She waited until he met her eyes before continuing. Each word precise. Each word the echo of a siren, and he meant that in every conceivable way.
“You have to dig.” She didn’t look away, and he couldn’t. “You have to look carefully, but there’s a story waiting for you. It wants you to see the signs. It wants to be told.”
Under that clear, calm gaze, he wanted to hide beneath the table once more. Cover his head and protect himself as the ground beneath him swayed and buckled.
Then she picked up her fork and speared another bite of her haricot verts, and he could breathe again. Could ignore for another moment that under his feet, the earth wasn’t actually solid and still. It was moving, continually. And deep, deep below a placid, cool surface, even stone turned molten and fiery and liquid.
“Also, geology is a culmination of various sciences,” she added in a casual aside. “Chemistry, physics, biology all come into play. I liked that too, because lots of different subjects interest me.”
He shouldn’t ask. He definitely wasn’t going to ask.
And yet—
“Why do you say it’s a dirty love affair?” he asked.
There it was.
Closing his eyes, he dropped his chin to his chest and exhaled hard through his nose. Shit. He didn’t need yet more reason to want April, not when his gut already tightened with each glimpse of her pale, freckled skin bathed by candlelight. Not when she made a goddamn living spearing through surfaces and discovering what lay underneath, and he wanted to remain undiscovered. At least for the moment.
“Up until now, I’ve spent a good chunk of my workdays handling soil. Looking for contamination at former industrial sites and coordinating whatever cleanup is feasible under the circumstances.” When he opened his eyes again, she was scraping the last bits of polenta from her plate. “The last few weeks, I’ve been dealing with a former pesticide facility, so the ground is contaminated with metals.”
Well, that was a lot less sexy than he’d both anticipated and feared.
Despite her matter-of-fact tone, though, her work sounded . . . dangerous. Technical. Physical, in ways he hadn’t anticipated.
He braced his elbows on the table, fascinated. “What will happen to that land, once the cleanup is done?”
She lifted a round shoulder. “Depending on what the owner of the site decides, it might become anything from a parking lot to a residential area.”
He didn’t understand. He truly didn’t. How was such a transformation even possible? How could something so thoroughly poisoned became a place for a family? For a home?
“But that’s not up to me, or even the consultant who’ll be taking over the site starting next week.” Her pale throat moved as she sipped her water, and he had to swallow hard himself. “Either the owner will devote the enormous amount of time and effort and money necessary to dig up all the contamination and dispose of it elsewhere, or they won’t. Can’t, in many cases.”
He fiddled with the edge of his jacket cuff. “And if they won’t? Or can’t?”
With an arc of her hand, her forearm going from vertical to horizontal, she mimed something being dropped from above. “They’ll tell the consultant to put a cap on the land. Two to five feet of clean soil over the contamination. It’s cheaper. Easier.”
“But?” There was a catch. He understood that, even without a single smidgen of background in geology.
“But under those circumstances, the land can never be used for any purpose that would require digging below surface level. The options for its use, its future, are limited forever.” There was no judgment in her tone. It was a statement of fact, not a condemnation. “At least until that owner, or the next one, makes a different decision.”
His chest hurt, and he forced himself to inhale slowly. Blow out the breath in several extended beats of his rabbiting heart.
Olaf came then to remove their plates, decrumb the tablecloth, and top off their water yet again. After he left, they sat without speaking and waited for dessert.
“You were worried you’d bore me to tears talking about your work,” she finally said. “But you had it exactly backward, as it turned out.”
She was watching him from across the table, her hair a silky wash of red-gold, her skin speckled with constellations, her wide mouth tilted at the corners. That wry, gorgeous smile caught at him, a hook towing him places he’d intended to avoid.
He wanted to make a different decision, though. He did.
“I’d like to go out with you again.” It was a sudden rush of words, tumbling forth like the landslide she’d mentioned earlier. Mindless. Inexorable. “Dinner, if you want, or something else. An art gallery, or a museum, or . . .”
What would hold the interest of a woman like her?
How could he hold the interest of a woman like her?
Could he maintain control of his narrative and date her?
“Better yet, we can go to an indoor water park.” He winked at her, forcing a confident grin. “I’m always happy to show off my hard work at the gym.”
Eventually, if all went well, if he decided he could trust her, he would let her dig further beneath his surface. In the meantime, he would entertain her the best way Well-Groomed Golden Retriever Marcus knew how. It could work. It would work.
For the first time since he’d met her, April appeared stunned.
Her lips were parted, her eyes wide, her body motionless. She didn’t make a sound, not one, before Olaf arrived in a burst of terrible timing to lay their desserts before them.
He disappeared quietly, and then it was just the two of them again.
She bit her lip, eyes downcast, and Marcus knew. Without her needing to say a word. He waited anyway, prepared to absorb the blow.
The answer was as clear to her as it was to him, evidently.
How could he hold the interest of a woman like her? He couldn’t. He didn’t.
“I’m sorry, Marcus,” she began, her voice quiet and reluctant, “but I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
And there it was. The kick to his chest he’d expected.
“Okay.” He didn’t say more. Couldn’t, not through the ache beneath his ribs.
“It’s just—” She hesitated. “It wouldn’t work. Not under the circumstances.”
Even though he hadn’t asked for more of an explanation, it seemed she was giving him one anyway. He just hoped she was kind enough to cushion the blow, rather than saying it outright: You’re too shallow and stupid for me.
And how could he blame her for thinking that, when she’d spent almost an entire meal in the company of his public persona?
“I, um, write Gods of the Gates fanfic,” she said, her cheeks suddenly rosy. “Including some stories that are . . . kind of explicit.”
Now he was the one startled into stillness and silence. She wrote fanfiction? Sexy fanfiction? And given both her Twitter handle and the photo she’d posted, her OTP must be—
“I write almost exclusively about Lavinia. And Aeneas. So you can see how it would be a little weird to date you, after devoting hundreds of thousands of words to you—” She paused. “Well, not you, really, but an Aeneas who looks like you. Anyway, after devoting hundreds of thousands of words to a you-looking Aeneas falling in love and, um—”