Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor 4)

“Of course,” she said. “Your Stoli is right over there.”

“Thank you.” His gaze didn’t move from hers. He extended a hand. “Jason.”

“Justine.” Her fingers were swallowed in a deep grip that sent a jolt of warmth to her elbow. “I hope your room is satisfactory.”

“Yes. However…” Releasing her hand, he said, “I’m curious about something.” He nodded toward the glazed earthenware flowerpot on the table. It contained a double-stemmed moth orchid, each stem bearing an inflorescence of snowy-white blooms. “I asked for an arrangement of white flowers. But this—”

“You don’t like it? I’m sorry. First thing in the morning I’ll get you another—”

“No. I—”

“It would be no trouble—”

“Justine.” He lifted a hand in the peremptory gesture of a man who wasn’t used to being interrupted. She fell instantly silent. “I like the orchid,” he said. “I just want to know why you chose it.”

“Oh. Well, it’s nicer to have a living, breathing plant in the room instead of a cut bouquet. And I thought an orchid would go with the Klimt artwork.”

“It does. Clean, elegant…”—a barely perceptible pause—“suggestive.”

Justine smiled wryly. The orchid bloom, with plush petals resembling lips and furled folds and delicate apertures, was nothing short of flower porn. “If there’s nothing else,” she said, “I’ll be going now.”

“Do you have to be somewhere?”

She glanced at him in bemusement. “Not really.”

“Then stay.”

Justine blinked and knitted her fingers together. “I was told you’re not much on small talk.”

“It’s not small talk if it’s someone I want to talk to.”

She gave him a carefully neutral smile. “But you must be tired.”

“I’m always tired.” Jason gripped the back of the chair, lifted it easily with one hand, and placed it near the bed. He sat on the edge of the mattress, and gestured to the chair. “Have a seat.”

Another command. Justine was half amused, half annoyed, thinking that he was entirely too used to telling people what to do. Why did he want to talk to her? Was he hoping to find out something about Zoë or Alex, something he could use during the negotiations for the Dream Lake development?

“Only for a few minutes,” she said, lowering to the chair. “It’s been a long day.” Pressing her knees together and folding her hands in her lap, she looked at him expectantly.

Jason Black was so darkly beautiful, so striking in his cool self-assurance, that he seemed more like a fantasy figure than an actual human being. He appeared to be on the early side of his thirties, wearing an air of disenchantment like a bulletproof vest. “Too handsome for his own good” was how Priscilla had put it … but it would have been more accurate to say he was too handsome for anyone’s good.

“Why are you staying here?” she asked bluntly. “You could have chartered a luxury yacht and moored it in the harbor. Or gotten a hotel penthouse in Seattle and flown in for the day.”

“I’m not the luxury-yacht type. And the inn looked like the right place for a vacation while we negotiate terms for the Dream Lake project.”

Justine smiled at that. “You’re not on vacation.”

One dark brow lifted slightly. “I’m not?”

“No, a vacation is when you spend entire days doing nothing productive. You take pictures of scenery, buy stuff you don’t need, eat and drink too much, sleep late.”

“That sounds…”—he paused in search of the right word—“grotesque.”

“You don’t like to relax,” she said rather than asked.

“I don’t see the point.”

“Maybe the point is that every now and then you should take a break to look back and enjoy what you’ve accomplished.”

“I haven’t accomplished enough to be able to enjoy it.”

“You’re the head of a big company and you’re a gazillionaire. Most people wouldn’t complain about that.”

“What I meant,” he said evenly, “is that I can’t take credit for the company’s success. I have a good team. And we’ve had some luck.” He took one of the vodka shots and nudged the silver tray toward her. “Here.”

Justine blinked. “You’re asking me to have a drink with you?”

“Yes.”

She gave a disconcerted laugh.

His eyes narrowed. “Why is that funny?”

“Usually when you invite a person to do something, you don’t give orders. ‘Sit there, do this, have that…’”

“How do you want me to say it?”

“You could try something like ‘Would you like to have the other shot of vodka?’”

“But if I asked you that way, you might turn me down.”

“Do you ever get turned down?” she asked skeptically.

“It’s been known to happen.”

“I find that hard to believe. Anyway, I’m not good at following orders. I need to be asked.”

Jason’s gaze was steady and intent on hers. After a moment he asked, “Would you stay and have a drink with me?”

Heat climbed up her cheeks until the skin felt tight and burnished. “Yes, thank you.” She reached out to take the vodka. “Do you usually drink both shots?”

“Sometimes I only need one. It helps me wind down at the end of the day. If I still can’t get to sleep after that, I have the second shot.”

“Have you ever tried herb tea? A hot bath?”

“I’ve tried everything. Pills, progressive relaxation, sleep music, books about golf. I’ve counted sheep until even the sheep can’t stay awake.”

“How long have you had insomnia?”

“Since birth.” Finespun amusement played at the corners of his mouth. “But there are benefits. I’m a champ at online Scrabble. And I’ve seen some great sunrises.”

“Maybe you’ll have luck getting some sleep while you’re here. The island’s quiet, especially at night.”

“I hope so.” But he sounded unconvinced. It wasn’t external stimuli that kept him awake.

Lifting the small glass to her nose, Justine sniffed cautiously and detected a slightly sweet odor like cut hay. “I’ve never had straight vodka before.” A cautious sip of the glacier-cold liquid set her upper lip on fire. “Wow. That burns.”

“Don’t sip it. Take it in one swallow.”

“I can’t,” she protested.

“Yes you can. Breathe out, knock it back, and wait ten or fifteen seconds before breathing in. That keeps it from burning.” To demonstrate, he downed his shot efficiently. She could see the movement of his swallow at the front of his throat, where his skin was smooth and sun glazed.

Tearing her gaze away, Justine concentrated on the tiny glass in her hand. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and expelled her breath. Swallowing the vodka, she tried to hold her breath, but her lungs spasmed as if they were about to explode. Giving up, she took a deep gasp of air, and was instantly sorry as her throat was scorched with wintry fire. She choked, her eyes watering.

“You breathed too soon,” Jason said.

A laughing cough escaped her before she could reply. “I have this habit of needing to take in oxygen at regular intervals.” She shook her head, wiping a trace of moisture from beneath her eyes. “Why vodka? Wine is so much nicer.”

“Vodka is efficient. Wine takes too long.”

“You’re right,” Justine said. “Vile, inefficient cabernet—I can’t believe all the time I’ve wasted on it.”

He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Vodka also makes food taste better.”

“Seriously? How?”

“Ethyl alcohol is a solvent for flavor chemicals. If you eat something right after a sip of vodka, the flavor is stronger and lasts a longer time on your taste buds.”

Justine was intrigued. “I’d like to try that.”

“It works best with spicy or salty food. Something like caviar or smoked salmon.”

“We don’t have caviar. But we can almost always put together a cold plate.” Justine studied his inscrutable face. “You probably didn’t go out to dinner with the others, did you? I’ll bet you stayed in your room and made phone calls.”

“I stayed here,” he admitted.

“Are you hungry?”

The question seemed to merit careful consideration. “I could eat,” he finally said.

Without a doubt, he was the most guarded person she had ever met. Did he ever relax and let go? It was hard to imagine. She wondered what he sounded like when he laughed.

“Hey,” she said gently, following an impulse. “When was the last time you raided a pantry?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Why don’t you come downstairs with me? I’m hungry, too. We’ll find something to eat. Besides, I owe you a second shot of vodka.”

To her surprise—and undoubtedly his—he agreed.

Five

Jason sat at the scarred wooden table and glanced around the kitchen. It was a spacious and cheerful room with painted cabinets, retro cherry-printed wallpaper, and soapstone counters. The massive pantry was filled with baking ingredients stored in penny-candy jars, and canned goods stacked three and four rows deep.

He watched as Justine unearthed glass Mason jars filled with pickled vegetables and brought them to the table.

Pulling a bottle of Stolichnaya from the freezer, she set it in front of Jason along with two glasses. “You pour,” she said, and went to slice a baguette into delicate ovals. He could barely tear his gaze from her long enough to comply.

So far in their brief acquaintance, Justine Hoffman had teased and mocked him in a way that no one else dared. She had no idea how much latitude he was giving her, how easily he could have crushed her. But the truth was, she interested him more than anyone had in a very long time.

She was a beautiful woman, with a slender build, long, dark hair and fine skin, and a delicately angular face. She gestured as she talked. Had there been a blackboard in front of her, it would have been erased several times over by now. He should have found that annoying, except that he couldn’t stop imagining ways to slow her down with his mouth, hands, body.

A background check had revealed a woman who wasn’t given to excesses of any kind. She had grown up without a father, which would have made her more likely to have had behavioral problems, drop out of school, abuse alcohol or drugs. But there had been no signs of trouble. No credit issues. No prolific sexual history, only a couple of quiet relationships, neither of which had lasted more than a year. No arrest records, medical issues, or addictions. Only a parking ticket issued by her college’s campus security. So the usual things that made people tick—lust, greed, fear—none of that seemed to apply to Justine Hoffman.

But everyone had something to hide. And everyone wanted something they didn’t have.

In Justine’s case, he knew what the first thing was. The second thing, however … that was the question mark.

Standing at the table, Justine arranged food on a large sectioned plate. “You’re a vegetarian, right?”

“When it’s possible.”

“Did you start eating that way when you went to stay in the Zen monastery?”

“How do you know about the monastery?”

“It’s on your Wikipedia page.”

He frowned. “I’ve tried to get rid of that page. The administrators keep overturning the deletion. Apparently a person’s right to privacy doesn’t bother them.”

“It’s hard enough for regular people to have privacy these days. It must be impossible for someone like you.” Justine unwrapped a wedge of cheese and set it on a cutting board. She began to cut it into thin translucent slices. “So did you become a vegetarian for karmic reasons? You got worried you might come back as a chicken or something?”

“No, it was what they served at the monastery. And I liked it.”

Holding up a hard-boiled egg, Justine asked, “Are eggs and dairy okay?”

“They’re fine.”

Justine loaded the plate with pickled yellow wax beans and cauliflower, salted Marcona almonds, buttery green Spanish olives, coral slivers of home-cured salmon, hard-boiled farm eggs, translucent triangles of Manchego cheese, a fat gleaming wedge of triple-crème Brie, a handful of plump dried figs. The plate was accompanied by a basket of baguette slices and salted rosemary crackers.

“Bon appétit,” she said cheerfully, and sat beside him.

As they ate and talked, Jason found himself enjoying Justine’s company. She was engaging, quick to laugh, the kind of woman who would call you on your bullshit. Her face was as cleanly structured as a haiku, the eyes velvety brown, the mouth as plush and pink as a cherry blossom. But there was something intriguingly unsensual about her, a delicate frost of remoteness. It made him want to burn through that vestal coolness.

“Why did you decide to run a bed-and-breakfast?” he asked, centering a slice of radish on a buttered cracker. “It doesn’t seem like something a single woman your age would want to do.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a quiet life,” he said. “Isolated. You live on an island with no more than eight thousand year-round residents. You must get bored.”

“Never. My entire childhood was spent moving from place to place. I had a single mom who couldn’t stay put. I love the comfort of familiar things … the friends I see every day, the pillow that feels just right under my head, my herb garden, my mountain bike. I’ve run on the same trails and walked on the same beaches until I can tell whenever there’s the slightest change. I love being connected to a place like this.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. The Japanese believe that you don’t choose the place, the place chooses you.”

“What place has chosen you?”

“Hasn’t happened yet.” By now it wasn’t likely. He owned a condo on San Francisco Bay, an apartment in New York, and a lodge on Lake Tahoe. Each of them was beautiful, but none had ever given him a feeling of belonging when he walked through the front door.