“Also, I don’t mean to be greedy, but could you say shit again in that accent? Or if you want to broaden your English vocabulary, there’s this fantastic swear word you might try.” He pressed a fist to his heart and stared at her like a starving puppy, as if he could just will the word right out of her. “Fuck.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Were you, like, Navy SEAL before you took up ‘security consulting’ or something?”
He angled his head just a little. The dim lights showed a strong jaw and a gleam in his eyes, but she still couldn’t tell their color. His hair must be brown, though—not light enough for blond, and if it was black, it would be all shadow now. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Wait, what? She’d been being sarcastic, trying to come up with the cockiest archetype of American manhood she could think of. What nail had she hit?
“I mentioned my arrogant male fatigue,” Vi said.
He grinned again. “In the right circumstances, I bet you could make me beg.”
This guy was so full of himself. It was disconcerting how much he made her insides tickle with that grin of his. It must be the adrenaline getting to her. Things had been so calm around here lately. It had been at least two days since she’d had to throw a pot at anyone’s head.
“But that’s what I lied about.” He looked woeful. “I’m not really here testing your window security.”
She sighed and set down her butcher knife to pick up the good-for-throwing knife in her right hand. “And I’m not left-handed.” She took an easy grip of the point in her right hand, holding his eyes. “But oh, right. I told you the truth about that.”
“I’m head of a security agency that has taken on as a client one of the billionaires coming to your restaurant tomorrow, and we were tasked with making sure that all of his meals would really be gluten-free.”
She choked. She made a mighty effort to keep her haughty, disdainful look, but she couldn’t hold the laugh back, and she had to set one of her knives down as she covered her mouth to try to suppress it. Damn it. Never let the cocky male make you laugh. You lost all kinds of authority that way.
“What?” he asked innocently. “He has an intolerance! It makes him bloated!”
She bit down on her lip as hard as she could, but the whole laugh escaped out into the open air. She dropped both knives and pressed her hands against the counter, trying for breath.
Her burglar grinned like a cat that had rolled in way too much catnip. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you are really hot.”
“Is there a good way to take that?” she challenged dryly.
“Well…as a compliment? I mean, if you told me that, that’s the way I would take it.”
She sighed, wishing his cockiness and physical strength and visible attraction to her didn’t get to her the way they did. The last thing a female chef needed was to be vulnerable to that particular male combination. She’d never hold her own. “Did Quentin send you to sabotage tomorrow’s dinner?”
A little of the grin faded off his face. He straightened away from the wall. In the light, his hair was a kind of blue-brown, his skin faintly ghostly. “Who’s Quentin?”
“He was my second.”
Her burglar’s eyes narrowed just a little. It changed the whole look of his face, from cocky and dangerous to her equilibrium to just…dangerous. To everybody else. “Was?”
She shrugged, as if this kind of thing didn’t hurt every time. Why the hell did men have to make it so hard to do her job? As if everything in life was all about them and their wants, all the time? “Well, since I’m a woman, obviously he thought he was the real star in the kitchen and that I was just some figurehead who was sleeping with the hotel owner.”
Her burglar held up one finger. “Just a little point of interest, and not to distract your story, but are you sleeping with the hotel owner?”
She gave him a withering look.
He smiled. “Good.”
Oh, for God’s sake. As if that was his business. She tried to wither his cockiness again, but like most of the men she encountered in her career, his cockiness just thrived regardless.
“I mean, because I wouldn’t want to have to kill your boss,” her burglar said innocently.
Damn it, he’d almost made her laugh again. She rolled her eyes to cover it.
“So you had to get rid of Quentin,” her burglar said.
“After he cornered me in the walk-in after everyone else had gone home and tried to prove his masculine supremacy over me, I did.” She shrugged. “It was either that or cut off his balls, and can you imagine the media if I did that? My career would be finished. No one would ever eat at the restaurant of the female chef who cut off men’s balls.”
He gazed at her a moment, with a dazed look in his eyes. He gave his head a hard shake. “Hell, you’re hot.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “The idea of getting your balls cut off attracts you?”
“I’ll wear protection. So this Quentin…what’s his last name? Where does he live?”