Captivated (Stranded) (3 page)

She laid down the knife and circled him to stand at the stove. He cut a generous pat of butter into his skillet.

“Melt that,” he said. “Coat the pan.” He picked it up to show her how.

She watched, nodding, and waited for him to set it down before she took it up herself. “Mmm,” she said after a moment, “smells good.”

Everything
in his apartment smelled good. She let out a low chuckle, and his dick twitched. He stepped closer to the counter and hacked at the vegetables. “Pour the rice in and coat it with the butter. Then stir it ’til it browns a little.”

“So that’s why the rice here tastes so good.” She stirred it. “I thought it was saffron or something.”

“Just butter,” he said. “They use saffron, too, but it doesn’t have a lot of flavor. Or maybe my tongue’s just not that sophisticated.”

Way to downplay your tongue skills, dumbass.

“Simple’s best,” she said.

They fell into silence for a while, Laine calmly browning the rice, Evan trying furiously to think of something to say. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to make small talk. Not sure he’d been good at it even then. Finally Laine broke the stillness.

“How’s this?” she asked, showing him the rice.

“Good.” He pointed with his knife to the kettle steaming at the back of the range. “Put in four cups of that,” he said and handed her the metal cup he had used to measure the rice, then reached for the bottle of Spanish white she had chosen. “Put in half a cup of this too. And one of those.”

She followed his nod to the jar of yellow-foiled stock cubes next to the range.

The oven buzzed, preheated. While Laine took care of the rice, Evan arranged the vegetables in a pan and drizzled them with olive oil.

“Ooo, give me a little?”

He looked up to find her hand outstretched, palm up. She cocked her chin at it, so he shrugged and poured a small amount into her hand. She tipped it into her mouth. Then she licked her palm.

Jesus.

It must have shown on his face (thank God she didn’t look at his crotch) because she gave him a sheepish smile. “I like olive oil,” she said.

“Apparently.”

“I don’t pay for the good stuff at home. But it’s so cheap here.” She closed her eyes. “And so good.”

He had to laugh. “You want more? I’ll pour you a cup.”

She shielded her face for a moment, and he barely kept himself from pulling her hand away. “You must think I’m a freak. Leave me alone for two seconds, and I’ll drink all your olive oil.”

“Nah,” he said, “it’s pretty fucking good.” He tossed the vegetables in the oil. Salt and pepper next. He held up his hands. “Can I get your help here?”

Her eyes went wide at his oily fingers, and she looked at him with a funny expression.

“What? No,” he said. “Salt and pepper. I can’t do it. Would you?”

A breath gusted out of her, and she took up the spice grinders.

Shit. Had that breath been relief? Because now all he could think of was her taking his middle finger into her mouth and swiping it clean with a hot, wet tongue. But the thought obviously disgusted her.

He tossed the vegetables to within an inch of their sorry lives and slid them into the oven. Laine washed her hands, then gave him a wide berth so he could do the same. Avoiding her eyes, he set a lid over the rice.

He cleaned the cutting board and the knife. Straightened the salt and pepper. Closed the bouillon jar.

Then ran out of things to do.

“Wine?” she asked.

“Please,” he said and hoped she couldn’t hear how his heart was trying to bust its way out of his ribs.

*

He was nervous, so Laine gave him a good pour. They had barely settled at the table when he got back up to root through the cabinet. She took the opportunity to admire his ass, gripping the stem of her glass to keep from grabbing two handfuls of firm, male flesh. When he turned back to the table, he brought a small glass jar.

“Marcona almonds,” he said, opening the jar and setting it before her. “Fried in olive oil.”

It might have been a casual comment if not for her stupid hand-licking earlier, and the way his mouth compressed on one side. She laughed, and then he did the same in a husky sort of way, and some of the air jittering between them soothed itself back into plain old dust motes in an attic room.

She took an almond and let it slide between thumb and forefinger. A light coating of oil, and a tiny bit of grit—salt, she guessed. She popped it into her mouth and caught him watching her. He looked down quickly and took an almond for himself. Three, actually, which he threw into his mouth.

“What brought you to Barcelona?” she asked.

He gave her an extra-cagey glance. “Would you be satisfied if I said ‘a train’?”

She felt herself smile at his wry tone. “Probably not.”

“Didn’t think so.” He swirled his wine once, tapped the bottom of the glass on the wooden tabletop, then took a gulp. “I was army. Got injured. Decided to travel some on the way home.”

“And got distracted by the sex museum?” she teased.

To her delight he blushed, his right cheek burning a dull red. “Something like that.”

“No, really. Why Barcelona?”

His mouth compressed again. He was deciding how much to tell her.

She waited.

“I liked the art,” he said. “Not here. Well, okay, here too.” He smirked, in a sheepish way. “But all over the city. It’s just so different from anything back home.”

She nodded and sipped her wine, hoping he wouldn’t stop. Patience rewarded her.

“I was discharged in Germany. And that was cool—best beer I ever had,” he said, and she realized his smirk was actually a lopsided smile, kept off-balance by the immobility of his grafts. “A buddy there saw me sketching one day and said I should check out Italy. Florence, Rome. So I did, and they were great.” He shrugged. “Amazing, actually. But I was restless, I guess. Decided to hit a few more cities. I figured I’d check out Madrid, then Paris, then maybe Amsterdam. But I got off the train here for lunch and didn’t get back on.”

It took her a few seconds to realize he’d stopped talking. She was so caught up in his voice, warm and a little rough, and the way a dimple would appear in his right cheek, then disappear, making her wonder if he’d had a matching one on the other side before—

And then he looked up to find her staring at his face and immediately shifted to put the scarred side out of view.

Idiot. Get him back.

She chose an almond. “So you’ve seen Gaudi’s work, right?”

He nodded tightly. Turning to the oven, he opened the door to check on the vegetables. His shoulders still looked stiff when he turned back—not all the way, damn it—and took another drink of wine.

Try again.
“I love
Sagrada Familia
. The way he designed the towers upside-down with weights and string?”

Evan nodded again and seemed to relax into his chair, slightly. “Park Güell sold me.”

“Yeah?”

“I got off the train and went looking for something more than a train-station sandwich. So I was walking up one of the streets and saw that crazy apartment he did. The one where the balconies look like alien shark jaws?”

She laughed. “Yes!”

“Well, some guy saw me staring at them and said I should walk up to the Park. So I thought, What the hell, I can catch the next train.” He shook his head.

“But you didn’t.”

“Nope.”

“So where’s home?”

“Ohio,” he said. “Little place no one’s heard of.” He tipped his glass toward her. “How about you?”

“Iowa.”

“Iowa?” he scoffed, frowning at her and forgetting, apparently, that he was giving her his full face. With one and a half eyebrows, his frown looked interrupted.
He
looked cocky.

“What about it, Ohio?”

He flinched at that, and the lopsided smile cam back. She was in so much trouble here.

Keep your cool.
“What’s so surprising about Iowa?”

“Nothing, it’s just…I thought you were going to say somewhere on the east coast.”

“Why’s that?” she asked, not minding putting him on the spot a bit.

“I don’t know,” he said, avoiding her eyes, waving vaguely at her clothes. “You look…sophisticated.” He frowned, seeming embarrassed, but she wasn’t sure whether it was at his word choice or the fact that she’d drawn it out of him at all.

“And Iowa doesn’t do sophisticated?”

“Iowa does corn,” he said dryly. “Same as Ohio. We do corn and astronauts.”

“Oh, come on. You have
The
Ohio State.”

He laughed. “That we do.”

The oven buzzed, interrupting whatever he might have said next, and the minutes following gave her another chance to watch him unseen. He moved unselfconsciously as he plated their dinners, the muscles in his shoulders and triceps forming distinct contours under his sleeves. When he reached for something in the cabinet, his hair touched his collar. The right corner of his jaw held a slight shadow of stubble. Wondering how it might feel against her neck had Laine squirming in her chair and refilling her wine.

He lit the candle on the table, and they tucked into their dinners. After a few hums of appreciation on her part, they ate in relative quiet. The vegetables were tender, with crispy, caramelized edges that shattered on her tongue, sending dual impressions of
fire
and
sweet
through her senses. The rice was rich but not cloying, hearty without being heavy, and with a spice palette just different enough from what she was used to to taste exotic.

“Who taught you to cook?” she asked.

“My dad. He was good at cooking on the cheap and making it stick.”

“Is he…still around?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s a plumber.”

Laine laughed. Of course he was.

“What’s funny?”

“So was my boyfriend. A plumber, that is.”

Something shuttered his eyes. His “Oh yeah?” sounded too casual.

“When I left, he was moving into big contractor jobs. Apartments and stuff like that.”

He nodded, still guarded. “Dad does some of that, but more on the repair end than installation.”

“He didn’t want me to come here.”

Why did she want so badly to tell him that? Was it to make herself look strong? To get another guy’s opinion? Or was she testing him to see if he agreed with Drew?

At any rate, she had his full attention now. He had squared his shoulders toward her. One hand remained on his wine glass; the other lay flat on the tabletop, as if he was trying to keep it from fidgeting. Or maybe he was bracing himself. She charged ahead.

“I thought maybe he’d be excited for me. He wouldn’t have gotten to come with me, so I knew that wasn’t going to go over well. But he was so…snarky about it. Said I’d be spending three months fondling moldy old sex toys. I tried to explain what the museum is, why the archive’s important, because it is. I’ve been dying to come here since I heard about it in undergrad. But Drew just saw it as me trying to leave him.”

“Was he right?”

She started, surprised. “I don’t know. But maybe,” she admitted. “We were high school sweethearts. He was tough and protective, and when I was fifteen, that made me feel, well, protected. But protective became possessive, and tough became stubborn.” She tried to gauge his expression. Was he siding with Drew? “We got through my college and grad school, and when the university hired me, the salary and benefits were too good to complain about. He still called me a nerd”—Evan frowned; that had to be good, right?—“but he actually seemed proud to have a professor for a girlfriend.” She shrugged. “And I was proud of him, too. He managed to build a business in a completely crap economy, and he’s good at what he does. But we weren’t right, and his reaction to this trip was my final clue. So I told him I’d rather do something I loved without his support than not do it just to keep him. And I ended it.”

He nodded and the hand on the table curled into a fist. Then the dimple flashed, unexpected.

“What?”

He shook his head. “That’s not how it went down when he told his friends.”

“How’d it go down?”

Now it
was
a smirk, but he was sharing it with her. “When he told his buddies, you realized how wrong you’d been and you wept and wailed and begged him to take you back. In the front yard. On your knees.”

Her smile had been growing as he described it, until
on your knees
. He seemed to hear the words—see
something
to go with them—just after she did. His gaze snagged in hers for a long moment, and she hoped he was imagining the same thing she was: her, on her knees before
him
.

Fuck.

He broke eye contact first and cleared his throat. “Don’t worry, they’ll know he’s full of shit. You don’t seem like the begging type.”

Try me,
she thought.

But he shifted them back to the relatively safer topic of her research. She told him about her grad work, how it had evolved from a general interest in how people documented sexuality to a fascination with captivity narratives, factual and fictional.

“And other people are interested in that too? Enough to pay you to study it, I mean.”

She shrugged. “We’ll see. I convinced the university to fund this trip, but any future research will depend partly on what I find here.”

“Anything promising yet?”

She nodded. “Yeah, and a few leads to documents in other places.” She squinted at her wine. The flame on the votive fractured through it like sunlight through a prism. “I really don’t want to go back empty-handed, you know?”

His finger tapped his own glass. “Yeah.”

She might have asked him what he meant, but then a huge yawn caused his jaw to pop. He caught her amused expression and ducked his chin. “Early riser.”

“I should let you get to bed.” She began to gather her dishes. “Is there a couch downstairs or something? A break room?”

“A break area, yeah, but no couch. You can have my bed.”

She glanced up sharply. “I can’t do that.”

“Course you can. I insist. I don’t get a lot of guests,” he said with a quirk to his lips.