffee is far better than my cuisine.” He rose lithely to his feet, headed for the percolator, giving her a questioning look over his shoulder. “Will you have a cup?”
“Yes, please,” Sera said gratefully. “I’d love some.”
“Since I am sans sofa at present, let’s take our coffee outside,” he suggested when the pot had brewed and he’d put their plates in the sink (not before running a finger along his to catch the last savory lick). “It should be warm enough if I bring a blanket, and the stars look to be fierce tonight. There’s no better way to enjoy after-dinner coffee in New Mexico.”
Sera felt a little faint, thinking of sharing a blanket with that much manly goodness. Was it her imagination, or was Asher inventing reasons for her not to leave? She couldn’t quite read him, but she was getting the definite sense that he wanted her to stay… almost as if he had something he wanted to say to her. Even as her sober instincts were screaming caution, some part of her—the part that had recently purchased a two-ton truck, probably—was telling her to let this play out. Something big was in the wind. “I can only stay for a little while,” she hedged. “Then I really should be heading home. Pauline will worry.” Like hell, she thought privately. If I come home too early, then she’ll worry—that I’m not getting laid.
Asher turned toward what Sera figured was his bedroom. “I’ll just go grab a blanket then, if you’ll carry the coffees?” Was it her imagination, or did he seem a tad edgy, too? He was back, carrying a fluffy white comforter under one arm, before Sera could consider the ramifications of that question too closely.
Sascha and Silver preceded them out, tails wagging as they disappeared into the gloom. True night had fallen while they ate their simple meal, Sera saw. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed a two-person glider tucked away at the back of the patio. She saw two side tables, one on either end of the glider, and carefully set their coffee cups down. Gingerly, Sera set herself down on the padded cushion, as far toward her end as she could manage. She didn’t want to presume anything. Silver pawed at her leg through her jeans, whining until she helped him up into her lap. The puppy provided a welcome distraction, and Sera petted his soft fur gratefully until he grumbled with pleasure and rolled himself into a contented ball, tiny head resting on comically big paws.
Asher folded himself down next to her with seemingly no thought for her personal space, his big, loose-limbed frame warming the length of hers even before he spread the puffy down coverlet over both their laps (and Silver, who had instantly fallen asleep on Sera’s). Sascha rounded out the tableau by flopping down on the bricks at her master’s feet, her thick coat providing all the warmth she needed to combat the October chill.
This must be what family feels like, Sera marveled. She hadn’t truly had one since her parents had died, so many years ago. Pauline had done her best, and her best was damn good, but Sera had always felt something was missing. A wholeness, a sense of completion. Now, her heart felt full, though her belly felt like a meadow full of butterflies had taken up residence. Alarmed at the fanciful direction her thoughts were taking, she took a sip of the coffee Asher had made, breathing steam out into the brisk night air. He was right—the coffee was delicious. And as promised, the stars were shining fiercely in the achingly clear sky, blazing down like pinpoints of celestial mystery. But Sera barely saw them. There was a terrestrial mystery stealing all of her attention. A mystery she desperately wanted to solve.
Who was Asher Wolf, deep down at the heart of him? Was he someone who could…
Who could what, Sera? her inner voice asked caustically. Overlook your shortcomings? Love you?
“It’s definitely cold tonight,” Sera remarked, plucking at the blanket to cover herself a bit more. “Wonder if we’ll have snow in time for Halloween next week.” She winced, embarrassed at being reduced to talking about the weather. Asher smiled gently, as if he sensed her discomfort, and tucked the blanket more securely around both of them. He left one arm across the back of the glider after he finished, nearly touching her shoulders but not quite. With his other hand, he placed his own coffee down on his side table after a single sip. Inside the cozy down nest, heat began to blossom, suffusing Sera and evidently overwhelming Silver, who burrowed his way out of the covers until he plopped out at her feet. Yawning, he trundled over to curl up next to his mother.
Asher set the glider going with a push of one foot.
Sera finished her coffee in three quick gulps, setting the mug down rather too hard on her own side table. “Sorry.” She winced at the clatter.
“It’s all right, Bliss,” he said. “I’m nervous, too.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that tonight,” Sera blurted out. “What do you have to be nervous about?”
He slanted her a sidelong look, those green eyes of his almost black in the darkness. He ran a hand through his short hair, then laid it back across the glider, this time touching her shoulders—deliberately, she thought.
“Bliss,” he said gently. “Do you know you are the first woman I’ve invited to my home here in Santa Fe? Since I moved here four years ago—since my life fell apart back in Tel Aviv—I’ve been content to move slowly, collecting myself, letting this place heal me and my needs make themselves known to me in their own time. At first, I simply needed everything to be different, to remind me of nothing from the past, so I built myself a new business, honed a craft I’d only ever practiced as a hobby before. Nothing truly touched me, except my memories—both good and bad. I drifted in this beautiful dream of a city. For a long time, it was enough, and eventually my heart became quiet. But now those needs… they’re awakening.” He leaned closer, impressing her with his earnestness. “What I mean to say, Bliss, is that you are awakening them.”
Sera’s heart was suddenly thrumming like a hummingbird’s wings. She sensed he was about to open up in a big way, and that perhaps he’d spent a lot more of his time focused on her than she’d ever imagined. Could she handle what he had to say? His hand was gently stroking her hair, toying with the lock at the front that never behaved itself, fingers skimming her cheek. Sera trembled, hardly daring to breathe.
Asher spoke softly, but with conviction. “What I’m talking about, Bliss, is the need to know another person… to hear her, and understand what drives her. The need to see her grow and challenge herself—even if it is sometimes in ways that make her uncomfortable.”
For an unhappy moment, Sera wondered if he were just speaking generically, but what he said next dispelled any question—Asher meant her.
“I need to watch her dance with abandon when she thinks she’s alone—and to hold her close while we dance together under the Fiesta lights. To watch her blush—far too often—at every little thing.” He smiled, stroking Sera’s cheek as if to note how flushed it was even now. “To watch how she gives love to those who are important to her, and witness her kindness when she offers others a new start. To see her smile”—he traced her lips with one featherlight finger—“and to know that, just maybe, I had something to do with that smile…”
Sera trembled, and tears threatened to overflow her lashes.
“Asher…”
“I find myself with the most powerful need to taste the confections that come from her kitchen, and to see her master a monstrously big truck. And most of all, I have the need to do this…”
This time, the kiss was not on her forehead.
It captured her lips, hot and urgent, but what it stole was Sera’s soul. The feeling was like a sob, a deep, ache-from-the-bottom-of-your-guts sob, only it was good, so good, both desire and admiration intermingled. The desire was for his body—and how—but the admiration was for his personhood, in some intangible way.
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She couldn’t help but respond. Overwhelmed, afraid, and dizzily flattered, Sera once again felt her wits skip town under the influence of Asher’s kiss. But for once in her life, her body seemed to know just how to respond. As their lips and tongues tasted and tested one another in the cold, clear night, she was overcome by the essence of Asher. It was all-encompassing. Like a drug, like the drink she’d given up, she longed for more of this man. He was so immensely promising, so tempting in the most primitive way…
Never in her life had Sera felt such a surge of straight-up passion. It flooded her loins and quickened her breath until she was dizzy with it. All she could think was more. Give me more, and more, and more again. She moaned, and his mouth took hers more deeply. She tasted coffee, fresh and deep, and man… and longing. Unbelievable longing, both hers and his.
It was that longing that stopped her.
Sera ripped herself from Asher’s embrace, leaping to her feet and nearly tripping over the comforter in her haste to get away. Silver yipped sleepily as she lunged over him and Sascha, scrambling to achieve some distance.
“Bliss, what’s the matter?” Asher rose to his feet in a hurry, but Sera waved him away.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Asher,” she warned. “You don’t know me.”
“I know enough—” be began.
“You don’t know enough, Asher. You don’t know the first thing about me. If you did, you wouldn’t be kissing me right now.” She drew in a sharp breath and wiped her lips, as if she could erase the feel of him so easily. “Truth is, Ash, I’ve been a first-class mess for most of my life, and I’m only just starting to sort myself out now. I’m an alcoholic; a failure in my career. Back in New York, my very name is a joke in some circles.” Sera’s voice broke, and tears began to fall in hot streams down her cheeks. “I’m glad you’re getting over whatever it was that hurt you, Asher. You deserve all those things that you want—that you need from a woman. Most of all, you deserve happiness. You’re an amazing man. But I’m not an amazing woman—not yet. I’m still trying to get my shit straightened out, and I’m so far from where I want to be that some days I can’t even see the goalposts. And there are some things”—like my problems in the bedroom—“that I’m probably never going to overcome. You won’t find what you need with me, much as I wish I were all those things you think you see right now. I wouldn’t bring you happiness, Asher—I’d only fail you, and humiliate myself in the process. So let’s just nip this thing in the bud, okay?”
Sera didn’t wait to see whether Asher agreed. She ran for her truck and hauled ass out of there, leaving a trail of smashed lavender and sage in her wake.
And one very disappointed Israeli.
Chapter Seventeen
You two should fuck,” Pauline announced.
For emphasis, she stuck her spade in the pile of freshly turned earth she was fertilizing, propped her elbow on the handle, and gazed at her niece and her guest with a beatific smile that encompassed them both.
“Whaaaaat?” Sera squealed. Oh no, you did not just say that out loud… right there in front of Asher! She cringed behind the flower bed she was, with no great conviction, attempting to weed.
“You know. Bone. Bang. Bump uglies. Make the beast with two backs. Shag each other silly. That whole thing.” Pauline waved the spade back and forth between Sera and Asher, then made an obscene, impossible-to-mistake finger gesture.
Serafina didn’t know whether to throw up or die. Oh, my God. A third option—blushing herself into a coma—appeared to be her body’s instinctive answer to the conundrum.
She’d begged Pauline not to ask Asher over. Barely two days had passed since their disastrous dinner at his house… two days during which she’d dodged his calls and stayed away from the placita, claiming she had to meet with restaurant suppliers (which was true) and didn’t have time to drop by the store (which was not). She wasn’t ready to deal with her landlord yet—if she ever would be after his romantic revelation and her cowardly absconding act.
Pauline, however, wasn’t concerned with Sera’s finer feelings, as today’s awkward get-together proved. She’d asked some rather pointed questions of her niece when Sera had arrived home the other night, tear-streaked and still visibly trembling. Sera, having no intention of telling her aunt what had happened, had merely assured her that Asher had done nothing wrong, and that Pauline could put away the ball-skinning knife. When Sera proved stubborn in her silence, Pauline had turned crafty, inviting the Israeli over to help bed down her garden for winter. Never mind that Hortencia had volunteered for the job (she was no slouch with a spade, and had been tending her own gardens for fifty years); no one would do for Pauline’s little patch of earth but her favorite foliage whisperer.
Sera didn’t know what to make of Asher’s apparent eagerness to take up that invitation. He’d arrived mere hours after Pauline’s call, with mulch and gardening tools in the back of his meticulously maintained Land Rover. Sera had planned to invent an errand and escape before he got there, but Pauline had foiled her—she’d told her niece Asher was coming at two, but asked Asher to show up at one.
So now the three of them were gathered in the little adobe-walled garden behind Pauline’s house; Sera wondering if she could successfully disappear down a gopher hole, Asher looking impossibly manly with a rake in one hand and his leather hat shading his eyes as he surveyed the little plot of land, and Pauline sitting on a stump, wearing a set of Hortencia’s knitted leg warmers (and a pair of arm warmers as well) along with her faded “Professors Do It in the Classroom” sweatshirt and a much-patched calf-length denim skirt. It was a bit of a Mexican standoff, Sera thought—Asher at one point of the triangle, Sera and Pauline staking out the other two, as if none of them quite trusted what the others might get up to.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. Pauline could be trusted to thoroughly embarrass her niece.
Sera shot her aunt a fulminating glare. “Aunt Pauline, I swear I will never forgive you if you don’t shut your trap,” she growled. “I’m really sorry, Ash,” she muttered, barely able to look at him where he stood beside a pile of pungent compost, clad in ancient jeans and a soft heather-green V-neck that complemented his eyes absurdly well.
But Asher seemed okay with it. “It’s all right, Bliss.” He turned to her aunt. “Miss Pauline,” he said gently, “I think that’s something the two of us can sort out on our own. We’re grown-ups. And besides, I think your niece appreciates a bit of delicacy in these matters, if I’m not mistaken.”
My hero.
Sera shot him the most grateful look of her life. Still, her blush, if anything, only intensified… because he hadn’t denied the possibility of them “bumping uglies.” But incredible as it was that Asher really, sincerely seemed interested in her, she couldn’t risk their budding friendship—or her delicate, still-healing self-esteem—on a fling that was destined to end badly. Facing him day after day at the placita once he learned how lacking she was as a woman… Sera shuddered at the thought. Oh, Ash. Don’t you understand, I’m no good for you? She thought she’d made that sad fact abundantly clear the other night. How many shrubs must a girl slay before a guy gets the hint? She still owed him a lavender bush. Now, if she could only convince her aunt to let it alone, she could go be miserable and unfulfilled in peace.
“Yes, please, Aunt Pauline,” she gritted out. “A modicum of delicacy would be nice.”
“Harrumph,” Pauline harrumphed. “Well, I’m just concerned for your health. It’s not good for you to go as long as you have without a nice, thorough climax, kiddo. And I suspect it’s been awhile for you, too, handsome.” She jerked her head toward Asher, who shifted his weight and tried to look as though people commented on his climactic status every day.
Unexpected tears flooded Serafina’s eyes. Maybe it was her aunt’s well-intentioned humiliation, or perhaps it was the certainty that she’d never know what it was like to “shag” a guy like Asher senseless, but suddenly she couldn
’t stand to stay in that garden another second. “Excuse me,” she said in a small, choked voice, rising from the flower bed and bolting for the house.
* * *
Asher caught up to her in the kitchen. Sera was scrubbing blindly at the dirt under her nails, shoulders stiff, water running full blast. But she sensed him coming anyway. Lately, she’d had Asher-radar so acute she felt like she could pinpoint his location with GPS accuracy, any time of the day.
He put his scarred jeweler’s hands exactly where the tension resided, where her shoulders met her neck, kneading with a gentleness that only made her want to cry more. Sera shrugged away, refusing to look at him.
“She means well, Bliss.”
“Stop calling me that,” she mumbled.
“What, ‘Bliss’? But why?”
“Because I don’t know the meaning of the word!” she wailed, half-angry, half-despairing. She flung herself around, grabbing a dishtowel and wringing it between her hands as if it were her aunt’s meddling neck.
Asher didn’t understand. “Of course you do,” he chided. His hand rose to push back the errant lock of hair that teased her cheek, then fell away as she flinched from the gesture. He’d removed his hat and left it on the tile-topped island in the center of the kitchen. Sera could see the faint indentation the band had left along his hairline, and she had the absurd urge to smooth it. His long, lean frame edged closer, subtly crowding Sera against the counter by the sink as he took the towel from her hands and set it aside. “You’re here, aren’t you?” he pointed out. “Pursuing your dreams. Opening that bakery is all about bliss. One taste of your confections, and that’s all a man needs to know about satisfaction…”
For some reason, his kindness set off her anger. “Satisfaction? Ha! You don’t get it, Asher Wolf,” she interrupted. “Just like I don’t get it. There’s no such thing as satisfaction with me. You wanna know why? Because I can’t have an orgasm.”
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