CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rosie
Something about Lucas was different.
It wasn’t just the button-down shirt and two-piece suit.
And it wasn’t the fact that he had styled his hair in a way that made me itch to slip my fingers through it to check if it was as soft and smooth as it looked.
It was something about the way he smiled, moved, or even breathed around me. The way he’d whispered in my ear how beautiful I looked tonight. Or the way he’d placed his hand at the small of my back when we’d entered Alexia’s restaurant. That intensity I’d felt from him in the past was back, but this time… this time it felt like more. Greater, bigger, like a separate, inescapable force.
It felt like gravity.
I looked around us, taking in every detail about the restaurant, Zarato, and finding myself in awe of the place. I felt as if we were in a bubble, a dream where we weren’t meant to be only friends, or roommates, where the purpose of tonight wasn’t about helping my writing, and where Lucas’s presence in my life didn’t have an expiration date. A dream where we were real, permanent.
I sighed, falling back into reality and feeling the walls of that bubble thin.
But not burst, I told myself. Not yet. Because I still have tonight.
It was the first time I’d ever had dinner at a restaurant like this, so I wanted to make sure to enjoy the experience as much as the company of the amazing man sitting by my side.
The atmosphere was refined but relaxed, and we had been placed at the bar, made of sleek wrought iron in the shape of a horseshoe. The best spot, according to Alexia, who had received us when we’d arrived.
Lucas’s hand grazed the skin between my bare shoulder blades, the touch sending a delicious shiver down my arms and validating my decision to wear a backless dress despite the drop in temperature and the dark heavy clouds hovering above New York today.
“You look happy,” Lucas told me in the deep, stern voice he’d been using all night. “Did you like everything?”
“I am happy.” I smiled at him, and when his eyes jumped down to my mouth his gaze darkened. My next words left me in a choppy, breathless way. “Everything was amazing. Thank you so much for bringing me here.”
“I wouldn’t want anyone else with me tonight, Rosie.”
My heart jumped at his words, hungry for more. And even if it was the stupidest thing to say, I found myself needing to make light of the situation: “Not even Taco?”
“No,” he said with a shake of his head, as if I’d said something serious. And then he leaned down his head, closing the distance between our faces until our noses almost brushed. “You’re the only one I want here with me, sharing food with me, and sitting so close I’m having a hard time keeping my hands to myself.”
And I—Okay.
I got this, I told myself. The pounding in my chest was under control. And the way it traveled to all kinds of interesting places in my body was one hundred percent imperceptible.
I just needed to say something. Anything. Keep the conversation flowing. “I think… I think Argentinian Japanese fusion cuisine is my new obsession.”
Lucas chuckled and shifted a few inches away. “Alexia and Akane have done an amazing job with the tasting menu. I don’t think I can pick a favorite from all the dishes they served.”
We had learned that Zarato’s Argentinian Japanese fusion specialties had only come to be after Alexia had fallen in love and married Akane, her sous chef. And that was what had elevated the restaurant’s reputation and standing, Alexia had told us during the quick tour she’d given us of the restaurant and the kitchen. A tour that had had Lucas eyes flickering with a kind of interest I’d only seen him show while cooking, he’d been so absorbed that he didn’t notice me studying him. Committing him to memory.
Lucas’s fingers skimmed along one of the thin straps of my dress, sidetracking all my thoughts.
“What was your favorite?” he asked in a low voice. “The one thing you enjoyed the most.”
I was tempted to tell him, You, you are. You are the thing I enjoy the most. “I loved everything.”
“I know you have one,” he said with a knowing smile. “And I think I can guess which one, but I want to hear it from you.”
I did. He knows me so well at this point. “It was the mochi.”
He hummed, and the pad of his thumb traced the length of my spine, stopping at the dip of my back. “I knew the moment you took that first bite. It was the dulce de leche filling, right?”
I nodded, feeling myself sigh at the Spanish words on his lips. I was never going to get over him speaking his mother tongue.
“What was that?” he asked, a new spark of interest in his gaze. “That thing you did.”
Dammit, he could be so perceptive.
I swallowed. “It was nothing. I was thinking of the mochi.”
“It wasn’t nothing. You let out this little sigh,” he said, and to my utter surprise he brought that thumb that had been caressing my back to my cheek. He grazed my now flaming skin. “Then there’s this. This beautiful blush. What’s causing this, Rosie?” He lowered his voice. “What’s making you hot?”
His words echoed in my ears, reaching a spot between my thighs. Seconds ticked by and I didn’t answer. Frankly, I didn’t think I could.
“Hey.” Lucas tugged at a runaway curl that had come out of the loose braid I’d attempted tonight. And only when my lips parted did he tuck the lock behind my ear with a gentleness that made me short of breath again. “Don’t be shy, Rosie. It’s me.”
And wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t I so transparent, so affected, because it was him who was the one here with me?
After a heartbeat I finally admitted, “It was your hand. On my back. The words in Spanish, too. It was all… distracting. Especially the words.”
That interest in his gaze sharpened. “What was so distracting about them, exactly?”
I went with the truth because what did I have to lose now? “The dulce de leche,” I tried, sure that I was butchering the pronunciation. “I just thought it was… sexy when you said it.”
Lucas blinked, one single slow blink, then his eyes filled with something else. Something wicked and a little dark. “You like it when I speak in Spanish to you.”
Yes. Obviously. “I guess I do.”
“I can say it again for you, would you like that?” he offered, and then, instead of waiting for my answer—Yes please, sir, and can you record it, too, so I can play it for years to come?—he leaned in. Close. Really, really freaking close. Until his mouth fell on the shell of my ear. “Dulce de leche.”
If I could have evaporated into a cloud of steam, I would have.
That was how hot this man made me with nothing more than three words that weren’t even supposed to be arousing. But I was, my God. I was so aroused.
“Was that good?” he asked, keeping his mouth right where it was, the touch of his lips on my skin sending wave after wave of shivers down my arms. “More?”
To my utter surprise, I nodded my head and said, “Please.”
I heard him inhale deeply, slowly, then he said, “Eres preciosa. Me recuerdas a una flor. A una rosa.”
My lips parted. My whole body churned now. “What does that mean?”
Lucas’s voice was impossibly low when he answered, “You’re stunning. You remind me of a flower. A beautiful rose.” My breath caught. “You blush like one, too, Rosie. It’s so fitting. So… goddamn gorgeous.”
And I… I wasn’t okay.
The way this felt wasn’t normal. The way my heart raced and my body pulsed with need, longing, yearning for him, couldn’t possibly be normal.
It couldn’t be. And if it was, I didn’t think I could take it. It was too much.
But Lucas had said that; he had called me beautiful. Said I was stunning. In two different languages, and I… knew he’d meant it. I knew it in my bones.
The way I feel has never been more real, I thought.
But I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge that out loud. Because tonight was supposed to be research, an experiment—our last experimental date—and now I knew I was at risk of having my heart broken. It could happen tomorrow, when I returned to my apartment, and I wouldn’t see him every day. Or it could happen in a matter of weeks, when he went back to Spain.
I let out a breath, the sound rocky, unsteady. “Thank you.”
Lucas’s head reared back slowly. “Thank you?”
I averted my eyes, and as much as I didn’t want to stop looking at him, I did. “Yeah. That was very deserving of a grand gesture kind of night.”
Because that was what tonight was about. Phase four, the grand gesture.
Usually, in novels, it came after a black moment, after feelings are put to the test. But in this case—being this was nothing but an experiment—that hadn’t made sense. So, we’d jumped ahead.
Lucas didn’t answer, not for a while. He just looked at me, his lips curled into the smallest smile he’d ever given me.
Reaching for my glass of wine, I mused over what to say, finally settling for something that had crossed my mind, but I had never asked. “Can I ask you something, Lucas?”
“You know you can ask me anything.”
“You never talk about Spain.” I was trying my luck here. He didn’t want to talk about his injury, or whatever had happened to him, I knew that much. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him going back. “You’ve only talked about Abuela. Or Taco.” I paused. “You know, the plan had been to fly your grandma here. With Taco. But she said she’d had enough of New York when she visited Lina a couple of years ago. She said everything’s so big here it gives her chicken skin? Charo wasn’t able to translate that.”
“Piel de gallina. Goosebumps. That just means that it gives her goosebumps.” Lucas let out a chuckle, but his heart wasn’t in it. Then, he said, “What do you want to know, beautiful Rosie?”
Everything. “Do you miss home?”
“Yes and no.”
I shifted to the edge of the stool, my knees moving into the space between his. “What do you miss about it?”
He seemed to deflate at the question, so I placed a hand on his knee. Encouraging him. He pressed his thigh against mine in response. “I miss… my life. How my life was before. Some days I wake up thinking I’m back in time, and my head starts pondering what beach I can drive to before the crowd gets in. Then I remember.”
“You remember what?”
His gaze zeroed in on my fingers as they rested on his knee. “That I’m not there anymore. That I’m no longer myself.”
“Lucas?” I said, and whatever he heard in my voice made him retrieve my hand from his knee and take it in his. “Why come here? Are you running from something? From whatever happened?”
He brought our hands to his mouth and placed his lips on my wrist. “I’m not running, ángel. Some days I’m not even moving.”
Ángel. My heart pounded. “What do you need?” I asked, because whatever that was, I wanted to get it for him. “To feel like you’re moving forward again.”
His gaze searched my face. “I don’t know, Rosie. And that’s what scares me the most.”
Something in my chest broke for him. The need to make it better growing by the minute. “I’ll take your hand,” I told him, tightening my grip around his fingers. “And keep you moving. Until you figure it out.”
And I’ll take that ángel, too. And keep it.
Keep it for when he left, and I had these memories instead of him.
He didn’t speak, not right away. Then, he said, “I hope you’re ready for your grand gesture.”