"I guess I"ll have to find a place to put my feet up," she said.
"The couch," he said. "It has a lot of pillows and it"s close to the kitchen."
"All right," she said. "Lead on, McDuff."
"I never was McDuff," he muttered. "I was always too short."
"What?"
"Nothing," he said. "Inside joke. I"m probably the only one left who remembers it."
She frowned at him, but he didn"t explain. And somehow she knew better than to ask him again.
*Five*
Darius dropped the noodles in the boiling water. The kitchen was still too hot, but he didn"t dare take off his shirt this time. Ariel was seated on his living room sofa, pillows against her back and under her injured leg. He"d wrapped the ice around it to bring down the swelling and found a few Advil to reduce the pain. But he didn"t dare help her any more.
Too much would be suspicious, especially now that she was awake.
He had to be careful too. He felt guilty about missing that ankle. He had moved his hands over her legs to heal them, but he knew he had stopped short of the feet. He probably just missed the ankle.
"This is a nice place," she said.
"Thanks."
"I read in one of the books about the Wilderness Area that they don"t allow people to live up here."
"They grandfathered a lot of us in."
"Really?" She frowned at him. "You don"t look old enough to be grandfathered in."
He had forgotten how he looked. He made himself shrug. "What I meant is that they don"t tear down existing buildings. They just don"t let anyone build new ones."
"Oh." She leaned back against the pillow.
He needed to change the direction of the conversation. "Want anything to drink?"
"What"ve you got?"
Anything she wanted, but he couldn"t tell her that. "Some pop, wine, beer--you name it, it"s probably here. But the refrigerator runs on a generator, so I really don"t want to hold the door open while considering."
"One generator?" she asked. "Doesn"t a refrigerator use a lot of power for that?"
Caught. He had put in the regular refrigerator because he hated to be without one--refrigerators were one of the best things about modern civilization, he thought--and he maintained it with his own magic, without thinking much about it.
"There"s more than one generator," he said.
But she didn"t seem to be paying much attention. She was tapping a forefinger against her lips. "I"d love a gla.s.s of wine. Do you think that would be a problem?"
"Why would it be a problem?" he asked. "All I had to give you was Advil. Wine would probably be good for you. This place has a great wine cellar. Just tell me what kind you want and I probably have it."
She smiled. "I"m not a connoisseur. I just like it. So bring me something red, heavy, and cheap."
"Sorry, no can do, ma"am," he said. "We don"t have cheap around here."
But he didn"t have to leave the kitchen to get her wine. He already had a nice cabernet breathing on the counter. Or he did the moment she said "red."
He poured them both a gla.s.s, then carried hers through the archway into the living room. He"d never appreciated the openness of the design of this place as much as he did right now. He wasn"t used to having company, so he had forgotten what it was like to entertain a welcome guest.
He didn"t think of Cupid that morning as a welcome guest.
Darius bent down to hand Ariel her gla.s.s and as he did, she looked up at him. A jolt went through him. In the depths of her emerald green eyes he saw something he didn"t want to see.
Ariel had a soul mate.
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said. The Fates had given him the ability to see whenever someone had a soul mate by looking directly in that person"s eyes. He hadn"t been looking before. He really hadn"t been looking now, but he had seen it.
He didn"t know who her soul mate was. He just knew she had one.
And that changed everything.
She blinked and leaned away from him. He got the sense she would have stepped away if she could. "What?" she asked.
He had to cover, and fast. "Don"t you smell that? I think dinner is burning."
She smiled and took her winegla.s.s from him. "I"m sure it"s fine. Sauce usually only burns on the bottom."
It sounded as if she were speaking from experience. He hurried toward the kitchen as if he really thought something were burning, even though leaving her side was the last thing he wanted to do.
He wanted to make certain what he had seen in her eyes was true.
She had a soul mate. And he was required to find that soul mate.
It was the last thing he wanted to do.
Ariel ate with gusto. She hadn"t realized how much she missed food made from fresh ingredients. Dehydrated meal packs took care of her hunger, but they weren"t satisfying like this meal was.
She had never had spaghetti sauce this good. The tomatoes tasted fresh. The sauce had a number of vegetables in it which she wasn"t used to, and it also had some kind of spice that she didn"t recognize.
Darius had served her food to her on a lap tray, complete with a rose in a bud vase on one corner. When he had set the tray before her, he had smiled.
"Such service," she had said to cover her nervousness.
"I normally make my guests do everything," he had said, "but since you can"t stand, I thought I"d change my policies just this once."
She had laughed and then lit into the food. He probably thought her some kind of pig, the way she was eating. But it all tasted so fine. He"d even made fresh garlic bread. She couldn"t complain that the stove heated the building so much--not when it enabled the food to be this good.
He had a lap tray too. He sat across from her in an overstuffed chair that looked as if it had seen better days. The upholstery sagged, and one of the sides looked as if it had been scratched by a cat, even though there was no cat in evidence.
In fact, he had said he didn"t have one--although he had also said that he needed one, a comment she had found strange at the time.
He had his feet up on the coffee table and seemed completely relaxed. Not at all like a man who had rappelled up the side of a cliff with a limp body in his arms and then had proceeded to cook a delicious dinner on a wood-burning stove.
"How long have you been hiking?" he asked.
She swallowed, feeling self-conscious. Did he think she was eating a lot because she hadn"t eaten in weeks? "Five days."
"Five days?" he asked. "All alone?"
She nodded.
"Most hikers who come through here have a companion."
"You can"t think about things if you have a companion."
"Ah," he said, taking a sip of wine. "A vision quest?"
She shook her head. "Just a chance to be alone after a hard year."
She didn"t want to tell him about the rotator cuff and the choices she was going to make. After what had happened today, that just might be too much. He probably felt sorry for her already.
"Boyfriend doesn"t mind?" he asked.
Normally, that wasn"t a question she liked to answer. Letting strange men know she was unattached often led to unpleasantness. But he wasn"t a strange man. She felt as if she had known him for a long time.
Still, she took another bite of that excellent garlic bread before she said, "There is no boyfriend."
"No boyfriend?" He seemed both shocked and dismayed, as if it were important to him that she have someone in her life.
"No boyfriend, no husband, no pet iguana. My friends and family know I"m here." That was a bit of a stretch. One friend knew she had left, but no one else did. She didn"t want to be talked out of this. "But there"s no significant other to keep the home fires burning while I"m away."
In fact, there were no home fires either. She had given up her apartment for the summer and placed everything she owned in storage. She had planned that when she thought she"d be in Hawaii, training, and she saw no need to change it.
She needed a new place, and she hadn"t found it yet.
"I"d think, then, you"d want to take a trip with someone," he said.
She shook her head. "There are just times in your life when you want to be alone, you know?"
"I do." He swirled the wine in his gla.s.s. Her comment seemed to make him sad.
"I"m sorry," she said. "I"m intruding on your privacy."
He raised his head. "I never said that."
"You didn"t have to." She leaned over and grabbed the wine bottle off the coffee table, somehow avoiding spilling her tray in the process. Every one of her muscles screamed in agony at the movement, but she ignored them. Muscle pain was something she was used to. "A person doesn"t live this far away from civilization because he likes company."
He watched her pour the wine into her gla.s.s and made no move to help. She appreciated that. It meant he wasn"t overprotective. She had been a little worried about that after he put the splint on her leg.
"I don"t live up here," he said.
"Oh? This is awfully well appointed for a rental." She finished pouring, then offered him the bottle.
He took it and poured some wine into his gla.s.s before putting the bottle back on the table. "I come up here a couple of times a year. I like the isolation on a short-term basis, but living here would drive me crazy."
"Winters," she said. "Snow, mountains, and no escape."
He nodded. "No movies either."
"I don"t know," she said. "You could get a satellite dish."
"I could," he said, "but I think a DVD player would be more useful."
"You have a Blockbuster in this neighborhood?"
He laughed. "I could bring a year"s supply of DVDs with me, and leave only when I run out."
"There"s a measure of a person"s time. He must emerge from his sojourn in the wilderness when he has seen "The Matrix" fifteen hundred times."
He frowned at her. ""The Matrix"? I was thinking of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre.""
"Yeah," she said, "something light and happy to help you through your solitude."
He set his tray on the floor but kept the winegla.s.s. "All right, what do you think I should be stranded with?"
"All the films of Chaplin," she said.
"Are they even on DVD?"
"They should be."
"With director"s commentary."
"No." She shook her head. "They"re silent films. You don"t want to rain that with narrative. You"ll get written notes in a file you can open on the side."
"Touche," he said.
She smiled, then picked up her tray. She was going to lean over and set it on the floor, but he was too quick for her. He got up and took it from her.
He looked in her eyes again. That same deep look he had given her before, as if he saw into her very soul.
Whatever was there seemed to upset him.