Loving Ashe - Book 1 of the Celebrity Series

Coffee and Kisses

Riley felt her face burning with embarrassment and she lowered her eyes.

"The Riley who doesn't believe she's as beautiful as she really is, who is more intelligent than she lets everyone else think," Ashe continued. "That's the Riley I want to talk to."

"Well, now that you put it that way, then I guess we can talk," she said as she unlocked her front door. "But just talk, okay?"

"Just talk," Ashe nodded as he followed her into her apartment. "I meant every word I said."

"I was afraid of that," Riley said, remembering the way he had kissed her earlier that evening, the butterflies in her belly fluttering again. Talking was starting to seem overrated.

* * *

"Would you like coffee?" Riley asked as they entered her apartment.

"Coffee would be perfect," Ashe said, slipping off his coat and hanging it behind her door. He followed her into her small kitchen, which was just a little space behind a counter, before stepping back as if realizing just how small the space really was.

"I hope you're not allergic to cats," she said as Ashe walked toward the living room. "Miss Bailey is here somewhere, but she's a little nervous of people she doesn't recognize, so she might be under the bed or the couch. Just don't be alarmed if you notice something moving, maybe rubbing against your leg or whatever."

"I won't," Ashe said. "I grew up with animals, and it will be a pleasure to meet Miss Bailey when she comes out of hiding."

While she prepared coffee, Ashe browsed through her books, pulling one out here and there to open it and flip through the pages, and always taking care of how he opened them. She could have sworn she caught him smelling the books, especially the vintage ones that belonged to her mother. Jane Eyre was one that he pulled out and flip through the pages, and Riley caught him smile to himself when he pulled out her mother's copy of Madame Bovary.

"Do you like to read?" she asked.

"I do, yes," Ashe replied as he returned a book to the shelf. "Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to read these days, unless it's to research a role. If I have some time, I read on my phone, but I do miss the feel of a real book in my hands."

"I know what you mean," Riley said. "That's why I have these books here in my apartment. Some of them belonged to my mother. She was such a voracious reader, and she loved collecting old books."

"Are these hers?" he asked, pointing to a row of old books on one of the shelves.

Riley nodded as the Moka pot bubbled and she turned away from him, taking the pot from the stove and dividing the contents equally between two cups. While she brewed espressos with a commercial machine at the Library Cafe, at home Riley preferred to do it the old-fashioned way, on the stove. Besides, her little kitchen had no room for an espresso machine. She extracted a carton of half-and-half from the refrigerator and a bowl of sugar from the cupboard.

"Having them around makes me happy. She died when I was ten," Riley said, taking both cups to the living room where she set them on the coffee table and sat on the couch.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Ashe murmured.

"She had MS, and she was in a wheelchair, and—" she paused, not wanting the conversation to go down a path she hated to go. But as she gazed at Ashe's face, she marveled at how honest he looked, like he was truly saddened by the news that her mother was dead. "I was too young to remember what happened."

But that was a flat-out lie. Of course, she remembered what happened. Riley had been with her mother when the next door neighbor's apartment caught on fire from an unattended cigarette. The thick scar on her left arm was her reminder every day of how she'd been too small and too weak to help her mother down the stairs where they would have been safer from all that smoke—and her father's hatred of her.