“Maybe you can,” he agrees.
By the time he leaves with a wave and a promise to keep us updated, it’s nine o’clock, and I’m fighting a yawn.
My stomach grumbles, and not even that loudly.
Hunter wraps his arm around my shoulder and steers me toward the kitchen. “Come sit. I’ll rustle up something for dinner.”
I blink up at him, surprised. “You cook?”
“Yup.” He gently nudges me into a dining chair and heads for the refrigerator as Wyatt and Knox chat about the security system, while Elias joins me at the dining table in the middle of the kitchen.
Elias spins the chair beside mine around and drops into it, folding his arms across the top. “If it’s from a box and comes with detailed instructions, I can manage it.” He points his chin at Hunter, who has his head stuck in the refrigerator. “He’s the one who can throw a bunch of ingredients together. Likethat cooking show.” He squints up at the ceiling as if trying to remember the name.
“MasterChef?” I suggest, as if I haven’t lost literal hours of my life sprawled out on my motel bed, binge-watching shows when I was too tense to sleep after I’d heard a strange noise outside my room.
With a grin, Elias snaps his fingers. “That’s it. The one with the box of ingredients and fighting in the pantry.”
I lift my brow. “Fighting?”
“Gentle nudging over the truffle oil or whatever fancy ingredient only chefs use.” Elias corrects himself.
“Those guys are pros,” Hunter says as he lays out peppers, mushrooms, sausage, and pasta on the counter. “What I cook is simple, fast, and mostly edible.”
Hunter says mostly edible while wielding a chef’s knife like… well, a chef.
He pushes a small pile of thin slivers of onion to the corner of his chopping board and catches me staring wide-eyed. He grins at me. “Thisis just practice. That and I hate onions. The faster I chop, the less I cry.”
“I just use the jar stuff in the refrigerator,” Elias says.
Knox snorts. “Elias is talking crap. He doesnotuse the jarred stuff. He lingers in the kitchen, complaining about not knowing what to cook until Hunter gets fed up, pushes him out of the way and takes over.”
Elias shrugs but doesn’t deny it.
A loud vibration pulls my gaze to Wyatt, who fishes his cell phone from his pocket and glances at the screen. “Ah. My family. I'd better go take this.”
As he wanders out of the kitchen, Hunter turns from the chopping board nearly overflowing with sliced sausage and veggies to yell after him, “This is going to take twenty minutes.Twenty.”
“Why are you telling him that?” I ask.
Hunter pulls a large pot and a skillet from a cupboard and sets them on the stove.
“Wyatt can spend hours on the phone with his family. There are a lot of them, and they’re Southern, so they cantalk,” Knox explains, joining Elias and me at the table.
I’m watching Hunter add water to the large pot when Wyatt shouts from the next room, “Maisie! I need you for a second.”
“Is something wrong?” I get to my feet.
Elias grins at me. “He told them about you, and now they’re desperate to know your life story.”
I freeze with my hands on the table, half out of my chair. “Um, maybe I can talk to them another time,” I suggest, raising my voice so Wyatt can hear me, but hopefully his family can’t.
“Quit scaring her,” Wyatt yells back. “Come on, darlin’. They just wanna say hi.”
“Hours,” Hunter says with a tone of foreboding, shaking his head as he adds onions and green peppers into the skillet. “Literalhours.” He follows his warning up with a grin and a wink, reassuring me he’s only teasing.
More curious than concerned, I walk out of the kitchen and find Wyatt sitting on the couch in the living room, holding his cell phone out in front of him.
“It’s on loudspeaker,” he whispers when he sees me, motioning me over. “Come sit.”
