He came to a full stop when he noticed me. “You’re up already? Or you didn’t sleep at all?”
I shrugged. “I napped. I don’t need a lot of sleep.”
Which was true. One of the biggest perks of my angelic state was that I could make do with three hours of sleep and still feel like I’d clocked a full eight hours.
“Lucky you.”
“I’ve arranged for your car to be picked up from Poughkeepsie this morning and delivered here.” I’d called in a favor to Blade, a fellow guardian. We’d done several assignments—and several men—together and got along very well.
“Don’t you need my keys?”
“Already got them. You left them on the little table in the hallway.”
“Right. I did. Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Blade would also pretend to deliver my clothes that had been in the trunk of my BMW the whole time. Kinda hard to explain that one to Charles.
He reached for a covered bowl on the counter. “Good morning, Wolfgang.”
Who the fuck was he talking to?
“How are you feeling today? You hungry?”
Did he have a pet that I had somehow missed? But no, that couldn’t be, not in a bowl.
I watched as he carefully measured flour, then water, and addedit to the bowl. It clicked. “You’re talking to your sourdough starter?”
“People talk to plants, don’t they? Wolfgang’s been with me for three years now, so I treat him like a friend.”
I pressed my lips together. “You named it Wolfgang?”
“It’s a German sourdough, so I figured it would be fitting.”
A man who talked to his sourdough starter? That was totally adorable. “It is.”
He covered the bowl again, then washed his hands and reached for the coffee maker, which looked so damn complicated I hadn’t even attempted to make coffee. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.” I gestured at the machine. “What else does that thing do except make coffee?”
He grinned. “Nothing, but it makes really, really good coffee.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “Seems like a bit of overkill.”
His smile faded, and he turned his back to me as he started fiddling with the machine. “That’s because it was from my café. My coffee shop.”
“You own a coffee shop?”
“Owned. It went under.”
His voice was tight, pained, like he was trying to hold back something that wanted to break free—grief, maybe, or anger, or both. There was a raw vulnerability in those few words that made something twist uncomfortably in my chest. For some reason that I didn’t want to examine too closely, I absolutely hated hearing that sound from him.
“Lots of new businesses fail, especially restaurants,” I offered.
He turned the machine on, and a loud hissing noise filled the kitchen. Too loud to talk, and so I waited and watchedas he carefully measured coffee and prepared two mugs. When the machine was finally done and a blissful silence returned, his back was toward me, stiff and tense.
“Yes, but most businesses don’t go under because of embezzlement.”
