Page 8 of Lone Star

She smiled, another bit of tension melting away. “Speaking of being hopeless: I’m not much of a cook, but there’s lasagna in the oven. And I’ve got wine.”

“Well let’s open a bottle, hm?”

~*~

He’d finally been given the greenlight to stop wearing the brace on his arm, he told her over their first glass of red, while she pulled the lasagna and he set plates and silverware out on the table. He had to go to physical therapy, which he made a face about, but Axelle noticed the faint tremor in his last two fingers as he placed a knife on a napkin, and made a mental note to bug him about it later if he didn’t go.

“How’s work?” he asked, when they were sitting across from one another.

“Less exciting than that shit in London” – he snorted – “but it’s alright. Mostly I just drive. I’m her chauffer. But Eden’s been sliding some things my way and asking for my opinion. So that’s kinda cool.”

“Just kinda?” he asked, picking up on the way her voice had gone up at the end.

She rolled her eyes, but couldn’t suppress a lick of excitement. “Okay, so, last week, we did a stakeout – cheating husband, right? But there were two women we thought might be the mistresses. Eden waited outside one place, and I took the other, and I got to be all Jessica Jones.” She set down her fork to mime snapping photos.

He grinned, and she grinned back – until she started to feel self-conscious, hands up and still holding a nonexistent camera.

She grabbed her fork again, and dropped her gaze. “So that’s…that,” she said, lamely.

Silence again, a beat too long, before she said, “Found a place for a shop, yet?” She glanced up in time to catch his own gaze dropping, frown tugging at his mouth as he used the edge of his fork to cut a bit of pasta into smaller and smaller bits.

“I’ve looked at some places,” he said. “Real estate’s more reasonable here than in London – but a shopfront is a shopfront, you know? You’re going to pay for the visibility. And I’ve not found one yet with room for my actual workshop.”

Axelle swallowed, and lasagna went down like lead. Because it was one thing to have stood in Albie’s shop, and seen him bruised, and beaten down in spirit, surrounded by silent furniture pieces and a whole storefront full of the kind of quiet misery that drove men to the bottle – and to the grave. One thing to see that, to stand in it, and know that he needed to uproot himself and go somewhere sunny and verdant where he could plant roots – and another to have him across the table from her, and know that he’d done just that…at her urging. To know that the shop he’d inherited, hand-crafted, and turned into a place all his own was gone, now, and that he was starting over, from scratch, because she’d told him he ought to.

That was a helluva lot of guilt to hit her all at once.

She reached for her wine glass and drained it. “Sorry.”

He glanced up, brows lifted. “There’s more wine.”

Not sorry for that, she thought, miserably.

~*~

Albie had thought, stupidly, that it would be easier than this. That once he was here in Tennessee, once he’d made that first, huge, scary step, all the rest would fall into place.

He was savvy enough to know that Axelle was interested; he hadn’t imagined the way she’d softened toward him in London, the way she’d looked at him; the real hurt in her eyes, at his shop, when he’d turned her away like a fool. But things weren’t easy, still, and he felt like he was sliding backward down a hill, losing traction on mud, unable to come up with one line, or gesture, or the proper look to have her relaxing into the moment.

Whatever they had, whatever bond they’d developed, it had developed in a moment of crisis.

How did they transition that into something that endured in the quiet moments?

Because he’d realized, somewhere between her goggle-eyed look at the flowers, and the first sip of wine, that this – being here, with her – was worth all the shop-hunting and awkward-adjusting it would take to settle into this American city. He could build a life here.

If he could only stop spinning his wheels andstartalready.

She topped off his glass, and he reached for it. The lasagna was good, but his appetite wasn’t up to its usual standard.

“I like your flat,” he said, with an inward wince – though he did. It looked cozy and unpretentious, eclectic. He hadn’t been able to form a mental picture of the sort of home she’d make for herself, but this suited, somehow. Quality, but not obnoxious about it; worn at the edges, but welcoming. Like her car in that way, he supposed. She liked the American battleships, with big blocks and mag wheels; what was a rambling old Victorian with faded rugs and attic nooks if not the muscle car of American East Coast architecture?

That’s a stretch, Cross, he thought to himself.

“Thanks,” she said, casting a look around the place, her gaze narrowing a fraction, like maybe she was scrutinizing it the way a stranger would. “Apparently, one of the old ladies lived here for a while, several years ago.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. That’s what Maggie said.” She sent him a cautious look. “She’s…”

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