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He sounds so indignant on my behalf. I nearly laugh, despite the somber mood. “Sure, I can cook. But I never went to culinary school. I never went to college. All of my education was hands-on. I’d only ever worked at Embarcado. And there was Blake, bad-mouthing me all over town. It makes it really fucking hard to find work. To make matters worse, I’d racked up all this legal debt. Pretty soon it looked like there was no way out. Then this lawyer calls me up, with this crazy offer to be a personal chef.”
“Then you ended up here.”
“And I ended up here.”
He’s frowning, like he’s puzzling through something, and then he asks. “What will you do when the contract is up?”
“I have no idea. When I first took the job, all I could think of was getting out of debt.”
“And now?”
I pull back to tip my head to the side and study him.
Now?
Now, I don’t want to think about the contract ending at all. If I think about what I’m going to do after my contract ends, then I have to remember that this is a contract. That Ian isn’t my friend … or whatever this is.
That he’s not just some neighbor who took care of me while I was sick. We’re not friends who live together and then had sex one night.
I put my head back on his chest, wishing he hadn’t asked what I was going to do next. Wishing I could wind back time and skirt around this entire conversation about my dad and my failed career.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ian
* * *
If you’d asked me when I woke up this morning if I could ever hold Savannah in my arms and not want to fuck her, I would have laughed in your face.
Which goes to show what a dumbass I am.
Clearly, it’s not that I don’t want her. I’m pretty sure I will always want her, every moment of every day for the rest of my life. But everything about this conversation is a boner-killer. So even though her body is pressed against mine, even though we’re still swaying to the country music playing through the speaker in the kitchen, the urges I’m feeling are decidedly not sexual.
I don’t want to fuck her. I want to keep holding her. I want to soothe her. To stroke her hair. To take care of her.
Not unlike when she was sick, I just want her to feel better. And I want to be the one who does that for her. It’s strange, this sudden need to alleviate someone else’s discomfort. It’s so foreign, it’s almost intolerable.
And yet, I don’t want it to end. In fact, when she tries to pull away, I almost don’t let her go.
My arms tighten instinctively, but I release her, even though it feels like she’s taking a chunk of me with her.
She turns, pacing to the far side of the kitchen. She faces the windows, looking at the view of the lake beyond.
“I’m sorry.” Even though she’s facing away from me when she moves her hands up to her face, I can tell she’s brushing away tears.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“For making it weird. By talking about this at all. For crying in front of you.” She makes a strangled sound that sounds half like a chuckle and half like a sob. “God, I hate crying in front of other people. Probably almost as much as other people hate when someone cries in front of them.”
“Do other people hate that?”
She twists just enough to talk over her shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised. “Do you not hate that?”
“I don’t know that anyone has cried in front of me before.”
Or maybe they have, and I just haven’t noticed.
Yeah, that sounds more likely.
