YARA I haven’t asked Yasmin anything else since she told me to be careful.
I’ve kept my questions to myself, kept my eyes down at breakfast, played the part of a girl who’s decided her own instincts aren’t worth the trouble.
It costs me something to do it.
I don’t know yet how much.
I’m at my window that afternoon, half watching the light change over the gardens, the way it turns everything gold and slow this time of day, when I see a truck I don’t recognize come up the long drive, dust rising behind it in a pale trail.
It isn’t the kind of car that usually finds its way up to this house.
No polish to it, no pretension, just a work truck that’s clearly been somewhere and done something before it got here.
A man gets out.
He’s tall in a way that isn’t about height so much as presence, broad through the shoulders, dressed like he’s not entirely sure he agrees with the suit he’s wearing, though he wears it anyway, sleeves a little too tight across the forearms, like the fabric was cut for a smaller kind of man.
Dark hair.
He doesn’t hesitate on the drive the way most guests do, doesn’t glance up at the house the way people usually do when they first see the columns, sizing up what kind of family lives behind them, cataloguing whether they belong here or merely visit.
He just walks toward the front door like the ground already belongs to him, unhurried, certain, the kind of walk that makes you understand a person has never once doubted where he’s headed.
Something in me goes very still, watching him.
I don’t know him.
I’ve never seen him before in my life.
But some old, wordless part of me leans toward the glass anyway, the way a plant leans toward a window it doesn’t know is there, some pull I can’t explain and don’t try to.
I watch until he disappears beneath the portico and I can’t see him anymore, and even then I stay at the window a moment longer, as if I might catch some echo of him still crossing the lawn.
Nola introduces him at dinner as Dean Callahan, a distant relation of a family Beau’s done business with, up from Texas on some matter she doesn’t explain further and nobody asks her to.
Callahan.
The name lands somewhere I can’t quite locate, familiar in the way a word feels familiar right before you remember where you heard it, gone again before I can chase it down.
I take my seat across from him at the long table, candlelight throwing gold across the white cloth, silver catching the light every time someone lifts a fork, and I tell myself it’s nothing.
A common enough name.
There must be a hundred Callahans in Texas.
For a while I barely look at him.
Nola is in her element, steering talk toward the Garrison wedding, and Beau leans in to ask Dean something about ranch land and mineral rights, and then, almost carelessly, about the St.
Claire trust accounts.
Dean’s answer comes half a beat too slow, careful in a way his other answers haven’t been, like he’s choosing each word before he lets it out.
He doesn’t perform.
It’s the first thing I notice about him, really notice, that he says exactly as much as a question requires and not one word more, except just now, when it seemed like he wanted to say less.
Then I look up, and he’s watching me.
It isn’t a polite glance, the kind strangers exchange across a dinner table and let go of just as fast.
He holds it, and I hold it back, and something moves through me that has no business moving through a body over nothing more than a look, a jolt low in my chest, sharp and electric, gone as fast as it comes and leaving a strange hum behind it, like a bell that’s been struck once and left to ring.
I look away first.
My throat tightens around nothing.
Conversation moves around the table the way it always does, Beau discussing something about trust agreements, Nola steering talk toward the wedding again, Yasmin laughing at exactly the right moments, golden and easy, drawing Dean into a question about Texas he answers without once looking up, as if her charm slides right off him.
I say very little, aware the whole time of the man sitting across from me in a way I can’t explain and don’t like, my shoulders tight, my hands still in my lap.
“Would you pass the salt?” he asks, his voice low, rough at the edges, nothing like the smooth Savannah cadence I’m used to.
We both reach for it at once, and our fingers brush.
It isn’t much.
A half second of contact, skin against skin, nothing anyone else at that table would even notice.
But heat floods up through my hand and into my wrist, warm and startling, and for one impossible instant something flickers across my palm where his fingers touched mine, faint and gold, like a coal catching just before it goes out.
I pull my hand back too fast.
I turn my palm over under the table, checking.
Nothing there.
Just skin, ordinary and pale in the candlelight.
Trick of the light, I tell myself.
That’s all it was.
But my palm is still warm, long after the moment’s passed, long after Dean’s hand has moved on to his fork like nothing happened at all, and I catch myself glancing at it twice more before dessert, half expecting the gold to come back.
After dinner, the men retreat to the back porch with their drinks, the way they always do, and I find myself out there too, drawn by nothing I can name, standing at the porch rail with the garden spread dark and fragrant below me.
Dean’s already there when I arrive, alone, a glass in his hand he isn’t really drinking from.
“Miss St.
Claire,” he says, amusement threading through his voice, as though the name doesn’t quite fit me and we both know it.
“Yara,” I correct, flat and quick.
“Nobody calls me Miss St.
Claire except people trying to sell my father something.” That gets something out of him, not quite a laugh, but close to it, a low sound in his chest that makes my pulse jump for no reason I can point to.
“Yara, then,” he says, studying me for a long moment, the kind of look that feels like it’s cataloguing something.
I have the strangest sense that whatever he’s looking for, he’s already decided he’s found it.
“You don’t much like these parties.” “Does anyone?” I ask, arms crossing over my chest.
“Some people are built for them,” he says, his eyes not leaving mine.
“You’re not.
You’re built for something wilder than this.” “You don’t know anything about what I’m built for,” I say, meaning it to sound sharp.
It comes out quieter than I intend, less an argument than an admission.
“Maybe not,” he says, turning his glass slowly in his hand, watching the liquid catch what little light spills out from the windows behind us.
“But I’ve been wrong about people before, and I don’t think I’m wrong about this.” “About what?” I ask, my grip tightening on the porch rail.
He doesn’t answer right away.
The quiet stretches long enough that I almost fill it myself, almost ask him something safer, easier, the kind of small talk this porch was built for.
But I don’t.
I wait him out instead, and something about the waiting feels like the truest thing I’ve done all evening.
He leans in, just slightly, close enough that I catch the scent of him, cedar and something underneath it I can’t place, something that makes my breath catch strangely in my chest.
“You smell like the river,” he says, quiet, like he’s telling me a secret instead of an insult.
“Like something wild that got trapped in a pretty house.” I go very still, and then I take a step back, putting air between us where a moment ago there was none.
No one has ever come that close to the truth in my entire life, and that’s exactly what frightens me about it.
Yasmin’s voice is still sitting somewhere in the back of my skull.
People start to wonder about a girl like that.
Maybe this is just a stranger with a gift for pretty, unsettling words.
Or maybe I’m standing on a porch with someone who already knows exactly what I am, and hasn’t decided yet what to do about it.
Give me more motivation!