Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
But school felt different now. The other juniors were seventeen, and Katy was eighteen, and the gap felt wider than a single year. She sat in the back of her classes and did her homework and ate lunch alone with a book and said sorry when someone bumped into her and thought about Julian Ventura approximately four hundred times a day.
October. Dionne’s lunch. He wasn’t there.
November. He wasn’t there either.
December. He wasn’t there still.
Katy ate her salad in the thin winter light and surveyed the empty terrace and finally asked the waiter, casually, while Dionne was in the restroom: “Is Mr. Ventura a regular here?”
Her own voice startled her. She never asked strangers questions. She once let a barista give her the wrong order rather than say something.
The waiter gave her the polite blankness of a man trained not to answer questions about members. “I’m not able to discuss our members, miss.”
“Of course. Sorry. I’m sorry.” Too many sorrys. She flushed and considered her plate.
She left it. She didn’t leave it. She sat in her car after lunch and pulled up the club’s website on her phone and found the employment page and saw the listing for a terrace server, part-time, and her heart rate did something medically concerning.
Amy didn’t need Katy hovering anymore. Katy was nineteen now, finishing junior year, and her school schedule left afternoons free. She had the time. She had the availability. She had a reason that she wrapped in a practical excuse and presented to herself like a gift: good tips, flexible hours, a foot in the door at a nice establishment.
She applied the next morning. They called her within a week.
THE FIRST TIME SHE saw Julian Ventura at Haven as a staff member and not a guest, she was carrying a tray of Veuve Clicquot across the terrace and he was sitting at Table Nine.
Corner of the terrace. The spot where the jacaranda threw its afternoon shade and the light came through in purple-gold pieces. Laptop open, iced water untouched, his attention on a screen. He sat alone. He always did.
She didn’t drop the tray. She wanted credit for that.
Her feet kept moving because her body was smarter than her brain, and her brain had gone white and blank and useless. A year of imagining this moment and she had pictured herself composed, casual, a girl who happened to work at the same club where a man she’d met once also happened to spend his afternoons. She hadn’t pictured the tray rattling because her hands were full of electricity, or her pulse climbing so high she could hear it in her ears like a second heartbeat.
She served Tables Three through Seven. She smiled at Mrs. Callahan. She refilled Mr. Drummond’s sparkling water. She did her job, and she did it well, and she didn’t glance at Table Nine for eleven minutes.
On the twelfth minute, she glanced.
He was already focused on her.
Not his laptop.
Not his phone.
But on her.
Katy.
His gaze tracked her path across the terrace with an intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. And when her eyes collided with his, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t break away. He kept her there, pinned, across thirty feet of jacaranda shade, and the heat on his face was the same heat from her eighteenth birthday. The same dark expansion of his pupils. Only this time he wasn’t shutting it down. This time he was just drinking her in, openly, like he’d been doing it for a while and had stopped pretending he wasn’t.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
Then his mouth flattened. He dropped his gaze back to the laptop screen, and his hand went to his water glass and gripped it until the tendons stood out along his wrist.
Her lungs forgot how to work. Her skin felt tight and hot, and there was that warmth again, the low pulse in her belly that she’d first felt in her bedroom a year ago replaying his attention, ten times stronger now because he was thirty feet away and he’d just taken her in like that, in broad daylight, and she didn’t know what to do with the information except hold it against her chest and try not to come apart.
She served him for the first time that afternoon. Walked to his table with fresh water, two cubes of ice because she’d noticed him accept exactly two from the server on Tuesday and filed the information in a part of her brain she refused to examine.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No.”
One word.
But his voice was different than it had been on her birthday. Lower. Rougher at the edges, like he’d scraped it against something on the way out. And he wasn’t attending to his laptop. He was taking in her hands on the tray, then her wrists, then the strip of skin above her collar where her pulse was hammering so hard she was certain he could see it. His gaze stayed there. On her throat. On the place where her blood was beating visibly under her skin. And his eyes went dark again, that blown-pupil heat, and she felt it land on her neck like a warm hand, and her knees almost buckled.