Lucy wasn’t very good at seduction when she was consciously doing it. Still, she was awkwardly charming and adorable. But it was when she was completely unaware and responding to my seduction methods that she turned me completely feral.
It was a good thing I kept a lid on my lustful thoughts, otherwise she’d be on all fours on the floor?—
Fuck.
I gave a shake of my head and closed our distance. Why did I feel like I wanted to give in to her? I gathered her close. “Tellyou what, with each quarter we finish, you’re going to let me fuck you.”
“What?” She threw back her head and laughed, but I only hugged her tighter. I’d already popped a boner, and I had no qualms about letting her know how much I craved her.
She stopped laughing. “You’re impossible.”
“It’s a fair trade, hmm, baby?” I nuzzled her ear. I wanted to devour her, but first I needed to get us settled in. I glanced at the fire and leaned in to stoke the flames, while keeping an arm around her. “Just imagine fucking in front of the fire. I have plans for you.”
“Incentivized sex.” Her fingers traced the outline of my chest. “Best of both worlds.”
“That’s right.”
“All right. I think it will fit on the coffee table.”
I let her go and walked to the kitchen. The sooner I got dinner started, the sooner I could fuck her. “Why don’t you do whatever you need to do? Set a fort in front of the fire if you have to. I’ll get started on the goulash.”
“Goulash?”
Shit, I didn’t think to ask her if she liked it.
“Have you had it before?”
“Yes.” She abandoned what she was doing as I plopped one ingredient after another on the counter.
“I prefer the Balkan version,” she added.
More tomato-based and thicker, the other being the thinner-sauce Hungarian goulash. “A woman after my own heart,” I drawled. “Besides, we don’t have caraway seeds.”
“I can’t believe you cook!”
I chuckled. “Don’t get too excited. This is the only stew I know. The rest is grilled meat with plain salt and pepper.”
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked tentatively.
“No, I’m good.” I slid out a cleaver from a canvas wrap. Maybe in the future we could spend some leisurely time cooking together and maybe expand on more than one dish. But right now, I needed my space to wield the cleaver and work out some tension from the unresolved situation with Anya. It had always been at the back of my mind. I always kept my promises, but I’d have to break one to the woman I’d known for over twenty years. Lucy was going to come first. If Anya couldn’t accept that, then I foresaw a huge problem. My ex-lover could be a vindictive bitch.
Her eyes widened at the shiny, sharp cleaver I ordered from my contact. “Whoa. The meat is already cubed, so what are you going to need that for?”
“I chop everything with it.” Her eyes darted from the cleaver to my face, and then back to the cleaver. “You should stop watching your serial killer shows,” I said dryly. “This is a perfectly acceptable kitchen tool for chopping. In fact, I learned this from a Chinese associate who used a cleaver for everything.”
I didn’t have to specify what everything meant. Because everything included dismemberment.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to it.”
It took me forty-five minutes tops to get the goulash on the stove going. I had it on a low simmer and checked on Lucy. She’d been shuffling to and from the other rooms to the seating area around the hearth. She’d pushed the coffee table to the side and cleared the knickknacks from on top of it. She’d arranged comfy pillows around the hearth and what looked like two layers of comforters over sleeping bags. She reminded me of a bird preparing its nest.
The seventeen muscles required to pull up the corners of my mouth to form a smile seemed to get more exercise lately. It no longer felt forced.
If Lucy was the female bird making our nest, then my job was to feed her. “This goulash is going to take a while. Do you want an orange or an apple?”
She glanced up from her task at that moment—still fluffing pillows—then, as if thinking better of it, she said, “No.” Then went back to what she was doing.
I shrugged and returned to the kitchen and picked up an apple and an orange. I weighed the fruits in my hand, but I was trying to figure out something, a question to ask. “If I skin and section the apple and orange for you, do you want any?”
