She grabbed his wrist across the counter, and the pat of butter he’d been about to add fell to the stove. “Heat the pan first. It expands the metal and gets rid of any invisible porousness, so the eggs are less likely to stick.”
He smiled at her fingers circling his wrist. Hell, he was easy. But he liked having her grab his body and manipulate it however she wanted. He wished she’d do that to a lot more than his wrist. “I thought I was adding the butter so the eggs wouldn’t stick.”
“You’re adding the butter for flavor.” She let go of his wrist.
It was all terrifyingly enticing—her sitting across a counter from him while he cooked a simple omelet. Of its own volition, his hand rose to draw a strand of her hair through his fingers. Soft and silky, still a tiny bit damp.
He expected her to bite his hand or something, but she just let that proud chin of hers rest on her fist, letting him play with her hair the same way he’d let her control his wrist and gazing at him as if she couldn’t figure out what to make out of him.
You can’t make much, he almost wanted to warn her. I am already what I made myself.
That was another thing that blocked him from those quiet moments of intimacy. Women, whether they admitted it or not, usually wanted to change a man, mold him to who they were. But he, like most of the men he knew, was just too hardened by the life, too stubborn, too confident. He had that will before which everyone else’s dissipated like ghosts.
And so he kept being him, and…well, here he was. Not divorced yet, which was something of an accomplishment in his field. Surrounded by a band of brothers. But…alone.
He hadn’t felt lonely the other night, when he met her. He’d felt cocky and sure of himself, quite willing to take her dares and ask her to marry him.
But seeing her vulnerable this evening made him vulnerable, too.
He didn’t know what to do with vulnerable. Pull on body armor? Crack a joke? Bring up his weapon?
He gazed down at the pan.
“You know what would be good with an omelet?” Vi said. “Truffles.”
Chase’s contact with truffles was confined to the chocolate ones his mom made for Christmas and which had always turned splotchy brown and grainy by the time they reached him in Afghanistan. He’d hide with them inside his hooch anyway, eating them slowly and closing his eyes as tight as he could to try to pretend he was home for Christmas.
Célie’s and Lina’s eyes lit up when Vi pulled an open plastic zip bag out from her refrigerator and unwrapped a dark, dirty looking lump. A pungent, earthy smell filled the room immediately. “A real one?” Célie said. “It’s July!”
“From Australia,” Vi said smugly. “Top grade, too.”
“Australians grow truffles?” Lina said doubtfully, as if Vi was suggesting something sacrilegious. “Real ones?”
“Taste it.” Vi started to slice off a sliver and cursed as her splint made that awkward. Instead of letting that stop her, though, she pulled out a cutting board and braced the mushroom on it, clumsy but managing. “I’m not sure we could ever use them in Au-dessus, because critics would have hysterics, but maybe Texans wouldn’t care.” She cut Chase a sardonic glance, but then focused on cutting three very fine slivers and gave one to each of them.
Her face had changed. Her eyes were glowing with pleasure to offer this.
Chase’s sliver was rich and earthy and unlike anything he had ever tasted before. But he knew to say, “Mmm,” and to use about the same tone he would have if Vi had just wrapped her hand around his dick.
Besides, it tasted rich, full, amazing—and it made Violette’s eyes glow.
“Wow,” he said, for good measure.
“Wait until you taste it in an omelet.” She began slicing fine slivers, hands still amazingly deft even with one partially immobilized.
“Want me to slice it?” Chase touched her wrist.
Vi yielded the knife to him with the ease of someone used to delegating to sous-chefs. “Slice it fine. Very fine.” She bent to pull out two more skillets and set butter to melting in one, white wine to reducing in another, while Chase sliced. He eyed her sidelong. She was smiling a little as she worked, relaxed.
Well, hell. He’d finally figured out how to calm Vi down. Give her food to work with and hungry people to feed. That was what made her happy.
And she hadn’t been able to do it today, in her moment of crisis. Because he’d had her restaurant shut down. So he’d been party to not only the worst thing that could happen to her, career-wise, but to eliminating the way she dealt with bad things that happened to her. Her cooking.
She added flour to the butter, a rich, nutty scent rising off it, then whisked in the reduced wine and something that looked like sour cream but that she called crème fra?che. She dipped a spoon in it and put it to his lips, to make him taste the difference.
He smiled, loving the fact that she wanted to put flavors straight into his mouth.
She took the bulk of the truffles he had sliced, grabbed the knife and minced them even finer, then dumped them into the sauce, putting the skillet on the back burner to warm gently. “Now for the omelet.”