It’s not really relaxing, what I’m thinking—it’s not like a peace settles over me. It’s a change of plan, after all, something big I’m going to spring on the woman I love when she’s reaching the top of a high, lean pole, no matter that she’s strapped in, perfectly safe.
“Zo!” I shout up at her, knowing she won’t fall. She’s at the top, steady now, as good as Sheree ever was, arms loose at her sides. I may be far away, but I know her body so well, know when there’s no tension in it. She tips her chin down, finds me beneath her, my arms crossed over my chest, my feet planted apart. As loose as her body is up there, mine is tense and coiled, as alert now as I am out on the job. But this is it, this is the moment, no matter what I’d planned for later: the fire I was going to light for when she got home from work, the dark purple irises—her favorite—I was going to buy to stuff that damned vase full of, the one I know started this whole thing. I was going to ask Kit and Greer to hide back in our bedroom so they could scream and hop in delight once I’d asked her, same as they did when I went to them one night two months ago and asked them for help picking out a ring. To be honest, I’d asked for their permission first, but then for help with the ring, help they’d given with thrilled, clapping enthusiasm.
But this is it.
I take a deep breath, no way she can see that, but if she’s like me she might feel it, might feel a bit of what I’m feeling down here—sure as hell but also nervous as fuck.
“Marry me,” I call out, loud and steady. Beside me Paul claps his hands together once, and in my peripheral I see Lorraine lean into him. I’m not taking my eyes off Zoe up there, but I’ll bet Lorraine’s smile is a mile wide.
“Oh, Aiden,” says Val, a note of disappointment in her voice. “This is really all wrong. When Hammond proposed, he—”
“You cannot be serious with this, Val,” says Sheree, laughing. “This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.”
Zoe hasn’t moved up there. She’s standing at the top of the pole as if she’s an extension of it, as if she’s just grown up to her full height. She wouldn’t want me to say so, but I like this about it most of all. Being on my knee in front of Zoe for this wouldn’t be down far enough for what I’m asking her, for how grateful I’ll be if she says yes. We’re done with debts, done with owing each other, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever get used to the idea that I deserve her.
“I’d want to keep my name,” she shouts down, and Sheree laughs.
“Fine by me,” I say, trying to keep down the smile I feel breaking through.
“I’m not making a scrapbook, Val!”
“I give up,” Val mutters, but she directs her next comment to me. “Of course I’d give you a discount on the lodge as a reception space.”
If there’s more chatter I don’t hear it. I’m not going to hear anything until she answers me. Even from this far away I know her eyes are locked on mine; I can see that smile spreading across her face. I can feel her loving me all the way from up there, and she doesn’t need to say anything at all.
Because Zoe—beautiful, smart, kind, complicated Zoe, my Zoe, my future wife Zoe—she stretches her arms out, and with a shout of happiness, she takes the leap down to me.
Acknowledgments
As always, an immediate and profuse thank you to readers for taking a chance on a new author and a new series. I absolutely fell in love with Zoe and Aiden while I wrote their story—they have stayed with me for months and months—and I hope you shared in some of that love while you were reading.
One lesson Zoe learns in this book is that sometimes you have to lean on the people you love the most and show them the parts of yourself you like the least. This lesson was also one I had to learn, and while I wrote Zoe and Aiden’s book I relied on many friends—old and new, in-person and online, writers and non-writers alike—to help get me through insecurity and writer’s block and all the other strange, relentless ups and downs of writing a book. A special thanks to dearest friends Amy, Jackie, and Elizabeth, and my mom, who all keep me honest and who remind me I’ve almost always been where I am before, and have come out on the other side.
Heaps of thanks to the romance writing community more generally, which generously welcomed me to the fold over the course of the period during which I drafted this book. I am especially grateful to Ainslie Paton, Olivia Dade, Adele Buck, Jen DeLuca, Elisabeth Lane, Adriana Anders, and Katharine Ashe, as well as to every single incredible participant in #RWChat and to the ladies of HBIC Nation. An extra special thanks to Eloisa James, who has always been unfailingly generous and kind to me, no matter what sort of dumb question I asked her.
What kind of luck I’ve got to be able to work with the extraordinary Esi Sogah, I’ll never completely understand—but I’ll take it. Esi, you are the most fun and the most sharp and you send the best gifs, and everyone who reads this book should know that it is one million percent better because of Esi’s influence. My agent Taylor Haggerty is similarly amazing and magic-making. Thank you to the entire team at Kensington/Lyrical, especially Lauren Jernigan and Michelle Addo; thanks to April LeHoullier for a keen copyediting eye and to Tammy Seidick for another heart-eyes cover.
To my husband—I mean, it is annoying that you manage to be as smart, handsome, kind, and funny as you are. But I love you forever anyways and I could never write a good hero without you there to remind me what one is truly like.
Also by Kate Clayborn
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Prologue
Greer
When I first see him there, I think I must still be dreaming.
I’d woken up at three-thirteen a.m.—unlucky, that—the sharp planes of his face still fresh in my mind, my skin still flushed, the sheets tangled around my legs, and I’d nearly gasped in embarrassment over it. Dreaming about him, of all people, a man I’d only met hours ago. A man so handsome I could barely look him in the eye without flushing. A man who wore all his vast experience in the rangy, confident movements of his body. A man whose friendly, innocent hug at the end of the night had felt like electricity to me, like being shocked awake after a long, unnatural slumber.
A man who also happens to be my best friend Kit’s brother.
Alex Averin.
Now he pauses as he steps across the threshold of Boneshaker’s, my favorite coffee shop not two blocks from Kit’s house, where he’s supposed to be staying for the weekend—where, I’ve decided, I’ll avoid until he leaves, since I’d basically gone acutely nonverbal in his presence. Between me and Zoe and Kit, my two closest friends, I’ve always been the quiet one, but last night I’d brought shyness to new heights, barely managing three full sentences over the course of dinner and dessert. I’d watched as Kit had beamed over him, proud of everything about her brother, and proud of everything that she was getting to show and tell him about her life here: her job, her newly-purchased house, even her budding friendship with Ben Tucker, a guy who I could already tell was more than half in love with her. And I’d watched as Zoe—cool and funny and unflappable—had traded stories with Alex of travel to Europe, to South America, even to Australia, where they’d both, apparently, visited the same koala refuge.
I’d just watched.
Watching. My speciality. For years, the only habit I was healthy enough to cultivate.
I return to that specialty now—so familiar, like I’m a wayward, crooked drawer that’s been pushed back into its track and now can slide easily into place, flush with its surroundings, barely noticeable. I turn my body in my chair slightly so that I’m not directly facing the door, arranging my book in a way that makes it possible for me to seem like I’m reading, though I’m still one hundred percent tracking him. As he moves toward the counter, the heads of all three women at a table beside me turn to watc
h him, one of them actually letting her mouth fall open a little.
I can’t say I blame her. He’s beautiful, that’s the thing—not just handsome, not just a strong jaw and a tall, fit leanness, broad shoulders and narrow hips, not just thick, jet-black hair that’s gorgeously messy, exactly as it was in my dream, exactly as I’d made it in my dream. He’s actually beautiful—smooth olive skin underneath his heavy stubble, and high, cut cheekbones that transform into something softer and kinder when he smiles. Full lips, white teeth, his right-side incisor a little crooked. Clear, bright green eyes that you can see across a room, framed with long, black lashes that leave a shadow on his skin when he lowers them.
From where I sit I watch him order, watch his mouth move: coffee, black. He pays in cash, shoves a dollar in the tip jar and the barista looks like she wants to propose marriage. He smiles at her and I try to telegraph her a message: Oh, I know. It hurts when he smiles like that.
He moves down the counter to wait for his coffee and I swivel again in my seat, curving my shoulders and looking down to my book again, hoping he doesn’t see me. Without the cover of Kit and Zoe, my awkwardness will seem worse—either panicked silence or a blurting non-sequitur, and I don’t think I could face his quizzical brow, his gentle smile of pitying encouragement, the same one he offered up last night across the table after I’d stumbled over answering a question as simple as Where did you grow up?
In my dream, though…he looked at me with total concentration. With desire.
I shake my head, force my eyes to focus, training them back at the top of the page of my textbook, so I can start reading all over again, since I’m sure I’ve lost every bit of information I read over in the minutes before he walked in.
“Hey,” comes a quiet, deep, already familiar voice from above me, and for a second I keep my eyes down, hope I’ve somehow developed actual powers of invisibility, rather than just your standard wallflower syndrome.
But I can feel him there, watching me, those thick black brows probably arranging themselves into the most charming little furrow. This again, he’s probably thinking.
When I turn to face him, to look up to meet those sea-glass eyes, my elbow knocks my textbook from the table, and Alex reaches a hand out, catching it easily at the spine, not even disrupting the steaming coffee he’s holding in his left hand. I think I let out a small groan of frustration, or of exasperation—I’m sure at any moment, after seeing that display of his reflexes, either the barista or the open-mouthed latte-drinker will just toss her panties across the room at him.
“Cultural Anthropology,” he says, looking down at the book he’s just rescued, his lips tipping up wryly, some ironic recognition. This renowned photojournalist who’s traveled the entire world, has seen it and so many of its cultures through his own eyes—who’s shaped, through his lens, the way other people see it—holding my little college textbook, my little lottery-induced dream of a college degree. It must seem—
“I always wanted to take a class like this,” he says, smiling down at me, and for a second I think about throwing my panties at him.
It feels like a good two and a half minutes of me simply blinking at him, adjusting to the handsome-glare his face gives off, but in actuality I’m pretty sure it’s only a few startled seconds before I manage a weak, “It’s a good class.”
He nods, gestures to the seat across from me. “Mind if I sit?”
“Oh,” I say, pulling my papers toward me, clearing space for him on the table. “Sure.” Inside my head there’s a tattoo of a thought: Don’t think about the dream.
“Thanks,” he says, sinking into his chair. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Don’t think about it, I tell myself again, hopelessly.
“Did you and Kit have a late night?” I feel ludicrously pleased at how normal and casual I’ve managed to sound. Now that the shock has worn off—or I guess now that my eyes have adjusted to his presence—I feel a bit more settled, ready to converse like a normal person.
“Sort of,” he says, and when he shifts in his seat I notice something for the first time. He has a bag with him—a sun-bleached canvas rucksack, one of its straps duct-taped, and as my eyes settle on it he reaches a hand down, tries to tuck it more tightly under the table.
“Are you—are you leaving already?” The disbelief in my voice—it seems to lash him like a whip. He snaps his head to the side to look out the window, inhaling sharply through his nose. “You’re supposed to stay for the whole weekend,” I add. Kit’s been preparing for Alex’s visit for days, ever since his quick, unexpected call to let her know he’d be in town—a call she’d greeted with such genuine excitement and hope that I’d immediately felt a prickle of unease. Never good luck, I’d thought, to look forward to something that much.
He looks back at me then, and I’m tempted to lower my eyes.
But Kit—Kit must be so disappointed.
“I got called in for a job,” he says, and it could be true. Alex shoots for The New York Times, for the AP, once, even, for National Geographic, photographs that Zoe and I ooh-ed and aah-ed over when Kit had shown them to us last year. But because I’m good—I’m so, so good at seeing every single thing, at watching—I notice it. I notice the way the corner of his mouth, right there on the left side, twitches. Barely a split second of movement, a pull of his lips that’d be entirely hidden from the casual observer.
“You’re lying.” I stare right into those eyes, those sea-glass eyes I’d avoided looking at last night, and I hope mine are burning right into his. I hope I’ve put into them all the accusation I mean to level at him. Kit’s heart is probably broken—all her plans for him this weekend, all the things she meant to show him about her new home. All the time she’s been waiting for him to come.
I remember: I can do more than just watch. When it comes to the people I love, I can do anything. “You can’t do this to her,” I say. “You can’t leave.”
The look he gives me—it’s nothing like what I saw in his face last night, nothing like the gentle, indulgent smiles he gave to Kit, nothing like the low, laughing surprise he’d had for Zoe’s bold sense of humor. Nothing even like the open curiosity in his eyes when he’d seen me for the first time.
It looks like anger.
“I can,” he says, and his voice is forceful. Unapologetic. So, so confident.
There’s a thick silence between us, the sounds of the café tinkling and vague. But I hear his voice like an echo.
I can.
It sounds so—it sounds so true. There isn’t anything stopping Alex—he’s healthy, he’s successful, he’s made his own way in the world. Someone—his sister, me, anyone, probably—may tell him you can’t, but he doesn’t have to listen.
He could get up and leave right now. He could pick up his rucksack and take his coffee with him, walk out this coffee shop’s doors. There’ll be a trail of women’s undergarments in his wake.
Instead he shifts in his seat, puts his elbows on the table, and holds his to-go cup between his hands. The movement puts him closer to me, the steam from his coffee wafting between us, warming the space between our bodies. For a split second I’m back in that dream, and I drop my eyes to the table. There’s a stray penny, tail-side up, beside his right forearm.
“Out there,” he says, nodding toward the door, his voice softer now, a still-rough texture to it that now doesn’t sound quite so unapologetic. “Out there is the thing I waited for my whole life.”
I press my lips together, roll them inward, a habit I seem to have picked up since I started my college classes. Trying not to over-participate, trying not to get a reputation as the eager adult degree student while the slackers in the back roll their eyes at me, hoping for an early release from class.
Alex’s eyes dip to my mouth, and suddenly I don’t care so much about seeming eager. I use a fingernail to tap out the curiosity I feel building in my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists. I hear the plink, plink of it against the ceramic. “What’s
that?” I ask, my voice hardly above a whisper.
And then he smiles. He smiles like he—like he somehow knows, like he heard me make that wish six months ago, the night Kit and Zoe and I had all joked about our possible lottery win, a win that became a shocking, I’m-still-not-over-it reality. The night I’d told my friends that all I’d want was an education.
“Freedom,” he says, and he could not have cut me deeper if he’d held a hot knife against my body.
My secret wish, the one I’d made silently that same night our numbers came up, the one I’m working so hard to make come true—with my winnings, with my college classes, with every small effort I make to be stronger, healthier, more independent.
Without ever leaving the sixty-five square miles of this city.
I lean back in my seat, lengthening the distance between us. I let the moment stretch a beat too long, my eyes on my mug, my book, the penny. Strangely, even though we don’t know each other well—at all, really—I can feel him waiting for me to argue, to push back. And when I finally meet his eyes, that’s what I see there.
Expectation. Anticipation.
Maybe not quite what I saw in my dream, but maybe not all that different, either.
But Alex isn’t who I thought he was, not if he’ll leave Kit this way. And his freedom isn’t the same as mine, not if it looks like this—a beat-up bag, a faraway look, no limitations, no attachments, no debts, no thought to who or what you leave behind.
I let go of that electric, curious heat he makes me feel. I replace it with all the disappointment I feel on behalf of my friend. I pull my book closer to me.
“I’d better get back to studying,” I say, keeping my gaze level, uninterested, aloof—the corollary gift of my shyness for moments like these.
He doesn’t wait long. Maybe a few seconds of taut silence before he stands again and hoists his bag over one shoulder, his cup of coffee still steaming in his hand. Oblivious, clearly, to the way so many eyes in the café are newly drawn to him.
Luck of the Draw Page 30
