CHAPTER THREE

New York City

The rain was still roaring down outside. Tillie wished for her umbrella, but Liam grabbed a big black one from the stand inside the door of the gallery and held it high enough to protect them both. She pointed to a diner down the block and shouted, "Coffee?"

He nodded.

They dashed for a red neon sign blinking "P-I-E." Liam dove for the door and held it open for her. She ducked under his arm, catching an alluring whiff of pheromones replaced with the scent of something baking as they pushed inside. It wasn't an old-school diner but a reasonable millennial imitation, with fresh red Naugahyde on the stools and booths, and pie safes on the counter. A young man came over to seat them. He was small and tidy, and Tillie thought of a cockatiel with a brush of white feathers on his head.

"Coffee, I assume?" he asked as they settled in a booth.

"Please," Tillie said, rubbing her fingertips over the vague whisper of migraine below her temple.

"Let me ask you, bro," Liam said, "can you get a pot of water really hot?"

"I got you," he said, pointing. "You want English style, with milk, am I right?"

"Yeah, that's exactly right."

His accent was not full New Zealand, with its pinched edges, or as deeply drawling as South African. Tillie decided he must have traveled a lot, and she wondered again what he did. Instead of probing, she bent her head to examine the menu. One side was burgers and eggs. The other was a list of pies and cakes. She felt a swift hunger and wondered when she'd last eaten.

The server returned with a fat steaming pot of water, a cup, a little metal pitcher of milk, and coffee for Tillie. "That looks amazing," Liam said, and the server beamed.

"Pies today are pecan, apple, peach." He glanced over his shoulder toward the glass-fronted fridge. "Mocha cream, banana cream, and everybody's favorite, lemon meringue. We also have honey cake. You need a few minutes?"

"Honey cake," Liam echoed. "Really?"

The server winked. "To capture the fairies."

"I'm not ready to order," Tillie said, taking a packet of sugar from the metal basket on the table.

"Nor I." When the man hurried away, Liam lifted the lid of the metal teapot and stirred the tea bags. "Promising. Could be a contender for the best tea I've had in America."

"You're nearly always better off with coffee."

"Yeah, no. I don't like the coffee here. No offense."

"None taken." Stirring a dollop of cream into her cup, she asked, "Have you been here awhile, then, in the States?"

"Awhile this time. Twelve weeks. I leave Saturday for Europe."

She inclined her head. "Work?"

He nodded but didn't elaborate.

"Do you travel here often?"

"Sometimes."

He still made no move to share what he did, and she let it go. Looked back at the menu. "I'm trying to decide whether to be healthy-ish and have a salad, or say to hell with it and dive into the pie."

"I'm going for the honey cake, myself," he said, tossing the menu down. "If that helps you decide."

"I don't know that I've ever had it," she said.

"A classic. If it's true honey cake, it will be soaked in honey syrup. I'm intrigued enough to give it a try."

"I'll look forward to your verdict," she said. "I'm going with the pie." She dropped her menu on top of his. Her gaze caught on the flesh of his throat, so golden ( like honey , she thought), and her imagination gave her an extravagant visual of flinging her body over his naked one.

A slight smile curved his mouth.

Embarrassed, she thought, Where did that come from?

Except that it had been a while since she'd had sex with anyone, since she'd broken up with her fiancé five months before. She thought of honeybees buzzing around an open flower. She smelled honey.

Suddenly, as if a knife slashed open reality—

She stood in the dark, surrounded by trees and stars, hearing a roar of animal sounds, birds, and insects in a cacophony that swept her up, enveloped her entirely. She heard water nearby and the buzzing of bees or crickets or—

And then, just as suddenly, she was back in her body, in the booth, with Liam across the table. A sliver of the migraine aura edged around the outside of her iris.

"You all right?"

"Yeah." She literally shook it off, moving her shoulders and head. "Food will help."

She was glad not to be alone.

The coffee and sugar helped. By the time the waiter brought their food—the honey-soaked cake for Liam, peach pie for her—Tillie was feeling fairly normal.

Which, of course, meant her ex started texting.

I have been thinking about that trip we made to Colorado last year , he said. Remember that moose we saw?

Tillie sighed and turned the phone over on its face. The phone buzzed, buzzed again, and then again. She ignored it and took a bite of the indulgent pie. As the sugar, peaches, and crust hit her tongue, she widened her eyes. "Wow. This is amazing." She pointed with her fork. "Is yours?"

He'd admired the cake enough to shoot a photo. "For my mum," he said. "This is her big thing. Honey." Now, he was three bites in, almost wolfing it down. "It's the real thing, I reckon. No sugar. A little orange zest."

"Maybe you need two pieces."

Beside her on the table, Tillie's phone vibrated again. Once, twice, three times.

"You can answer," he said.

"No." She picked it up and put it under her thigh, where she could feel it but it wouldn't interrupt. "An annoying ex."

"Ex-husband?"

"Oh, God no!" But that made it sound like he was only an old boyfriend. "Fiancé, actually. We broke up a couple of months ago, and he's having a hard time with it."

Liam gave her his full attention, even setting down his fork. "Yeah?"

For some reason, the focus made her want to talk. Explain. Although, really, that wasn't exactly the right move with a guy you wanted to impress. And she did want to impress him. His lip shone with a brush of honey.

She said, "I should block him, but it feels mean." She plucked a sliver of peach and ate it with her fingers. "Has that ever happened to you?"

He watched her eat with her fingers. "A fiancée?" he returned with a slight smile.

"Maybe. Or someone you couldn't be with, even though you knew they loved you?" She heard the sentence and straightened. "Wow, sorry, that was really personal. I'm a little off tonight."

"I prefer personal and real to the superficial," he said. "I almost had a fiancée once. Turned out she was not as interested in the arrangement as I was."

"Sorry to hear that."

He shrugged. "That's life, as my friend Krish reminds me."

A little pain lingered beneath the shrug, and she wanted to follow the trail of it. Beneath her thigh, the phone buzzed again. Jared was drinking, she guessed, listening to albums on the turntable they'd bought to play the vinyl they'd collected. She could imagine him sitting on his couch in the rain, in the apartment they had planned to share, drinking beer and wallowing in the music they loved. It made her feel both really sad and really relieved.

The server paused by the booth, tilting his cockatiel head back and forth between them. "Would you like some more, handsome?"

Liam grinned. "Nah, bro. How about a grilled cheese?"

"You got it." He glanced at Tillie, his body still angled toward Liam. "You need anything, sweetie?"

She shook her head.

Liam folded his hands on the table—beautiful hands, long fingers with well-tended nails—only marred by the cluster of gemstone bracelets running up his wrist. Again, she wished he weren't such a surfer-hippie dude. "Working on your energies?" she asked, pointing.

"Ah, yeah, why not? My sister gave them to me when I started traveling. Reckoned it couldn't hurt." He took a breath, fingered the beads. "It's a challenging trip."

"Are you a model?"

"What?" He laughed. "No!"

"Actor? Dancer? Professional surfer?"

"I'm pleased you see me as a man of substance."

It was Tillie's turn to laugh. "Sorry. You're just so ..."

He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

She was going to say pretty , but that wasn't it. Light skated along the bridge of his nose, his cheekbones, and she thought of Tam Lin, the knight stolen away by fairies. Following some instinct she'd learned to trust, she asked, "Would you maybe have time to let me sketch you?"

"You're an artist, too?"

She nodded. "I have so much work, I wasn't even going to come tonight."

"I'm glad you did."

She let the words skate around in her veins, awakening sleepy blood. "Me, too."

"I have time tomorrow." He paused. "Or tonight, if you'd rather."

An iridescent possibility rose between them. "I would," she said. "Rather. Tonight."

The rest of their meal had no weight. Liam ate his sandwich, and they dashed into the rain and miraculously caught a passing cab. Tillie gave the address and fell back in the humid car. His knee and hers touched. Neither of them moved. She smelled nutmeg on him, or maybe it was just his skin.

"I hope your coat is warm," she said. "It's going to be cold." She almost said in the morning , but was that what she meant? Why else would she be inviting him back to her apartment to ostensibly sketch him at 10:00 p.m. on a rainy night?

He took her hand and turned it over. "Shall I read your palm?"

His skin was warm, warmer than it should have been. Light from the street flashed over his hair, showed the faint shimmer of beard on his jaw, the growth of a day. She thought, I will remember this.

"Sure."

He spread her fingers open, stroked the center of her hand. Tillie was acutely aware of each brush of his fingers. "Long lifeline," he commented, then: "Hmm. A break early. Did you suffer an illness as a child?"

Was he really reading her palm? "I did have a fall when I was three or four."

"You don't know which one?"

Answering that honestly would mean getting into things about her mother that she wasn't interested in expressing to a stranger. To deflect, she tugged the streak of white in the hair over her temple. "That's when I got this."

"Head injury?"

She nodded. "I was out for several days, they say. I had to learn to speak all over again."

His attention sharpened, a contrast to his mild comment. "Interesting." He bent his head. "And this"—he slid his finger from the pad beneath her middle finger to the heart of her palm—"might be the breakup with the man who misses you."

The man who misses you. The words gave her a strange ache. "He does."

"Do you miss him, too?"

She raised her eyes. Shook her head.

Liam bent in and kissed her. He held her hand, and his other arm moved behind her shoulders, giving her a sense of protection. The touch of their mouths created a sense of light, and a fragrance of forest enveloped them. Tillie leaned in as if enchanted, pulled by something she couldn't name—

A bird cawed in her head. The porch from the painting emerged clearly on the screen of her imagination. Trees stood sentry around it, and the bird hopped down to the railing. A giant cat raced up the steps, and the bird flew away—

The lurking headache abruptly bloomed, throbbed across the bridge of her nose, and she felt suddenly sick to her stomach. Pulling away, she breathed in, then out. "Sorry," she whispered, trying to calm the nausea. "It's just—"

His hand fell between her shoulder blades.

Embarrassment mingled with the sudden, hard arrival of a full-blown migraine. She was trying not to barf in the cab when they pulled up in front of her building. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't think I can—"

"Let me help you inside. That's all."

They ran toward the foyer in the deluge. Her feet and shins were splashed with water, her hair soaked before they reached the stoop. She paused for a moment in the foyer, thinking wildly that she should check the mail, but the blindness had spread over one eye, and she didn't even know if she could climb the four flights to her apartment. Sinking down on the stairs, she rested her head on her forearms.

"Do you have some medication to take?" he asked. "Can I get you something?"

She raised her head. His crown was surrounded with shimmering lights, like a halo. "It's four flights."

"C'mon. Lean on me."

Honestly, she was so grateful for his presence, she didn't think about anything else. Taking it slow, she held on to the railing. A whisper of regret moved through her—she wouldn't see him again after all this.

In a way, that made it easier. She didn't ordinarily take men to her apartment. It was too personal, too revealing, but without his help, she'd be sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her head on her knees.

Her loft, which sounded fancy but wasn't in the slightest, occupied most of the top floor. It was barely finished and cold as the tundra. The only reason she'd landed there was because she'd inherited it from a friend who had moved to Los Angeles. It was two thousand square feet of open space and windows. To counter the cold, she'd scattered space heaters around and grouped the living areas together. The rest was open for easels and supplies and stacks of canvases. Organized chaos. Liam looked at the painting closest to them, a nude female nursing a baby wolf, her hair wild and full of vines. He said nothing, but it made Tillie feel vulnerable. Too much of her was visible in this room. Far too much for a stranger to see.

When he said gently, "Let's get you settled," she nodded and took a step toward her bedroom—

And fainted dead away, like some Victorian heroine.