Page 7 of Iridescent
I leaned closer, lowering my voice as I glanced around the crowded restaurant. "Or are we planning to eat and make a run for it like we did at Harley's?"
After one of my fights, we'd ended up at a bar with sticky floors, bad lighting, and a bartender who looked like he had lost custody of his patience sometime in the eighties. Xavier ordered fries. I ordered a burger. Neither of us had checked our pockets until the bill arrived.
To this day, he insists we didn’t flee.
We absolutely fled.
Xavier threw his head back and laughed, and there they were—those dimples that had sent my common sense straight to hell the first time I saw them. I had made him laugh, and I was damn proud of it.
When his gaze returned to mine, the delight in his golden eyes struck something painfully tender in me, as if I had coaxed daylight out of a man who had learned to live without morning. Smiling suited him better than the quiet sadness he carried even on his best days.
In that moment, he reminded me of a midnight sun: impossible, incandescent, burning where darkness should’ve reigned and leaving warmth where grief had rendered me desolate.
God, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. My Midnight sun.
“We never—no, amor, we are not doing that.” His chest rumbled with the remnants of a chuckle when he said, “Karras closed the deal.”
I went still, unable to process the words. “The deal?”
“The deal,” he confirmed, nodding once, like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.
Dominic Karras was the reason Xavier and I had met in the first place. He owned the private investment firm Xavier had spent six months trying towin over, and he held a silent stake in The Ninth Bell.
Which explained his condition, though it did nothing to make it less insulting: twelve sessions with the house coach—me—and three rounds in the ring while Karras watched from the ropes before he would even consider backing the deal.
I had thought the whole thing was absurd.
Xavier had looked at me like absurdity was just another door he intended to kick open.
His ambition was part of why I fell in love with him. That ferocious, almost unreasonable belief that he could build a future out of nothing but nerve, hunger, and refusal. That, and the way he made room for me inside a life he was still fighting to earn.
My mind caught up a second later. I shot out of my chair. Xavier rose with me, one hand bracing my waist to keep me from knocking my hip into the table.
“You’re serious?” I narrowed my eyes. “This isn’t a trick to make me stop calculating how many toilets we’d need to scrub?”
He drew me closer until there was no space left between us, his warmth and the familiar woodsy scent of his skin making it hard to think. “Signed this afternoon.”
Pride surged through me with a visceral force that stole the breath from my lungs. I threw my arms around his neck, squealing right there in the middle of that too-expensive restaurant, and for once, I didn’t care who looked.
“You did it,” I breathed, laughing so hard it almost broke into a sob.
Xavier's arms came around me, firm and immediate, his mouth pressed to my hair. “I did it, amor.”
When we finally pulled apart, half laughing, half crying, the maître d’ was standing beside our table with the careful expression of a man deciding whether to offer champagne or call security.
"Is everything all right?" he asked.
I nodded too quickly. "Yes. Perfect. Sorry."
Xavier's grin lingered as he guided me back into my chair, his hand warm at the small of my back. I tried to compose myself, failed almost immediately,and hid my smile behind the menu.
Giddy and fighting a laugh, I pointed at the first dish that caught my eye.
Poulet basquaise.
The number beside it sobered me immediately.
Xavier studied the menu description, then lifted his gaze to the server assigned to us. “No shellfish,” he said, calm as a man discussing market conditions instead of my inconvenient mortality. “No shellfish stock, no shared pans, no shared oil, no garnish prepared on the same board. Nothing that has touchedshellfishcomes near her plate.”
