Zane took a shocked step backward, smacking right into the washing machine as surprised color heated his face. How could she possibly have known that he was a shifter? Not that he was personally aware of any unicorn shifters, but— “Uh, n—no?”
Victoria’s face crumpled in embarrassment, or rue. “No, of course you’re not. It’s just, you know, you’re kind of perfect on the surface, like a unicorn. Gorgeous, personable,irons clothes for fun,I mean…right, no, not a unicorn, of course not. You, uh, you don’t cook.”
Oh,thatkind of unicorn. Somebody who seemed perfect, not a shifter kind of unicorn. Zane should have known, but the idea that she already knew about shifters had thrown him for a loop. He said, “I could learn to cook?” and Vicki laughed.
“I’m sure you could, and then where would the Take-Out King of LA be?” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself of something, but whatever it was, she gave herself a shake and tilted her head toward the living room. “Let’s get your ironing board set up. Or set up my dining table to pretend to be an ironing board, anyway.” She hurried down the hall.
Zane followed more slowly, only belatedly realizing he should have kept his mouth shut about ironing the clothes dry. If they’d gone on the line, he would have had a great excuse to stay overnight in Vicki’s apartment.
Not that he intended or expected anything to happen. He’d just met her, and now he knew for sure that the whole conversation about being a shifter needed to happen. He hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed that he was only a wolf, not a unicorn.
Only? His wolf sounded indignant, although that was its only opinion on the matter. Zane muttered, “You know what I mean,” aloud, and followed Vicki down the hall.
She was so bright and beautiful, so full of enthusiasm for everything. The paintings and drawings done by her students were the most heartfelt and wonderful art he could imagine for a home, and her slightly chaotic life clearly worked well for her. His was much more regimented, mostly thanks to Dion’s constant interference, but he couldn’t work without a certain amount of structure.
It struck him suddenly that even the ways they dressed reflected that chaotic/orderly approach to life: Vicki was wearing pink yoga pants, a mint green shirt that showed off her midriff, and fluffy orange slippers. He imagined she didn’t dress like that for work, but those were her casual, off-the-clock clothes.Hisoff-the-clock clothes were slacks and a button-down shirt and got more formal from there. Even his workout clothes were tailored.
Zane sighed. Even if he’d believed whole-heartedly in fate, he was fairly sure his wolf was wrong about the power and inevitability and perfection of that recognition when it came to Vicki. There was nowaysomebody like him would fit into her vibrant, energetic life. They’d just clash, the way his parents had, and there would be no joy in that for anyone.
“All right,” Vicki said dubiously. “Your ironing board awaits, Monsieur Designer.”
“Thank you, Madame Teacher.” Zane bowed and came to look at the ad-hoc ironing board she’d set up with a towel on the table. “Ah, this will work just fine, thanks.” He spent a few minutes rolling his clothes in other towels, squeezing extra water out, until the iron would do most of the drying for him. Vicki sat on the far side of the table, chin in her hands, watching him iron like it was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen.
“You weren’t kidding,” she said after a few minutes of apparently genuinely rapt silence. “You’re really good at this. You could make a killing with a YouTube channel.”
Zane lifted the iron so he wouldn’t burn anything while he stared across the table at her incredulously. “Withironing?”
“Oh, God, yes. People love watching people be competent. They’d ask you to iron increasingly impossible things, of course, but honestly, it’s really soothing to watch something being done really well. Especially when it ends with nice crisp lines and smooth fabric like this does. And you’ve got a built-in audience, since you’re already famous. You could get somebody to film you doing whatever ironing you have to do for work and have the clips edited, and oh, yeah, it’d be a great success.”
“I’m both intrigued and disturbed. There’s a lot of work I couldn’t show, though. The whole point of a lot of the couture gowns is that no one has any idea what the stars will be wearing until they arrive on the red carpet.” Zane went back to ironing, silk-scented steam puffing up as the hot metal ran across the smooth fabric.
“Even if you just ironed your own suits, it’d be popular. Not that you have to, but I’m just saying. There are guys—and people love it when it’s guys—who make whole careers out of sewing for social media. Not for peopleonsocial media, just to show what they’re doing via it.”
Zane smiled crookedly at her. “I think I feel like I exist in an entirely different world than you do, right now.” That was true, of course. His world included shifters, for one thing, and hers didn’t.
“Hey, I’ve got a movie star or two in my life too, you know.” Vicki tossed her hair and laughed. “No, I know what you mean, though. The kids in my classes are really in touch with a lot of this stuff, so I have to keep up on it, to the point that I’m fairly sure I sound like an alien to people my own age. They’re the ones who even got me to enter the contest for your dress. The kids, I mean.”
“Really?” Zane’s heart thumped unexpectedly. “Then I guess they did me a real favor. I never would have come back to Virtue otherwise, and I never would have met you.”
Vicki pursed her lips, studying him a moment, and he braced himself for the obvious questions:why did you leave, why weren’t you going to come back, do you miss it, and for all the questions that would follow.Do you think you’ll ever reconcile with your father, have you ever sewn for him, would you have ever left to follow your dreams if you’d had a different relationship with him.He’d heard them all before, and mostly hadn’t answered; Dion was very good at cutting off or redirecting interviews that went places Zane didn’t like. And Zane wasn’t the kind of celebrity that most people wanted to know everything about, either, which helped. Still, he braced himself.
And after a moment’s thoughtful pause, Vicki didn’t ask a single one of those questions. She only said, “They did me a favor too. I’ve never won anything in my life, but if I get to winonething, this is an amazing onetowin. I’ve always loved your work, even before I came to Virtue and found out you were a local boy.”
“Thank you.” He hung his silk shirt and socks up so he could turn his damp slacks inside out to iron them. “I haven’t been local for a long time, though.”
She laughed. “You wouldn’t think that from how the kids talk about you. You’d think you actually only left last summer, and they were all your close personal friends. Which is pretty funny, coming from six year olds. It’s a weird little town, isn’t it? It feels really closed off a lot of the time, but it’s also vibrant and proud of people like you who are from here.”
“Probably because I don’t talk about where I’m from much, so they can keep on being isolated and closed off.”
Even he heard the touchiness in his voice, and Vicki’s eyebrows rose a little. “You and me, both eager to get out of here, huh? It’s fine,” she added hastily. “The kids are great, obviously. But I feel like there’s…do you knowThe Music Man?”
“You mean Professor Harold Hill, Harold Hill?”
“Hah! ‘Tell me what’s his line!’ Or something like that, I don’t think that’s quite right. But the point is, I’ve found coming to Virtue is like going to River City in that musical. It’s a place where everybody already knows each other and nobody wants to know an outsider. I’ve worked in a lot of small towns, but I’ve never encountered something like it. I keep wondering if I’ve forgotten to put on deodorant or something.”
“You smell good,” Zane assured her hastily, then winced. That probably wasn’t the right kind of thing to say to a woman you hoped to romance. Or maybe it was exactly the right thing, but still probably not right when you’d only known her a few hours.
Vicki laughed, though. “Yousmell good. Please tell me it’s a cologne and not just your naturally fantastic masculine scent, because that would be unrealistic.”
