The knife makes a sound when the blade connects with the cutting board, and I smile, feeling like someone should give me a gold medal. Maybe Top Chef is still taking auditions?
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Ryan’s less-than-enthusiastic voice has my head jerking up to look at him.
“What? I did it! Look at that solid cut!”
“I turned a million years old in the process.”
Someone likes to exaggerate. “Is speed always your top priority?” I give him a taunting, flirtatious look, but he doesn’t take the bait. Still, I see the corner of his mouth twitching. I want to kiss it.
“How do you not know how to use a knife?”
I shrug. “I work with dough all day. Very rarely do I have to use something sharp.”
“Okay, well, today you learn.” The authority in his voice is doing nothing to lessen his attractiveness.
I’m ready for Ryan to move in close behind me and pick up the knife so he can teach me how to use it. He’ll keep his body pressed up next to mine, and his breath will tickle my ear as he shows me how to properly slice a potato. His calloused hand will cover mine, and my whole body will break out in chills from his touch. It will be the sexiest cooking lesson in the world, and we will fog up the windows in my house when he kisses my neck, knife lesson forgotten. He’ll probably spin me around and carry me to the couch and—
“June!” He’s waving his hand in front of my face, and I blink. “Where’d you go?”
My cheeks flush, and if he notices, he doesn’t comment. He’s too engrossed in my impending lesson—all business. He holds up his knife and nods for me to do the same. Super. I guess I really am getting a lesson in knife work with a gap so wide between our bodies I’d have to stretch just to get our elbows to touch. How sexy.
For the next ten minutes, Ryan drones on and on about how the knife should never leave the cutting board, and the blade should rock back and forth, letting me move through the potato faster. Honestly, I’m bored to tears. I couldn’t care less about this dang blade. This is nothing like when we were making donuts side by side. Instead, Ryan’s brows furrow, and he’s serious—joyless.
I pause my practice and look up at him. “You know, I had no idea that you even liked to cook—back in high school, I mean,” I say, interrupting his monologue on the various techniques of rocking the blade at different angles.
He freezes, and I see something flash across his eyes. “No? Huh.”
“You never mentioned it. Not once.”
His attention is back on his work. “Not exactly surprising. We never talked back then unless we were trying to annoy each other.” He’s right. And now that breaks my heart. So many wasted years.
“Well, tell me now then.” I lean my hip against the counter and look up at him. “When did you get into it?”
“June, we have a lot to get done. Let’s just focus on getting the dinner made before we have to get ready for the rehearsal.”
Oh, I see. He expects me to open up about my life, but he gets to keep all his secrets inside? I don’t think so.
“What are you doing?” he asks, sounding close to amusement.
“I’M…CARRYING…YOU…INTO…THE…SHOWER!” I say with my arms wrapped around Ryan’s gigantic body, using all my strength to try to lift him off the ground. Someone please call Superman. He’s the only one who can get this job done. Ryan is clearly made of lead. “Make yourself lighter!”
He laughs, turns around, and picks me up by my armpits, setting me back onto my perch on the counter (apparently, I wasn’t that much help in the slicing department). I find it ridiculously unfair that he can just move me around like a rag doll, and I can’t even push him an inch.
But I’m not so easily deterred. I reach for the sink sprayer and aim it at Ryan’s chest, but I don’t wait for him to spill his secrets. Nope. I turn on that cold water and blast him like a machine gun of liquid. Otherwise known as a water gun.
His shoulders jump, and he drops the knife onto the counter, but that’s the most startle I get out of him. He rests his hands on the counter and takes the stream of cold water like a war hero. Then, slowly, his gaze shifts to me, and I see retaliation in their depths. His dark eyes flash fire.
They say when you get close to death, you can feel it. I feel it now.
I drop the sink sprayer and bolt up onto the counter, jumping off the island to the other side. Ryan is fast, though. He’s rounding the kitchen island and racing toward me. I don’t know what he’ll do when he catches me, and I don’t want to find out.
I race out the front door, squealing in a way that I’m not proud of as I run toward my backyard. I feel Ryan close on my heels, and when I glance over my shoulder and find miles and miles of his toned, tan abdomen instead of his drenched shirt, my steps falter. When did he take that off, and how did I miss it?
I land hard on the ground.
A better man would check to make sure I’m not hurt. Ryan is not one of those men.
He dives onto the ground and pins me down so he can jab his fingers into my ribs until I’m practically screaming from laughter. How dare he remember that I’m highly ticklish! I want to murder him. Or run my hands up and down his abs. One of those two things.
Finally, the torture stops, and I open my eyes. He’s smiling. A warm, heart-wrenching, let’s-do-this-forever kind of smile, and I feel a piece of the ice around my heart break off. I wish I wasn’t this girl. The one protecting her heart like it’s made of spun glass. He’s still pinning me down, but there’s a new tenderness in his eyes as he shifts his weight to his elbow and uses his other hand to brush my wild hair out of my face.
“I used to cook with my mom,” he says quietly, and both my rapid breathing and smile fade into something softer. “Anytime I had a bad day but didn’t want to talk about it, she’d pull me into the kitchen with her, and we’d cook something together. It was our thing. By the time whatever we were making came out of the oven, I had told her everything that was bothering me. And somehow, just having her listen made me feel better.” He gives a sad smile. “The day she died, I went in the kitchen and cooked her favorite lasagna. It went in the trash when it was finished because I didn’t have an appetite for a while after she died, but that’s how I got into cooking. It’s how I remember her.”
“I didn’t know.”
His thumb traces my jaw. “Because I didn’t tell you.”
“I wish I had known back then.”
“It’s okay. You were nice to me when I was feeling my worst after she died. I think it was the only truce we’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, but still. I wish I knew that about you and your mom—that you liked to cook. That you were hurting more than you let on. I wish I knew you back then.”
“I wish a lot of things about that time. If I could go back, I’d do it differently.”
But we can’t go back. And even if we could, would he really change anything? “If things were different between us back then, you might not have gone to France and become a chef. You would have missed out on doing something you love.”
His eyes leave mine for the first time to stray to where his elbow is holding up his weight. “Right.”
