Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor #4)(13)

“You breathed too soon,” Jason said.

A laughing cough escaped her before she could reply. “I have this habit of needing to take in oxygen at regular intervals.” She shook her head, wiping a trace of moisture from beneath her eyes. “Why vodka? Wine is so much nicer.”

“Vodka is efficient. Wine takes too long.”

“You’re right,” Justine said. “Vile, inefficient cabernet—I can’t believe all the time I’ve wasted on it.”

He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Vodka also makes food taste better.”

“Seriously? How?”

“Ethyl alcohol is a solvent for flavor chemicals. If you eat something right after a sip of vodka, the flavor is stronger and lasts a longer time on your taste buds.”

Justine was intrigued. “I’d like to try that.”

“It works best with spicy or salty food. Something like caviar or smoked salmon.”

“We don’t have caviar. But we can almost always put together a cold plate.” Justine studied his inscrutable face. “You probably didn’t go out to dinner with the others, did you? I’ll bet you stayed in your room and made phone calls.”

“I stayed here,” he admitted.

“Are you hungry?”

The question seemed to merit careful consideration. “I could eat,” he finally said.

Without a doubt, he was the most guarded person she had ever met. Did he ever relax and let go? It was hard to imagine. She wondered what he sounded like when he laughed.

“Hey,” she said gently, following an impulse. “When was the last time you raided a pantry?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Why don’t you come downstairs with me? I’m hungry, too. We’ll find something to eat. Besides, I owe you a second shot of vodka.”

To her surprise—and undoubtedly his—he agreed.

Five

Jason sat at the scarred wooden table and glanced around the kitchen. It was a spacious and cheerful room with painted cabinets, retro cherry-printed wallpaper, and soapstone counters. The massive pantry was filled with baking ingredients stored in penny-candy jars, and canned goods stacked three and four rows deep.

He watched as Justine unearthed glass Mason jars filled with pickled vegetables and brought them to the table.

Pulling a bottle of Stolichnaya from the freezer, she set it in front of Jason along with two glasses. “You pour,” she said, and went to slice a baguette into delicate ovals. He could barely tear his gaze from her long enough to comply.

So far in their brief acquaintance, Justine Hoffman had teased and mocked him in a way that no one else dared. She had no idea how much latitude he was giving her, how easily he could have crushed her. But the truth was, she interested him more than anyone had in a very long time.

She was a beautiful woman, with a slender build, long, dark hair and fine skin, and a delicately angular face. She gestured as she talked. Had there been a blackboard in front of her, it would have been erased several times over by now. He should have found that annoying, except that he couldn’t stop imagining ways to slow her down with his mouth, hands, body.

A background check had revealed a woman who wasn’t given to excesses of any kind. She had grown up without a father, which would have made her more likely to have had behavioral problems, drop out of school, abuse alcohol or drugs. But there had been no signs of trouble. No credit issues. No prolific sexual history, only a couple of quiet relationships, neither of which had lasted more than a year. No arrest records, medical issues, or addictions. Only a parking ticket issued by her college’s campus security. So the usual things that made people tick—lust, greed, fear—none of that seemed to apply to Justine Hoffman.

But everyone had something to hide. And everyone wanted something they didn’t have.

In Justine’s case, he knew what the first thing was. The second thing, however … that was the question mark.

Standing at the table, Justine arranged food on a large sectioned plate. “You’re a vegetarian, right?”

“When it’s possible.”

“Did you start eating that way when you went to stay in the Zen monastery?”

“How do you know about the monastery?”

“It’s on your Wikipedia page.”

He frowned. “I’ve tried to get rid of that page. The administrators keep overturning the deletion. Apparently a person’s right to privacy doesn’t bother them.”

“It’s hard enough for regular people to have privacy these days. It must be impossible for someone like you.” Justine unwrapped a wedge of cheese and set it on a cutting board. She began to cut it into thin translucent slices. “So did you become a vegetarian for karmic reasons? You got worried you might come back as a chicken or something?”

“No, it was what they served at the monastery. And I liked it.”

Holding up a hard-boiled egg, Justine asked, “Are eggs and dairy okay?”

“They’re fine.”

Justine loaded the plate with pickled yellow wax beans and cauliflower, salted Marcona almonds, buttery green Spanish olives, coral slivers of home-cured salmon, hard-boiled farm eggs, translucent triangles of Manchego cheese, a fat gleaming wedge of triple-crème Brie, a handful of plump dried figs. The plate was accompanied by a basket of baguette slices and salted rosemary crackers.