“You made dinner?” she repeated, like it was the most amazing and unbelievable thing in theworld.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Just some honey garlic chicken and wild rice. And asalad.”
She gawked atme.
“It’s… uh… kind of a thing of mine,” I explained. “Since getting clean. You know, a healthier lifestyle. Eatingwell.”
“You really didn’t have to do this, though. We could’ve ordered in.” She dropped her purse and came deeper into the kitchen. “You didn’t have to spend your day cooking when you’d rather be making music…” She stopped right next to me and peeked through the glass lid of thepot.
“It took me like fifteen minutes to throw it together,” I said, watching her. “The crock pot did the rest.” Her hair was smoothed over one shoulder in a long braid and her bared throat was so close to me, I could smell that warm, almost spicy smell of hers. Like coconut and rum. I almost pressed my lips to her smoothskin.
Ididn’t.
She gazed up at me. “I didn’t even know I had a crockpot.”
“You didn’t,” I told her, feeling kinda stupid about it now. “I… uh… bought you one.” I wasn’t trying to kiss up, but now it felt like it. What kind of idiot buys a crock pot for a woman after sleeping with her once? “I just wanted to make this. You know, it’s so easy, and it cooked while I was in the studio…”Shit.What the hell was shethinking?
She probably knew musicians who had literal orgies of sex and drugs going on around them in the studio. And I was making her crock pot chicken like some fool inlove?
“Is that my laundry?” she said, her eyes flicking to the pile of folded towels on thecounter.
“No. I just… needed a dish towel and couldn’t find any clean ones, soI—”
“You did the dishes?” She looked around, and suddenly I saw the kitchen through her eyes. The clean dishes—the ones we’d dirtied over the weekend during our marathon recording sessions—stacked neatly in the rack on the counter. The open dishwasher, emptied. The little piles of her things tidied up on the island. The blinds over the breakfast nook window that had gotten stuck open, that I’dfixed.
Her eyes met mineagain.
“Wow. I, uh… feel like anidiot.”
She shook her head slowly. “I feel like a slob. My cleaner doesn’t come ’til tomorrow. I usually pick up after myself a little better thanthis…”
“Noworries.”
“I was planning to get the blindsfixed.”
“I didn’tmind…”
An awkward silence landed as she continued to stare at me like some alien had landed in her kitchen. Like she couldn’t quite figure out what was goingon.
Then she bit her lip a little and cocked her head. “When will it be ready?” she askedsoftly.
“What?” My gaze had gotten stuck on her sweet lips. That perfect cupid’s-bow shape, made forkissing.
“Thechicken.”
“Uh… it’s ready now, if you’rehungry.”
“Oh.” She looked… disappointed. “I mean… will it go bad if we don’t eat it rightaway?”
“Well… I can just put it on the warmer, if we need to talk…” Yeah. Clearly, we needed to talk. About how I was being a fucking weirdo cleaning up her kitchen and fixing her broken shit and buying her small appliances while she was out. As if imposing on her life wasn’t already fucking weirdenough.
“I don’t wanna talk,” she said, and her gaze dropped to my mouth, her gray eyes darkening—like a stormy sky right before it explodes with thunder andlightning.
Oh.Read that totally fuckingwrong…
As blood thundered suddenly to my awakening dick, I switched the crock pot to the warm setting. “It can sit for awhile…”
“How long?” she asked, blinking up at me, somehow looking all angelic and totally fucking horny at the sametime.
