face, so soft and welcome his bones actually ached with it. The abrupt transition stole his breath for a long instant, but the jingle of the door behind him and the press of another caffeine-deprived customer jostling into him got Kane moving again.
The place looked nothing like the bright, airy cafés of LA, all big panes of glass and clean, modern lines and self-consciously designer furniture. And it wasn’t much like the well-used, well-loved downtown shabby-cool hipster coffee bars back in Austin.
And it couldn’t have been more different from that one place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the Parisian-style coffee shop where he’d first told Claire Durand he didn’t care how much older she was, or what people would think. Where he told her exactly how much he wanted her.
Forcing the memory from his mind, Kane looked around at the cracked plaster walls covered in aging yellow posters for things like Vienna beef hot dogs and chocolate-covered Twinkies. It was a small place, narrow and long, with a bank of red vinyl booths running along the left side. Customers lined up to the right, giving their orders to a smiling young woman with colorful tattoos climbing both bare arms.
Kane was willing to bet she didn’t call herself a “barista,” and that the cups of coffee came in small, medium, and large. He grinned.
More than anything else, it reminded him of the diner back home in the Texas Hill Country town where he grew up.
Feeling calmer and more at ease than he had in months, Kane risked pushing his sunglasses up onto the top of his head so he could read the menu. Sure enough, his options were limited to drip coffee, espresso, or latte, and none was offered in Italian sizes.
He thought the girl working the counter might have recognized him—behind her cat-eye glasses, she went a little wide and shocky—but she handed over his beautifully boring plain coffee-flavored coffee without any hassle. Grateful, Kane stuffed a twenty in the tip jar and went in search of cream.
What he found was the one woman he’d been doing his best to figure out.
There, sitting at the booth in the corner behind an open laptop and a mug topped with snowy white frothed milk, was Claire Durand.
She’d been on his mind so much, Kane had to pause for a moment and blink furiously to clear his vision and make sure she was really real, really there.
But it seemed she was, elegant and classy in her dark red sweater set, with a gorgeous patterned scarf knotted carelessly at her neck. She was like something out of those magazines Kane’s mom used to get, the ones that had articles like “Where to Summer This Year” and “At Home with Princess Grace.”
And it had to really be her, he reasoned, edging closer to her table, because if it were all in his head, surely he’d picture her the way she’d looked stretched across the sheets in his hotel room back in New York, her slim, toned thighs and slender arms reaching for him, her mouth deeply pink because he couldn’t stop biting at her lips, her gorgeous hair spread over the pillow like a blanket of fallen autumn leaves.
Feeling a little dazed, Kane raised his mug to his lips. The bitter burn of unadulterated coffee jolted him awake. He never did find the cream, did he?
But now that he’d seen Claire, he was locked into her magnetic gravitational pull like a satellite orbiting a small planet. Drifting closer, he stood right over her. She glanced up from her work with a frown of concentration still knotting her auburn brows.
The frown smoothed into a look of pure surprise. Kane savored it for a bare moment before setting his coffee down on her table and sliding onto the bench seat across from her.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said, as easy and breezy as you please.
The memory of that day, weeks ago, in a small café on the Upper East Side flickered across her beautiful face briefly, then was gone.
She hesitated before she replied, and
The place looked nothing like the bright, airy cafés of LA, all big panes of glass and clean, modern lines and self-consciously designer furniture. And it wasn’t much like the well-used, well-loved downtown shabby-cool hipster coffee bars back in Austin.
And it couldn’t have been more different from that one place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the Parisian-style coffee shop where he’d first told Claire Durand he didn’t care how much older she was, or what people would think. Where he told her exactly how much he wanted her.
Forcing the memory from his mind, Kane looked around at the cracked plaster walls covered in aging yellow posters for things like Vienna beef hot dogs and chocolate-covered Twinkies. It was a small place, narrow and long, with a bank of red vinyl booths running along the left side. Customers lined up to the right, giving their orders to a smiling young woman with colorful tattoos climbing both bare arms.
Kane was willing to bet she didn’t call herself a “barista,” and that the cups of coffee came in small, medium, and large. He grinned.
More than anything else, it reminded him of the diner back home in the Texas Hill Country town where he grew up.
Feeling calmer and more at ease than he had in months, Kane risked pushing his sunglasses up onto the top of his head so he could read the menu. Sure enough, his options were limited to drip coffee, espresso, or latte, and none was offered in Italian sizes.
He thought the girl working the counter might have recognized him—behind her cat-eye glasses, she went a little wide and shocky—but she handed over his beautifully boring plain coffee-flavored coffee without any hassle. Grateful, Kane stuffed a twenty in the tip jar and went in search of cream.
What he found was the one woman he’d been doing his best to figure out.
There, sitting at the booth in the corner behind an open laptop and a mug topped with snowy white frothed milk, was Claire Durand.
She’d been on his mind so much, Kane had to pause for a moment and blink furiously to clear his vision and make sure she was really real, really there.
But it seemed she was, elegant and classy in her dark red sweater set, with a gorgeous patterned scarf knotted carelessly at her neck. She was like something out of those magazines Kane’s mom used to get, the ones that had articles like “Where to Summer This Year” and “At Home with Princess Grace.”
And it had to really be her, he reasoned, edging closer to her table, because if it were all in his head, surely he’d picture her the way she’d looked stretched across the sheets in his hotel room back in New York, her slim, toned thighs and slender arms reaching for him, her mouth deeply pink because he couldn’t stop biting at her lips, her gorgeous hair spread over the pillow like a blanket of fallen autumn leaves.
Feeling a little dazed, Kane raised his mug to his lips. The bitter burn of unadulterated coffee jolted him awake. He never did find the cream, did he?
But now that he’d seen Claire, he was locked into her magnetic gravitational pull like a satellite orbiting a small planet. Drifting closer, he stood right over her. She glanced up from her work with a frown of concentration still knotting her auburn brows.
The frown smoothed into a look of pure surprise. Kane savored it for a bare moment before setting his coffee down on her table and sliding onto the bench seat across from her.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said, as easy and breezy as you please.
The memory of that day, weeks ago, in a small café on the Upper East Side flickered across her beautiful face briefly, then was gone.
She hesitated before she replied, and
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