Dion, sounding awe-stricken, said, “You cook?”
Emmy, who apparently had very sharp hearing, yelled, “He’s a great cook!” down the hall, and Aaron laughed.
“She’s better, but I’m not bad.”
“I’m noooooot!”
Aaron, still smiling, tilted his head at Dion. “How about you come keep me company in the kitchen?”
“I’d be delighted.” Dion bounced up, gave Zane a positively thrilled smile, and followed Aaron into the depths of the house.
Zane said, “Well, that’s cute,” aloud once they were gone, and Emmy’s voice caroled down the hall again: “They’ve been beingadorableat each other all day. I’ve only read two pages because they’re sosweet!”
“At least now you can read in peace.” Zane headed for the stairs with Emmy’s “Right?!” following him.
His B&B room was more than comfortable, and looked as if he’d set up shop permanently already, despite having only been there overnight. But there were sketches and papers everywhere, piles of notes that he’d brought with him, thoughts for future projects, and one single untouched sketchpad that he always carried around but never drew in. It was hand-bound in beautifully embossed leather, with a sewn spine so it would lie flat no matter what page it was open to, and had been a gift from a client several years earlier.
As was the case with any particularly beautiful sketch or notebook, Zane had always felt like it needed to be saved for somethingspecial.There had never been anything special enough to justify using it—thank goodness he didn’t usually own beautiful sketchpads, because otherwise he would have dozens of them, all ‘too good’ to draw in—but he thought this dress, for this woman, deserved to be thought out in its pages.
This woman. His fated mate, maybe. Zane sat down with the sketchbook, letting his fingers work while his mind wrestled with the idea. It was impossible to deny the connection he felt to Victoria Hawthorne, and almost as impossible to accept the idea of a fated mate.
He knew they were commonly accepted as real in the shifter communities. It was more the idea thathemight have one that was hard to come to terms with. His parents’ contentious relationship had certainly not been one built on the kind of recognition he felt toward Victoria, and…Zane’s hand went still, his gaze unfocused as he finally put words to something he’d always subconsciously believed.
Othershifters, born of fated meetings and mates, might have the possibility of that kind of happiness in their own futures. But Zane himself, born from an ordinary marriage between two people who hadn’t, in the end, liked each other very much…he’d never thought he was special enough, really, to find a fated mate of his own. It seemed unlikely enough for shifters who were raised in a happy, fated family. For him? It simply had never seemed possible at all.
He glanced at his sketchbook, not surprised to see he hadn’t really made much effort to draw any gowns. Instead he’d drawn Vicki herself in easy strokes of colored pencil that brought out the pink in her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, the soft golden fall of her hair. He murmured, “Cinderella,” and turned the page, drawing her as the classic heroine in a gown of light blues and whites, trying to find a space for her preferences in the midst of making it clear which princess she was.
The pages filled up with sketches after that, some of them just drawings of Vicki, others of gown ideas, some of both. He fell asleep late, listening to the sound of ice-cold rain on the shutters, and nestling the sketchbook in his arms as he rested.
If his alarmhadn’t been set so he’d get up for the drive out to the nearest airport, Zane would have slept through breakfast withVicki. As it was, he woke with a jolt, disoriented, and had to call a taxi—a taxi! like some kind of twentieth-century barbarian!—to get him to the diner in time. He barely made it: last night’s rain had turned to snow sometime during the night, and it lay thick over black ice, making the roads treacherous.
The Silver Dollar Diner was pretty much exactly as he remembered it, a 50s style diner decor, including a huge neon and chrome sign proclaiming the place’s name up on the roof of the building.
Vicki was at the door, wearing her boxy coat. It was still muddy, but his heart jumped with surprise and understanding: she knew he’d remembered the coat, and wore it to help him recognize her. He said, “Thank you,” in a rather overwrought way when he met her, and she smiled.
“It worked. That’s what matters.” Her voice had recovered considerably overnight, and she no longer winced when she spoke. “Good morning. I stuck my head in to ask them to reserve us a table, but…” Vicki gestured first at the parking lot, which had very few cars in it, at 8am on a Saturday, then gallantly held the door for him while he protested. “Well, you can either go in or we can stand here arguing in the cold,” she said briskly, and Zane, chastised, scooted inside.
It seemed like there were even fewer people in the diner than there were cars outside, which didn’t make sense until Zane considered the fact that the staff had also had to drive to work. It looked the way he remembered, too, although he was sure it had been updated in the years he’d been gone, or everything would be aged and faded by now. But the black and white checked tile floor and the dining counter with stools remained the same, and there was still an old-fashioned soda fountain that he bet he still loved. Everything was chrome and fake red leather, with little jukeboxes at each table that took quarters and had, the last time Zane had been there, worked. Right now there wasn’t any musicplaying, though, probably because there really weren’t many people there. Just a handful of them scattered around the room, eating separately, ignoring each other.
They took a seat and a waitress bustled right over to pour coffee and say, “How about this weather, huh?” before bustling off again.
“It’s been like this all winter,” Vicki said in the waitress’s absence. “It snowed a lot, really early, and it hasn’t stopped since. I had to buy huge warm boots that come up to my knees.”
Zane, who hadn’t seen her in those boots, glanced under the table to see if he’d missed a wintery fashion statement. She was wearing ankle boots that didn’t look very warm, and when he came back up from his investigation, her expression was faintly embarrassed. “They’re not cute,” she admitted. “I chose fashion over function today. And I’m paying for it. My toes are frozen.”
“The sacrifices we make.” Zane smiled to keep himself from offering to warm her toes up. Probably by tucking them under his leg or something, although he was open to other suggestions. In fact, he had a whole list of better ideas, but proposing them in a diner booth just didn’t seem like the right idea. “So I did some sketches…”
“Oh!” Vicki brightened with excitement, then tamped it down. “Wait, I have to choose food first or I’ll forget to eat. What are you having?”
Dion generally arranged for Zane to have a delicately scrambled egg white omelette with fresh herbs and tomato on weekend mornings, but he bet that wasn’t on the Silver Dollar Diner’s menu. “I haven’t eaten here in a long time. What’s good?”
“I have a personal weakness for the corned beef hash and eggs. It’s homemade hash and has spoiled me for the canned stuff forever. If I ever want to eat corned beef hash again, I’mgoing to have to come back to Virtue. How far is too far to drive for breakfast?”
“That might depend on whether you like to drive, or how much you like breakfast.” Zane smiled at a sudden memory. “Where I went to college, there was a pancake place that did Saturday morning brunch. They did like thirty kinds of pancakes, maybe more, and didn’t take reservations. People drove for a couple hours to go there, and stood around in line for at least that long waiting to get in. Sometimes when we’d been up all night we’d all pile into somebody’s car and drive over to be first in line. That’s where I met Dion, actually.”
“Oh.” Vicki’s smile went a little wistful. “So you’ve been together a long time.”
“God, yes. I couldn’t live without him. Okay, you’ve talked me into trying the corned beef hash. Do they still have good orange juice? They used to.” The waitress came to take their orders, and Zane cleared the table top between them when she left. Vicki watched with interest as he opened his sketchbook to the pages that were sketches of dresses, rather than sketches of Vicki herself, and pushed the book across the table toward her. “Let me know if you see anything you like.”
