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They ate their dinner and Finn ignored everything but Kitty herself, and discovered that it was a little too easy to talk to her. It was too easy to find himself captured by the way she held her fork. By the matter-of-fact way she talked about everything contrasted with the deeply, almost sensual way she reacted to what she was eating.

She told him every single flavor she tasted in every bite and he realized that she wasn’t kidding around. She really could taste every note, every hint of spice, every bit of the food’s essence. She experienced all of it like a full body, full contact experience.

Watching Kitty eat, he quickly realized, was mesmerizing.

Maybe it was also because she seemed to have no qualm about eating her fill, either, and that felt something like revolutionary to him.

Kitty ate with a joyful sort of relish. And it wasn’t like Finn had spent a lifetime paying close attention to how women ate, but he knew without having done any research that this wasn’t usual.

Every woman he knew had rules around food, or hung it all up on different sorts of morals. They should eat this, they shouldn’t eat that, or they could only have this other thing if they climbed a mountain or burned it all off at the gym.

Kitty just ate. And enjoyed every bite. And unlike pretty much every other thing he could think of her doing, when it came to food she was immediately passionate and only too happy to share.

She barely frowned as she put bites of things on his plate. She offered him her fork. Every time the owners came by, she told them exactly how much she loved every single thing she was tasting, and he could see that they appreciated it. More than that, they seemed delighted as she listed all the flavors she tasted and asked them about cooking times or particular tricks they might have gotten up to in the kitchen, until it almost felt as if he was watching people speaking a different language in front of him.

He realized at the end of the meal that he’d never been so turned on his entire life. Certainly not by something he’d previously considered even remotely erotic, like eating.

When they finally left Crowded Table, he felt something like drunk even though he’d had very little alcohol. It was her, he realized.

She was intoxicating.

Outside, it was still light, the sky in that particular shade of late-night summer blue.

“That was amazing,” Kitty said, with a deep sort of lusty sigh that seemed to hit him hard, or maybe the truth was, he was hard already.

“You are,” he told her, and then he couldn’t help himself any longer. He didn’t care that there were vehicles driving by and folks out on the road because no one liked to waste the light in summer.

He’d just had one of the most erotic experiences of his life sharing a meal with her.

He was only a man.

So he kissed her just the same as he would have if they were alone on her porch again.

He kissed her like that was a way to express his appreciation of the night they’d just had, where participating in her experience of the food at this restaurant felt intimate. Passionate.

All the things his sister was certain he didn’t feel, but he did.

Thanks to Kitty, he felt entirely too much.

When the kiss was done, when he pulled back and looked down at her to see her eyes closed and her cheeks bright red, Finn stopped pretending there was any kind of answer that he could give her.

Save one.

“Yes,” he told her, his voice sounding raw. Something like raspy, because he had the taste of her in his mouth again. “I will marry you, Kitty.”

Her eyes snapped open and all he could see there was a startled gold. “Really?”

“Really.”

Finn thought about what she’d said about moving into her house, and the way he felt right now, that suited him perfectly. In fact, he couldn’t wait. He didn’t need her to explain things to him any more than she already had.

He fully understood that the only way to get this woman into bed was to put a ring on her finger and move into her bedroom first.

Right now, it seemed like a bargain.

Especially when her whole face brightened and she smiled up at him without a trace of her trademark frown, like dawn was breaking at last.

Chapter Seven