Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
“You could have told me that a week ago.”
“I could have.”
“You let me beg Mariano for a week.”
“It was informative.”
“Informative.”
“I learned a great deal about your persuasion style.”
She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without looking. She made a sound, half frustration, half laugh, that hit him somewhere behind the sternum with a force he hadn’t been prepared for.
He was across the kitchen before she could blink, taking the coffee from her hand, setting it on the counter, and kissing her. Not gently. Not with patient restraint. With hunger. With the specific, targeted intensity of a man who had discovered that his wife’s outrage tasted better than anything the espresso machine could produce.
She melted against him. She always did. Her body’s response to his was the most honest thing about her, instantaneous and absolute. Her fingers found his shirt and gripped, and the small sound she made against his mouth sent a jolt through him that he felt in his spine.
When he pulled back, her eyes were glazed.
“That’s not fair,” she whispered. “You can’t just kiss me to win arguments.”
“I didn’t kiss you to win the argument.” He picked up her coffee and handed it back. “I kissed you because you called the espresso machine Mariano and I found it intolerable.”
“Intolerable?”
“You named it after a beautiful Italian man.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. The flush climbed her cheeks again.
“Are you...” She bit her lip. “Are you jealous of the espresso machine?”
“Drink your coffee. We’re late.”
He was not jealous of the espresso machine.
He was, perhaps, mildly territorial about the fact that his wife had given an Italian name to a kitchen appliance and spoke to it with more tenderness than she spoke to most humans, but this was an entirely rational response and did not constitute jealousy.
Zia was grinning behind her coffee cup. He could see it. He could also smell it, the bright, warm spike of delight that bloomed from her skin when she was pleased with herself.
She was pleased with herself frequently. It was extraordinary.
The drive to the office was his. He had begun driving them himself most mornings, because having her in the passenger seat, her feet on the dashboard despite his opinion about this, her voice filling the cabin, her hand resting on his forearm while she talked about whatever her mind had produced in the last twelve minutes, was a pleasure he was unwilling to delegate to anyone, including Gerry.
This morning she was telling him about a design problem with the V-Series housing. Something about the polymer casing and heat resistance in equatorial climates. She talked with her hands when she was excited about her work, gesturing at invisible blueprints, and the passion in her voice, the unguarded enthusiasm for scent neutralization technology, was more compelling than any presentation he had ever witnessed in a boardroom.
“The current casing warps above forty-three degrees Celsius,” she was saying, her hands drawing shapes in the air. “But if we shift to a hybrid polymer...”
“You’re extraordinary,” he told her.
She stopped mid-gesture. Blinked.
“I’m...what?”
“At forty-three degrees. Continue.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her lips parted, the flush returning. Then she laughed, that full, startled, helpless laugh that rearranged the architecture of his chest, and went back to her polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment.
Her phone buzzed in the cupholder. She glanced at it. Her thumb swiped the notification away before the screen had fully lit, and she set it face-down in her lap and went back to talking about polymers.
Her feet stayed on his dashboard. He chose not to comment. Different because the design wing now watched Zia with the particular attention that came with her new last name. Same because Zia moved through the attention like she didn’t notice it, greeting the cleaning crew by name, asking the Fae engineer about her daughter’s recital, complimenting Kirsten’s new haircut with a sincerity that was impossible to fake because Zia didn’t know how to fake things.
That was the quality he had noticed first, from the back of a car across the street from a coffeehouse. Not her beauty, though she was beautiful, not in a way that had anything to do with symmetry but everything to do with warmth. It was her transparency. She existed without armor. Without performance. She was the same person in every room, with every person, and in a world of preters who spent their lives curating their presentation, her authenticity was so rare it bordered on alien.
It was also, he was discovering, a magnet.
The Lyccan delegate from the trade fair had requested a follow-up meeting specifically with “the product designer.” The request was professional. The way the delegate looked at Zia during the meeting was not. Alexei sat at the head of the table and watched a grown man lean three degrees too close while asking about dispersion algorithms, and something proprietary stirred in his chest.