Page 20 of My Three Billionaire Rockstars

Warmth crawls up my neck. “Do you make a habit of unsettling people?”

“Only the interesting ones.”

I glance up despite myself. “That sounds like a line, too.”

“It’s not.”

“That somehow makes it more obnoxious.”

His gaze holds mine a second longer than necessary, then drops briefly to the menu in my hands. “Get the steak.”

I laugh. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s better.”

“I’m not ordering steak in a diner T-shirt. That feels every type of wrong.”

“You’re still going on about the T-shirt?”

“I’m sitting in a room full of people who dressed for date night while I look like I got kidnapped on my way to taking out the trash.”

“You look better than most of the room.”

There it is again. That certainty. That maddening, immovable confidence in his own conclusions. I should hate it more than I do.

Martha comes back before I answer him, and for once I’m grateful for the interruption.

She takes our orders without even pretending not to notice the tension at the table. Xander orders for himself. For me, I pointedly choose something cheaper than what he suggests, purely out of spite.

He notices.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he says after Martha leaves.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t need you deciding what I eat.”

His thumb taps once against the stem of his glass. “You think I’m controlling.”

“I think you’re used to getting your own way.”

He leans back, eyes never leaving mine. “And you think fighting me on dinner fixes that.”

“I think fighting you on dinner fixes me.”

“Someone taught you that,” he says.

“I taught me that,” I say, equally calm. “Turns out it’s a useful life skill.”

The bread disappears between us in pieces, and the strangest thing happens.

The conversation gets easier.

He asks about the town. He wants to know my favorite place to get coffee when I’m not serving it, which roads are best to drive with the windows down in fall, where people go when they need peace, what nights Bennett’s gets loud, and whether the farmers’ market is actually worth dealing with or just an overpriced zucchini convention.

It’s easy to answer him. Worse, he actually listens.