Page 11 of The Fine Art of Faking It
He nodded. “I wanted to apologize. For before. The HeHa dance. I know it’s water under the bridge and you probably haven’t given it a second thought, but I still feel bad—”
She held up her hand, the one not clutching the remains of her sub. She worked her mouth into a strained, phony smile. “Let’s not talk about the dance. In fact, let’s not talk. Ever.”
Davis’s smile dropped as he took in her words.
He sighed, accepted, because of course he was the freaking good guy. “For what it’s worth, you’re even prettier now than high school.”
“And I’m even less forgiving,” she snapped. She wanted to take her hoagie corpse and shove it into his chest, ruining that crisp white Oxford. But she was a fucking grown-up. “Welcome home,” she said loud enough for everyone within earshot to hear. Without waiting for a response, she stomped back to the table where Sammy—eyes wide, mouth gaping—waited.
“Everything okay?” Sammy asked.
“Peachy.” Eden sat down, back to Davis Gates, and ate her mangled turkey with restrained fury.
* * *
She ranher errands in a fog, pretending that she wasn’t hearing Davis’s name whispered everywhere she went. The grocery store, the drug store, the post office. She could do this. Blue Moon Bend was a small town. But it wasn’t like she was going to see the manevery day. She never went to the winery—rumor had it Davis’s parents had hung her school photo like a mug shot in the tasting room with instructions never to serve her should she darken their door. Sure, she shared a property line with the winery, but with her acreage and theirs she could probably pretend that he didn’t exist just as she had with his parents.
She nodded. Yeah, she could do this. She’d worked so hard. She wasn’t going to let one unfortunate, handsome, sexy,jerkof a man derail her.
Eden signaled and turned into her tree-lined drive. She was deep in thought and had to slam on the brakes when she came around the bend. There was a moving van stuck in the middle of the lane with flares behind it. The driver gave the offending flat tire a good kick.
Eden eased into the grass and pulled alongside the truck. Another figure tucked a phone into his pocket and leaned through her open car window.
Davis Asshat Gates gave her an apologetic grin. “Hi, neighbor.”
Oh, no.
7
Present Day
He was going to drown in acrid smoke.
He’d been upstairs in the tiny spare room he used as a makeshift studio working up a palette of acrylic paints when he’d heard the thud in the kitchen. By the time Davis had made it downstairs, the first floor of his house was engulfed in yellow smoke that smelled as if an entire junior high basketball team had sweated to death in a dumpster without ever learning what deodorant was for.
He gasped in a breath. “God! What is that smell?”
He’d made it into the kitchen, but the smoke was too thick to see the walls. Or the chair he’d neglected to push in after breakfast. Davis pitched forward, meeting the cold metal of his refrigerator with his face. “Son of a bitch!” He clutched at his temple, feeling dizzy and sick. He slid the rest of the way to the floor and lay there for a minute trying to remember where the door was.
It smelled a little less bad on the floor. Through swimming vision, Davis noticed flames licking at the wall in the far corner of the kitchen. With an aching head and burning lungs, Davis belly crawled in the direction of his back door.
He miscalculated and smacked the other side of his head off of the sharp edge of a cabinet. “Mother—” his rant was cut off by a choking fit. Dazed and gasping, his searching hands finally found the wood of the door.
He felt like he was swimming through the innards of a volcano. Davis reached up and gripped the knob. His lungs were turning to ash in his chest, his cells recoiling from the smell and the smoke. The fetid scent was smothering him from the inside out.
On his second desperate try, the knob twisted in his hand and he collapsed on the threshold as the door flew open giving the smoke an escape route into the chilly November air. Weak and dizzy, he dragged himself out onto the back porch by his elbows. He collapsed on the wooden planks and coughed until his eyes watered.
His head felt wet and when his fingers came away from his forehead, they were red with blood. “Well, hell,” he rasped. His phone rang in his jeans. With the last of his strength, he wrestled it from his paint splattered pocket. He rolled over onto his back.
“Yeah?” he wheezed.
“Boss, there’s a lot of smoke coming from your house,” his vintner, Anastasia, blandly stated the obvious.
He lifted his head and watched flames licking up the inside of the kitchen windows. “I think my house is on fire.” One more thing that would piss off his next-door neighbor.
* * *
Davis huddledunder the alpaca wool safety blanket one of the firefighters had draped over his shoulders before attacking his kitchen with axes and hoses. He clutched the cup of warm liquid between his hands, not sure if it was hot chocolate or coffee or just hot water. His head ached, his vision was iffy, and he smelled like a parking lot portable toilet after the Super Bowl. And the ambulance tailgate felt like a frozen pond under his ass.
