He smirked back. “Not that I don’t appreciate a good poke at the redneck heritage, but this isn’t the place I wanted help with. I was talking about the coffeeshop down on the end. The landlord’s being a dick, and says he won’t sell for anything less than a fucking ransom. The proprietors are club friends. The Cooks.”
Ian’s brows jumped in interest. “Related to the charming Miss Cook your wife asked me to hire, I take it.”
Ghost nodded. “Her parents.”
Ian tipped his head, auburn hair sliding in the sunlight. “Turning over a new leaf? Adopting whole families now?”
“You can’t adopt whole-ass adults.”
“Not even me?” An innocent tone, but his eyes betrayed a stroke of true feeling; a gratefulness that Ghost found himself looking away from, to keep from embarrassing the boy too much.
Predictably, Ian cleared his throat and was himself again. “Do you want me to lean on the landlord? I’m honestly flattered that you think I’m more intimidating than you.”
“I want you to buy the building. After you lean on the landlord to get the price down – that shithead doesn’t deserve to rob anybody, not even you.”
“Hm. Am I to assume you’d want me to allow Cook’s Coffee to stay?”
“Yeah, that’s the whole point of it.”
Ian stroked his chin with gloved fingers in a movement Ghost knew was calculated.
“Don’t get all supervillain on me,” he muttered, and Ian’s hand dropped, and his cheeks colored. “If you don’t wanna do it, just tell me, that’s fine. But since you’re buying up half the real estate in Knoxville anyway, I figured it might be a good investment.”
“Is it turning a profit?”
“You’d have to ask the Cooks. They have a decent crowd.”
“This entire row of buildings is two stories. What’s above the coffeeshop?”
“Dunno. But I think it’s empty.”
Ian’s fingers twitched, like he wanted to stroke his chin again, but managed to restrain himself. That was the problem with posturing so much: it became habit. A thought Ghost entertained while he managed not to rub at the back of his neck, for once. “Why isn’t the club buying it?”
“We could swing it,” Ghost said, “but it would make things a little tighter than I want, and we’re nowhere near done with renovations on the places we’ve already bought. Whereas you could buy it with whatever pocket change you’ve got on you.”
“Don’t hate me because I’m rich, darling,” Ian sang, chuckling, then grew thoughtful. “I’ll consider it. Seriously,” he added, in response to Ghost’s look. “When have you ever known me to pass up the chance to gain more power?”
“You make a good point,” Ghost said, dryly.
“Darling, don’t I always.”
~*~
Of all the people Leah expected to find in the coffeeshop when she walked in that evening, her boss wasn’t one of them.
She halted just inside the door, bell jangling behind her, brought up short by the sight of Ian standing in front of the counter, taking an obvious, though thankfully appreciative, look around the shop, as elegant and well-dressed as ever, hair so deeply auburn it was nearly brown in the soft lighting. The big guy she’d pegged as a bodyguard before stood to the right of him, and a slender, equally elegant young man with dark hair and glasses on the left.
Both of Leah’s parents stood on the other side of the counter. Mom looked a little awestruck. Dad looked mistrustful.
“Bruce, you’re too intimidating,” she heard Ian say as she approached. He waved at the big man. “You may wait outside.”
The guard – Bruce – nodded and turned obediently.
Ian glanced after him, and caught sight of Leah, his smile immediate and sharp. “Miss Cook. There you are. I was just introducing myself to your parents.”
“That’s…nice. You can just call me Leah,” she said, faintly, too stunned – and slowly filling with worry – to be anything like eloquent. “Um. Mr. Shaman. Did you come for coffee?”
“Of course. And, I must confess, a bit of business.” He touched the arm of the man beside him. “My husband, Alec. Alec, darling, this is my new accountant over at the in-town office.”
Alec smiled warmly, and offered his hand right away. “Lovely to meet you.” He was American, but something about his voice told her he’d picked up on some of his husband’s speech patterns, the way he pronounced lovely.
“Hi,” she said, stupidly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cook,” Ian said, turning back to her parents. “I was wondering if there was somewhere we might talk privately.”
~*~
Practice with Elijah gave Carter a chance to burn off some of his nerves and focus on something else for a little while. But by the time he parked his bike in front of Cook’s Coffee, his stomach was full of butterflies again.
“Idiot,” he chastised himself, as he unsnapped and hung up his helmet, but he was smiling. He took a moment, standing on the sidewalk, to try and scrape his sweat-damp hair into some kind of order and get his wide, stupid smile down to something pleasant and normal. He even scoped his dim reflection in the shop’s windows. He was wearing workout gear, but, to be perfectly honest, it showed off his physique, and he was hoping that was a point in his favor.
Inside, Leah wasn’t at her usual table, but at the register, an apron hastily tied over her work clothes, her gaze nervously darting toward the hallway that led back to the Employees Only section of the shop.
“Everything okay?” he asked, as he approached.
She sent him a fast, distracted smile. “Maybe. I hope.” She leaned over the counter and whispered, “Ian’s here. He wanted to have a private discussion with my parents.”
Carter bit back a wince. Ghost was nothing if not efficient. “Yeah. About that. I talked to Ghost about the club maybe stepping in and buying the building.”
“Uh, Ghost isn’t the one who showed up.”
“I know. He thinks Ian ought to buy it.”
Her eyes widened. “Why?”
“Finances, I think. I dunno. He and Walsh and Ian are the only ones in the know about money stuff these days.”
She let out a breath and nodded, slowly. “Okay. Well…that’s still a good thing, right?” She propped her hands on her hips and glanced up at him for confirmation. “Ian’s in tight with the club, Ian has lots of money. Ian came here, to talk to my parents first, which shows that he cares what they think, right? So this is good.” She nodded again, like she was trying to convince herself.
“Probably, yeah.”
“Probably doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I thought you were the one who said you liked Ian. That Ava and I were overreacting when you got a job with him.”
“I did, yeah…but now I’m working for him, and my parents are going to be paying him rent, maybe, if this works out, and that’s just a whole lot of fancy British man in my life, suddenly. I don’t know how to feel about that.”
A thought occurred – a spark of something that felt dangerously like jealousy. “Wait. You’re not into him or something, are you?” Maybe her nerves were about infatuated intimidation, and he really didn’t want to think about that. “You know he’s gay, right?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, he’s here with his husband, you goober. I’m worried about the fact that this fancy British man is really rich and powerful, and I have no idea if we’re on his friend list, or his People To Use list.”
“Oh.”
“You see my dilemma.”
“I don’t think he’s gonna do anything sketchy,” he said, “not to you guys. Ava and I were worried, yeah,” he admitted, in response to her raised-brow look. “But he’s trustworthy. If Ghost thinks it’s a good idea for him to buy the building, then it is.”
A glint of red drew his attention, and he glanced over to see Ian and Alec emerging from the back hall, Bruce melting out of the shadows to tail them, like always. Ian spotted him right away, and his small, c
urving little smile left Carter uneasy. I see right through you, that smile said.
They didn’t linger, thankfully. “Miss Cook, lovely to see you outside of work,” Ian said with a quick, correct bow before his little crew swept out the door. Carter wondered how he’d missed the Jag on his way in; too distracted by his own plans, he guessed.
“I can’t believe he and Ghost get along,” Leah mused when they were gone, shaking her head.
“Nobody can. It’s weird.”
She chuckled, and some of tension she’d been holding melted off her face.
Good, he thought. He didn’t like seeing her tense, or worried.
Boy, he was in trouble, wasn’t he?
“Leah–” he started, and her parents came bustling back behind the counter.
Her dad was scowling to himself, but her mom was beaming.
“Leah!” Marie gripped her daughter’s arms. “He’s going to buy the building and let us keep running the shop! He wants to put in a bookshop upstairs, even! Nothing’s been there for years, and a bookshop will be perfect!”
Leah smiled back, though less manically. “That’s awesome! Why is Dad making that face, though?”
“He’s too fancy,” Marshall said. “I don’t trust that.”
“Oh, hush.” His wife swatted his arm. “He’s just being him,” she told Leah. “Don’t mind him. Oh, Carter! Hi!” She was bubbly as a schoolgirl. To Leah: “Here, sweetie, give me that apron back and you kids go sit down. Do you want the usual, Carter?”
“Um, yes, ma’am.”
Five minutes later, they were seated at Leah’s usual table, him with his sandwich and tea, Leah with a bagel and a latte.
She looked a little shocked. “So that’s happening, I guess.”
“Looks like.”
She licked a bit of cream cheese off her thumb, then propped her chin on her fist and stared at him, a small, enigmatic smile plucking at the corners of her mouth.
“What?” he asked, prickling with a sudden awareness.
“I’m just…I told you this time yesterday about my parents’ problem, and twenty-four hours later there’s a solution. It’s…stunning, actually.” She sighed, and maybe it was his imagination, but he thought it sounded dreamy. “Lean Dogs really do get stuff done around here, huh?”
Lean Dogs meant all of them, and in this case even included Ian, but her gaze was fixed on him – was warm for him. So it felt personal, her attention – the way she was so clearly, openly impressed.
His throat was tight. He set his sandwich down and coughed discreetly into his fist, wanting to move beneath her gaze. Not to get away, no, but keeping still was hard, suddenly. His palms tingled, and his heart gave a few hard beats, and it was that same tension that had happened at Ava’s house. The same insistent, nearly choking urge to grab her and kiss her.
It had been like that with Jazz at first, way back when. Shocking, heated need. But that was where the similarities ended.
“All I did was ask,” he said.
“And delivered.” She gave him one last look, her gaze warm, and appraising – lingering, unmistakably, on his mouth a moment – before she sat back and reached for her bagel.
The moment had all the markers of slipping away. She’d ask him about how working with Elijah was going, or he’d ask her how her day at work had been, and they’d slip back beneath this sudden swell of mutual something else, back into the safe, warm waters of friendship.
Fuck it. If he could have the conversation he’d had last night with Jazz, he could have this one – even if it was alarmingly more nerve-wracking.
Endings hurt. Beginnings left him breathless.
“Leah,” he said, too firmly. Her head and brows lifted, surprise evident on her face. “Do you wanna have dinner this weekend?”
She stared at him, frozen.
“Not dinner like this.” He gestured to the table between them. “I mean a real dinner. Where I’ll be wearing real clothes, and I’ll pay. I mean – a date. Do you want to go on a date?”
She stared another moment, and then blinked, her gaze dropping. She set her bagel down slowly, and took a few breaths. When she lifted her face, her jaw was tense in a way that didn’t bode well.
His stomach sank.
“You want to go on a date?” Her tone was careful – it reminded him of Elijah’s tone, in those moments when he was trying to get a read on Carter. Unsure of his intentions.
He nodded, pulse kicking up another notch. “Yeah.”
A pause. “With me?”
“Yeah.”
She frowned. “Really?”
He’d run at least a dozen possibilities through his head, and in none of them had this conversation unfolded like this. “Yes, really.” He fought his own impulse to frown back at her. Tried to keep his voice even and encouraging. “Why do you look like that’s so hard to believe?”
“Because it is.”
He sucked in a breath. “Leah–”
“It’s not that I’m – that I’m not interested,” she pressed on, stumbling over the words. “But, Carter…you got your nose broken for sleeping with someone else’s crush. You have a not-girlfriend.”
“Not anymore. I ended things with her.”
Her brows flew up again, voice getting high. “For me?”
“For me, because I’m not happy,” he said, sharper than intended.
Her expression softened – to one of sympathy. “I know you’re not. But I don’t think throwing yourself at a new relationship–”
He leaned back so hard and so fast the legs of his chair scraped loudly on the tile. “Is that what you think?”
She froze again.
“That I’m just experimenting? Shopping around until I’m less sad?”
She swallowed, and at first he couldn’t place the sheen in her eyes. Quietly, she said, “Yeah, that’s what I think. And I think I’m familiar, and safe. I’m easy. So. No, thanks, I don’t want a date.”
He realized what it was, then, that gleam of emotion: it was fear.
He gripped the edge of the table with white-knuckled force, and his sleeves felt too tight over flexed biceps. He was breathing hard. And when he glanced around, he saw that he’d gotten loud enough that customers were looking at him. Curious, alarmed. And, in Marshall Cook’s case, working toward furious.
“Sorry,” he muttered, stood, and bolted.
~*~
Leah sat very still for a few minutes – save waving her mom off with a murmured “everything’s fine.” Everything was not fine, and it was definitely her fault.
What did I do?
Ava warned her – well, more like told her – after the potluck that Carter was, in her words, interested.
In me?
Oh, yeah. Did you not pick up on the way he was staring at you? Those were some mutual stares, by the way, don’t try to hide it. I know chemistry when I see it.
And Leah knew it too, and had been feeling it…but it was one thing to share long looks, and wonder, and dance around, never really touching on what was happening. It was quite another to be asked out to dinner twenty feet away from her parents.
She’d panicked. Not in a stuttering, blushing, make-a-fool-of-herself way. A more controlled panic. She’d thought about Jason, about his assertions that they’d drifted apart, and that he needed to undergo some self-exploration. Thought about Carter’s nose dripping blood down onto his shirt in Maggie’s office, and Tenny’s sneer, and Maggie’s clucking. A guy didn’t go from fucking everything in sight to wanting to try a real, grown-up relationship in the span of a few weeks. That only happened in novels.
But the longer she sat there, staring at her long-cold bagel, the more she could acknowledge that she’d freaked out, plain and simple. And that, in the midst of it, despite knowing that her arguments had been good, she’d definitely insulted Carter, and probably hurt him, too. She’d seen the evidence of his unhappiness up close and personal, and then watched, over the past few weeks, as he began slowly to bloss
om again.
She’d handled it horribly, and there was no undoing it. She wanted to smack herself.
She sat, silently beating herself up for who knew how long; but when a fresh, steaming latte landed on the table in front of her, she glanced up to see that all but one lone patron had left, the closed sign had been turned in the window, and her mom was sitting down across from her and unlacing her apron. All her earlier exuberance had been replaced by a deep, motherly concern.
“What happened, sweetie?” she asked, softly.
Leah darted a glance to the counter, but her dad had gone in the back. Dustin was sweeping up beneath the machines.
“Carter left in an awful big hurry,” Marie pressed. “And you look miserable.”
Leah sighed and reached gratefully for the hot latte. “I’m an idiot.”
“Definitely not.”
“Carter asked me out.”
Marie’s brows went up. “Like on a date?”
“Like on a date.”
“And you said…”
“That I didn’t think he really wanted to go out with me. That his love life is so screwed up, and he’s depressed, and he was looking for a safe option.”
“Oh.” Marie’s eyes widened. “Well, that’s…”
“Bad, I know.”
“Terrible, I was going to go with terrible.”
Leah groaned and dropped her face into her hands. “You should have seen his face, Mom.”
“I kinda did. He looked really upset.”
He’d looked devastated. And wounded. It had been a big leap, asking her outright like that. No ambiguous hanging out or hooking up. A date. He’d said dinner, and that he would pay for it. It had been comically juvenile, and terribly grown-up and endearing all at once.
Homecoming (Dartmoor Book 8) Page 23