“I told you I didn’t drink wine,” he protested when she poured him a glass a few minutes later to go with his food.
“Just try it,” she insisted. “It’s the perfect thing to drink with this.”
“Amanda—”
“How are you ever going to know if you like something if you don’t try it?” she insisted, just a little too sharply.
Jake lifted an eyebrow at her. “This stuff must be real important to you.”
Amanda did her best to offset her tension with a playful scowl. “Chinese food is my life. Now, come on and try it.”
“You’re sure you’re not trying to poison me?” he demanded, picking through the vegetables on his plate.
“I’m trying to teach you that there’s more to life than steak at Stilwell’s and stew in the kitchen.”
Jake shot her a glare. “And just what good is that going to do me?” he demanded. “Last I saw there weren’t any Chinese restaurants in Lost Ridge.”
She held her breath, praying for patience, for insight. “But there are in San Francisco. You can smell them when you ride the cable car. Chinese food, fresh air, salt water and flowers. I’ll tell you something. San Francisco is the best-smelling city in the world.”
“And you want me to go there.”
She smiled, her hands clenched in her lap. “I just don’t want you to count it completely out. Try the Chinese food, Jake. Maybe next week I’ll make you veal scaloppine or coq au vin.”
“Next week? How long were you planning on staying?”
The room crackled with unspoken questions, with demands and pleas and questions. Amanda answered them. “I don’t know,” she admitted, casting a quick glance down at her plate. “I have quite a lot of dishes I’d like to try out on you. And I’m going to be taking a class in Thai cooking this summer. I could be here for quite a while.”
“Thai cooking? What the hell’s that?”
She looked up at him, grinned. “Do you like peanut butter?”
She could see the bemusement, saw the humor struggle to break through, saw the crust of discipline that covered desperation.
“Yeah,” he finally admitted. “Why?”
She nodded. “Then you’ll love Thai food. And Indonesian, come to think of it. Now, try this before it gets cold.”
He did. Amanda held her breath, held her place, not sure what she wanted, knowing that if Jake did like it, if he had been dreaming of trying it just once in his life, she was torturing him. Hating it, knowing she’d do it again if it didn’t work this time.
His eyes lit, a dark, private fire smoldering way inside him. He didn’t say a word for ten minutes, tasting one dish, then another, then the wine, his concentration centered on his meal as if he were the first man to test uncharted waters, as if his perceptions of it would have to be carried back to an unknowing world.
He never noticed that Amanda barely touched her food.
Finally, he lifted his gaze back to hers, and Amanda saw the full weight of what she’d done to him.
“New York has great Chinese restaurants, too,” she told him, her voice small, her fingers clenched around the stem of her nearly empty wineglass. “And Italian and French and Spanish.”
“Does New York smell great, too?” he challenged wryly.
Amanda couldn’t help but grin. “No. But it’s... there’s an energy there, a rocketing, pulse-pounding life that you won’t find anywhere else on earth.”
“You really like it.”
She shrugged. “I’d like to go there sometime when I’m not alone. There’s so much to share.”
Jake’s eyes betrayed him, just briefly, when the pain seared them, tightened them. When, for just a heartbeat, he let her know how much he wanted that, too. But he retreated too quickly to catch.
“It’s not going to work,” he told her, setting his utensils down.
