“You did what?” When I didn’t immediately reply, he added, “Dirty fucking plates, Alivia?”
“I wouldn’t call them dirty. Someone sent back their food tonight, and that’s where I got the cooked tomato.” I pointed at it. “The steak was from a kid’s plate. He didn’t even eat a bite of it, and his parents didn’t take it to go. Rachel said it was okay if I kept the food—she knew I wasn’t going to eat it, that I was just going to practice cutting.”
He nodded toward me. “Show me.”
“The food?”
“No. Show me the way you’re cutting.” As he spoke, he came closer.
And with every inch he moved, more goose bumps rose across my skin.
This wasn’t just the man I’d spent two nights with. A man I craved beyond words. A man I spent hours glancing at almost every night I was here, knowing I would never get to touch him again.
This was also Walker Weston. No one in this world could cut like him.
I knew because I peeked whenever I was in the kitchen, and the things he could do with a knife was beyond comprehension.
At some point while I had been talking to him, I’d set the knife on the counter, and as I stared at it, the last thing I wanted to do was pick it up. “Do I have to?”
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
I looked at him, holding my breath. “If I can’t say that to you … you can’t say that to me.”
“You’re testing me in my own fucking kitchen. There are consequences to that.” His green eyes were the color of emeralds tonight, his stare almost rabid while he gazed at me.
I didn’t want to focus on them—they were too beautiful to continuously admire—but I couldn’t look anywhere else.
“Walker, the thought of showing you how I cut makes me so nervous that I can’t even breathe.”
That wasn’t the only thing making me jittery and breathless, but I wouldn’t admit the other reasons to him.
He went totally silent. “Then at least show me how you hold a knife.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Show me, Alivia.”
As I turned toward the counter, he came over to the back of me, and I slowly picked up the knife, sliding my grip toward the blade.
“Now hold the knife against the cutting board.”
I did as he’d ordered, setting the serrated edge along the wooden block.
“Pretend you’re chopping a green onion—a vegetable that takes very little movement. Show me how you’d cut it.”
I lifted the back of the blade and lowered it, continuing that pattern, using a fast rhythm for about ten chops before I glanced at him.
But I didn’t have to look far; he’d slid in directly behind me. And although he wasn’t touching me, his presence was wrapping around me. I could practically feel the hardness of his chest. The power in his fingers. The heat from his skin.
“Has anyone ever taught you how to properly hold a knife?”
“No.”
He repositioned my fingers, adjusting my placement, and once he had my wrist arched, his hand surrounded mine, locking ours together. “You don’t want to lift the blade up and down. You want to swing it forward and back, like a wave.” He shook myhand until it relaxed, and while he held me, he took over, showing me the exact motion. “When you’re cutting things larger than a green onion, you just adjust the height of the swing. It’s all in the wrist. Let that guide you, and your fingers will follow.”
I was soaking in every bit of instruction, memorizing his words as though I would have an exam later. Visually calculating how high the blade rose and the precise location of my fingers.
But there was far more to this than that.
