So he melted the butter with a sizzle and started to pour the eggs in.
“You’d better let me do it,” Vi said.
Seriously? He couldn’t even make an omelet right? “You should see me work a grill.”
Vi actually grinned. “For an omelet?”
“Everything is better with a grill,” he said loftily.
She laughed. And slipped between him and his pan, so that he got to stand with his chest brushing her back and one hand against the lower counter by the stove, framing her like they were…together or something, her body shifting against his as she rapidly twirled the pan with the egg in it rather than pushed the egg around with the spatula. Her hair smelled really nice, so fresh from the shower, and the warm, hungry scents of butter rose from the pan and mixed with white wine and truffles.
She was messing up his ability to compartmentalize. She was accessing all the emotions he set aside in a box for when he was back home.
And some new emotions he had no idea what to do with, since he and the men he spent his life around dealt with their deepest emotions by pretending they didn’t exist.
Might as well take the appearance of unicorns in stride as handle the emotions that rose up when a slim, proud woman stood with her hair brushing his chin as she worked in the circle of his body, holding a spatula with the thumb and finger she could still move with that splint on, where she had broken it on his jaw. Broken it because, to her, he had destroyed her life as if she was nothing.
She would never understand that he’d been protecting her life, as if it was everything.
What did you do with those emotions? When you’d spent ten years trying to box them up in a little carton labeled “impossible things” and pack them out of the way?
He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to let his head slowly tip forward until it rested on her head and sigh some of his size and strength out so that he was small enough to fit in this space and just stay there a moment, with his eyes closed, breathing her in.
Just as well that she’d probably elbow him in the ribs or something if he did. Kept a man on his toes.
In what was so deceptively close to the shelter of his body—he felt like he was sheltering her, but she probably didn’t feel that way at all—Vi dribbled the truffle sauce down the center of the omelet, folded it, sprinkled it with a pinch of some special sea salt, and slid it on a plate for Célie and Lina. Then she set about making another one.
“Let me try.” Chase brought his other arm around before she could shift away, taking the pan and the spatula and holding them around her, so that she was captured by his body while he worked.
Mmm, yeah. Nice. A man could really enjoy learning how to cook this way.
And she still didn’t elbow him in the ribs or anything.
“Like this?” Rather than move the spatula around the pan to spread the eggs, she had held the spatula pretty still in the middle of the pan and twirled the pan rapidly to get the eggs to spread. So he tried that, just clumsy enough that she made a little sound of protest and placed her hand over his bigger one to guide him.
He grinned down at the back of her head in triumph and caught sight of her friends eyeing them with a great deal of thoughtfulness. Go away, he thought to them. You’re…whatever that French word is. De trop. I want this time. Me, mine. You’re messing it up.
Plus, Jesus, the last thing a man feeling this vulnerable and this full of emotions needed was an audience.
But he didn’t say that.
In fact, after they ate the most delicious omelet he had ever had in his entire life—it took omelet to some phenomenal level, and she’d managed that in only a few minutes’ work—he ended up washing the dishes in the background and then settling himself on the floor on the margins as the women drank wine and he frowned over the French label on Violette’s pain medication and tried to figure out how dangerous mixing the two was. Probably less dangerous than running off on a motorcycle with a strange man who had just broken into your kitchens, but still…at least that risk had had a very high reward potential, right?
She ignored him, so it took him a while to realize she hadn’t even opened the damn bottle of painkillers yet. Too tough, hmm? Well, he’d seen some friends go down a bad road that started with painkillers, so maybe just as well.
She did drink a couple of glasses of wine, and he just watched the gathering and kept his mouth shut, except when the sympathy from her friends seemed to be starting to prey on her courage. Then he would say something randomly provocative to make her spine stiffen again.
He smiled, sipping his own wine in his corner. He did like that straight spine of hers.