How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [92]
A woman approaches. She’s very long-legged and glossy in the way of women who have been wealthy their entire lives. “Hello, Jonah,” she purrs. “I thought that was you.”
His shoulders look rigid. “Hello, Alex.” His voice is calm.
She looks at me, head to toes, and then dismisses me. She squats in front of him, showing her sleek calves and a tasteful glimpse of cleavage. “How have you been?”
“Good. This is my friend Ramona. Ramona, this is Alex.”
“Hello,” she says, holding out a hand with a topaz the size of a bread box on her finger. “Jonah and I have a long history.”
“Ah. What a coincidence,” I say. “So do we. When did we meet, Jonah?”
His smile says everything I need to know. “Twenty-five years ago.”
“Old friends, then, huh?”
I look at Jonah, and he looks at me. “Not exactly.”
She shakes her hair, smiles. “Well, you know where to find me,” she says. Wiggling her fingers, she sways away.
“Please tell me that was not one of the Real Housewives of Vail,” I say. “I would hate to think I had been rude.”
He laughs. “Well done.”
“A love affair that ended badly?”
“Never even an affair. We dated a little, but she’s not … the kind of woman I like to spend time with.”
I pluck a sandwich from my plate. “Gorgeous and rich isn’t a combination that works for you?”
He frowns. “High maintenance. Wrong values.”
“What are the right values?”
“Human beings before things. Earth before consumption.” He lifts a shoulder. “Time is precious and should be respected.”
For a moment I look at him, thinking, He really is the person I thought he was all those years ago.
Onstage, the cellist begins to play a solo. The bow strokes are long and melancholy, as if to underline Jonah’s words. Time is precious. I look at Jonah’s hands, his neck. Notes weave into the gilded evening, sailing almost visibly through the air to land in my chest, caress my throat. “What is this?” I ask.
“This one,” he says in a rough voice, “is mine.”
I close my eyes, overcome and embarrassed to show too much, and let the notes settle into the crooks of my arms and the bones of my spine. Tears fill my eyes and spill over. Embarrassed, I blot them with a napkin. “Sorry. It’s just so beautiful. I can’t help it.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m touched that it moves you.” He takes my hand and pulls me closer, his thumb moving over my inner wrist. I scoot a little nearer and can hear him humming beneath the cello—not singing along but adding harmony or counterpoint. It makes me want to cover him with my body, press him into the grass, and kiss his throat. The brush of his thumb, slow and light, sends sparks leaping across my skin, and I can feel the movements beneath my hair on the nape of my neck, on my temples, beneath my arms.
I lift his hand, his marred hand, and press it to my face. “Will you play for me someday, Jonah?”
His breath leaves him on a sigh as he bends in to my invitation, sweeping his other arm around to create a circle that encloses us. His breath smells of chocolate as he leans to kiss me, and when his mouth touches mine, delicately at first—such full lips—my skin and brain are so tingly that I almost feel as if I will faint. I reach for him, for the brace of his shoulder, and grasp the fabric of his shirt as he—or I, or both—makes a low sound, angles his head, and our tongues touch. It feels like an act we invented this minute, something so rare and strange and incredible that I want to hang in this cello-wound moment, just touching Jonah’s tongue, for at least a year.
But our bodies move, our lips, our tongues, exploring and breathing and sliding and swirling. We breathe. His hand is hot on the back of my neck, and I am holding too tightly to his shirt, and all my resolve to be distant and aloof and to guard myself is gone.
I pull back to look at him. His lion eyes look down at me and we move in to