“Oh,” I say, cocking my head to the side. Did I? Now I can’t remember if I was wincing at my own internal thoughts or my sore shoulder from carrying equipment around. “This bag is just really heavy. I think I pulled something this week. It happens.”
“Here, let me take it.” He holds out his hand expectantly, and I hesitate. I flick my eyes up to Nolan’s and am met with a warmth that makes me melt a little.
“Alright then,” I say, shifting the bag into his waiting hand. He hoists it over his shoulder effortlessly, his biceps bulging in a way that, honestly, should be illegal. I scowl.
Rude.
“Ready to go?”
I follow him through the kitchens to a small room. Butcher block countertops line its outer edges, and a matching butcherblock island sits in the middle. Open shelves underneath the counters house a mess of stainless-steel bowls, pots, and pans of a variety of shapes and sizes, with most looking fairly banged-up or scalded black on their bottoms.
“The graveyard,” Nolan says, catching my gaze as I survey the space. “All the older stuff that we don’t use anymore in the kitchens comes here, and the crew uses this space to cook their own food or test recipes, if the rest of the kitchens are in use.”
He moves to a stove at the far side of the room to turn it on. It sits sandwiched between a double-decker oven and a small fridge.
Two trays are already laid out on the island—one holds two massive ribeye steaks, while the other is piled with thick asparagus and mushrooms. My stomach starts to grumble, and I realize I haven’t really eaten much in the past few hours. Nolan’s breakfast delivery, which has continued to arrive each morning at the same time, was such a long time ago in the context of how long this day feels, and I didn’t manage to eat lunch.
“Nolan—I don’t mean to be rude, because this looks like it’s going to be incredible…but do you happen to have, like, a piece of bread or something? I’mstarving.”
He chuckles, whirling without hesitation and striding toward a few racks near the door, then bending down to pull one out.
“How about mangled corn bread?” he calls over his shoulder.
“You sure know the way to a woman’s heart.”
Nolan smiles—nose crinkling, eyes squinting slightly.
“Anything to make a pretty girl happy.”
A blush quickly blooms across my upper body—my chest, neck, and cheeks all turning crimson at his words. He grins again, then plucks a few misshapen pieces of bread off the tray. As he passes them to me on his way back to the stove, his fingers gently brush against mine, and suddenly the onlythought I’m consumed with is what those calloused hands might feel like on my body.
Nolan is already infuriatingly gorgeous when he’s not smiling. His jawline is defined, but not Hollywood-sharp, and his thick, black beard looks like it would be soft to the touch, instead of coarse or bristly. His curly hair has a slight hint of grays streaking throughout, and it gives him a look of distinguished charm that I’m naturally drawn to.
But when he’s smiling…wow. It’s like sunshine, personified. He’s absolutely uninhibited, open in a way I’ve never known a man to be. All my exes were closed off. They kept their feelings buried so deep that it was hard to know what they were thinking, or how they were feeling. I constantly had to read between the lines, until I could no longer distinguish what they were saying on the surface and what they truly meant.
Nolan doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve—he rips it out of his chest and hands it to you, trusting you fully and completely.
And it’s infectious.
I lean against the stretch of counter next to the stove and nibble on the corn bread while Nolan starts prepping our meal—salting the steaks, cutting off the bottoms of the asparagus stalks, chopping the mushrooms. It’s nice to watch someone else work for a change, and I get a little lost in it.
“Long day?” he asks, suddenly breaking me out of my trance.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “But every day is long. I don’t mind it.”
“Me neither,” he starts, glancing up at me before carrying the tray of steaks to the stove. Holding the tray with one hand, he uses tongs to set down each steak delicately into the frying pan. The scent of seared meat immediately begins to fill the air and the pan hisses sharply. “To be honest, I don’t know what I would do with myself if I had too much time off, you know?”
He looks at me earnestly, and I nod.
After Dad died, for a while I languished in my complete and total disdain for anything other than watching reruns of popular dramas from the early 2000s. The only time I would leave the house was to take a half-hearted run or grab some groceries down the block. I felt awful. Every day, waking up just to do nothing. Every night, going to bed feeling the opposite of accomplished.
After Dad’s money ran out—not that there was much—I didn’t have any option but to go back to work. At first, I did some freelance editing gigs, and those paid the bills for a while. But that dried up after February, when the industry got a little slower.
As much as I didn’t want to be here, the longer I spent away from home and the couch, the more I felt like I was getting back to myself. But…if I was also truly honest with myself, it wasn’t just Dad’s death that made me give up in the first place. I had been on that path for a while, slowly losing my purpose, year after year, in a relentlessly brutal industry that didn’t want to see me succeed.
Dad’s death was just the catalyst.
So, being here—even with my archnemesis marching around somewhere nearby—was starting to feel good. It was starting to feelright.
