Page 31 of The Seven Year Slip

Well, it was better than a towel, at least.

I shrugged on the robe. It still smelled like her perfume. Red by Giorgio Beverly Hills. So distinctive and intense. She’d worn it for close to thirty years.

As I came out of the bathroom, Iwan glanced over at me, my hair damp, smelling slightly of lavender soap. He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Blinked—quite a few times. Then he said, quiteseriously, “Ma’am, I’ve a very serious question to ask you: Did you murder your husband?”

I fluffed up the boa and adopted a terrible mid-Atlantic accent. “I’m sorry, Officer, I can’t recall how my husband died. It must’ve been the pool boy! I’ll have to get a new one.”

He arched an eyebrow as he stood by the stove, where he slowly heated a large saucepan, half a dozen lemons on the counter beside him. “Pool boy or husband?”

“I’m not sure, what’re your credentials?”

He flicked his gaze down the length of me. “I’ve a pretty healthy résumé,” he replied in that soft, low Southern drawl of his. “And plenty of references.”

Itsked. “For your character, I hope.”

The edges of his mouth twitched as it turned into a sort of halfsmirk, and he really thought he was being suave as he leaned back against the stove—and gave a yelp. “Sonova—!” He quickly threw his hand into the air, but he’d already burned the shit out of the tip of his pinky finger, and stuck it in his mouth.

“Are you okay?” I asked in alarm, dropping my awful accent.

“Fine,” he said around his pinky in his mouth. “I’m fine. ’Tis only a flesh wound.”

I gave him a look and came over, taking his hand out of his mouth to inspect his finger. There was an angry red mark all the way across the inside of it. “We should put butter on it.”

“Butter?” He sounded incredulous.

“Yes? My mom always does it.”

He laughed then, and gently took his hand out of mine. He turned on the faucet and ran his pinky under the cool water. “This’ll do just fine, I’d hate to mess up your aunt’s Échiré.”

It took me a moment to realize—“Her fancy butter has aname?”

“It’s not fancy if it doesn’t have a name,” he replied gallantly, turning off the faucet while I grabbed a bandage from the first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet. He outstretched his hand again once he’d dried it, and I wrapped it in a Disney Band-Aid. “Would you like to kiss it?” he asked. “Make it feel better?”

“That doesn’t work.”

“About as well as butter, I suppose” was his reply.

“Well, in that case...” I really didn’t like how smug he sounded, and in my aunt’s feather boa, suddenly feeling brave, I brought his hand to my mouth and gently kissed the bandage.

His face turned a lovely pinkish-red, from his neck all the way to his scalp, making the freckles across his cheeks glow. And it was also strangely sexy, his curly hair messy from a day out in the city, his tie loosened and askew, dressed in a white button-down that didn’t quite fit him, and black trousers that I was sure were a few years old at this point because they were frayed a little at the hems. Whenever I took a closer look at him, he was disorienting in the kind of way kaleidoscopes were, constantly moving and shifting, full of colors and shapes that shouldn’t have gone together but did in a way that made it perfect.

He might have been the most handsome man I’d ever seen.

But especially when he blushed.

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbling with the difficulty, discombobulated.

I dropped his hand and said, “Butter works, by the way.”

“I... uh.” He looked at his bandaged finger.

“It feels better, doesn’t it?”

His gaze fell to my lips. Lingered there. He bent toward me, millimeter by millimeter, and the closer he got, the more of him I drank in, his long eyelashes, the freckles across his cheeks and nose, multiplying by the moment. His lips looked soft. He had anice mouth—a kind one. It was hard to explain why it looked kind, but it did.

But then something made him pull back, second-guess himself, and my stomach twisted a little in regret. He cleared his throat. “Fine, fine. Buttermightwork,” he said, busying himself with tossing in measurements of sugar, some sort of corn starch or flour, and salt, and the pinkish tint only remained at the edges of his ears.

Were you about to kiss me?I wanted to ask, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted the answer to be no. But instead, I asked, “What’s for dinner?”

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