She fetched wine, and two glasses, poured, and settled on a stool across from him at the island. She slid the second glass within his reach, assuming he wouldn’t drink it, but offering it all the same. “What are you making?”
A pan was heating on the hob to his right, and he added a splash of olive oil and then scraped the pancetta off the cutting board into it with the edge of his knife. It landed with a sizzle, and an immediate bloom of good, savory frying smells. His nose wrinkled.
“Fried rice. Sort of.” He gestured to the ingredients he’d lined up on his other side. “Best I can do.”
She didn’t say that she tried to limit her starch intake. Nor that she wasn’t sure how long that can of peas had been sitting in the pantry. She cooked some, and poorly at that, so she hadn’t known the state of her inventory. She didn’t get up, rummage through the fridge, and suggest an alternative.
She said, “Well, it smells good already.”
He paused in the act of dicing an onion, and looked up at her, gaze narrowed. Searching for a lie, she thought, or a trace of mockery.
She sipped her wine, expression mild, and he went back to work.
“Where did you learn to cook?” she asked.
“Maybe I’ve always known how,” he countered. The knife wentsnick-snick-snickon the wood cutting board, his technique not professional, but competent, sure and steady.
“Maybe you have.”
He reached for a carrot. As he sliced into it, neat little orange coins rolling away from the edge of the knife, he said, in a softer voice, “I learned a long time ago. In Russia. Nothing fancy. But there was…someone who said a man should know how to keep himself fed. Cheaper. Safer, sometimes. It was good, he said, to have that independence. He taught me a few things.”
His father? she wondered. A brother? Uncle? She said, “He sounds like a smart man.”
“Hm. Yeah.” He gave the pancetta a stir, and then lifted it out onto a plate. Added the vegetables instead. The pan roared to life, the sizzling more intense, now, as the onions and carrots hit the meat fat. The scent shifted, grew richer, flavors layering together.
“I can’t remember the last time my kitchen smelled like something besides lemon cleaner. Here or in London,” she confessed.
His brows furrowed as he stirred. “There’s lettuce in the fridge. A lot of it.” His mouth twitched. “If you want a salad instead.”
“Oh, no. I’m not going to smell this and then eat rabbit food. We’ll call it a cheat day.”
His mouth twitched the other way…and then settled. His brow slowly smoothed.
Whatever’s going on inside that head?she wondered. She was quite good at small talk, had perfected the art of it for work, but she found that she had no idea how to keep him talking. His was the sort of past best not pried into, and he wasn’t so much guarded as unavailable. Signs of life flickered through – his arm around her, his nastiness with Greg Ingles, the twitches of brow and lip; small signs of displeasure and disquiet – but she had no idea how to get him to relax. To really talk.
She said, “What’s your best dish? In your estimation. The one that really gets the girls exclaiming.”
He rapped the spoon on the side of the pan and sent her another look screened by his lashes, this one verging on derisive. “The girls?”
“Yes. Your dates. Your girlfriends.”
The brows furrowed again. “I don’t have girlfriends,” he muttered, and turned toward the back counter to fetch the rice cannister. It offered her a lovely, unimpeded view of his tapered waist, the flex of lean muscle beneath his shirt. The backside he always hid with baggy jeans, and which, regrettably, his bespoke suit jackets covered. Now there was a delightful surprise.
“Right, right,” she said. “You’re young, and hot, and on the prowl. Don’t want to tie yourself down.” She rolled her eyes, though he couldn’t see it; thought it leaked through into her voice anyway.
His shoulders, she thought, looked stiff inside Miles’s too-small shirt. When he turned, his frown had nearly become a scowl, black brows two unhappy slashes angled together. “I don’t have girlfriends,” he repeated. “I don’tdate.”
Such vehemence. She hadn’t pegged him for a player, given his seriousness.
“Well, chin up,” she said, briskly. “There’s still hope. If you want a girl to sit up and take notice, you’ve got to be at least a little sociable. You should cook for her.”
He added dry rice to the pan to toast; stirred it back and forth with the flat edge of the wooden spoon. His gaze flicked up to meet hers, startling in its sudden intensity – though, really, he was always intense. It was a matter of degrees, really.Thisgaze, though, filled the space between them with an immediate tension. It sizzled like their dinner on the hob.
She didn’t think she imagined the new, roughened edge to his voice when he said, “I’m cooking for you.”
Holy hell.
Christ.
