Or that was what he’d told himself as he’d torn his way over here. That it was a necessity, a prophylactic measure.
Slow steps finally took him to the semi–open plan kitchen. He found her flitting around, her hair up in a wonderfully messy mass.
As soon as he entered, she looked over her shoulder again, nodding toward the island. “Pull up a chair. I won’t be long.”
He walked up to her instead, struggled not to pull her back against his aching body.
She continued to work with fast, precise movements, pausing only when he tucked a lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder back into her impromptu hairdo.
He bent, murmured in her ear, “Don’t you think it weird, with our history, for you to be inviting me to a meal?”
She straightened, continued to work with renewed zeal. “Why? I invited you to meals before.”
And he’d thought everything she’d served him had been ambrosia. “You were someone else then. Actually you weren’t someone at all, just a role. One that necessitated satisfying my every hunger to mollify me enough so you could dupe me. Which you did. No more reason for you to feed me.”
She flashed him another look over her shoulder that struck his heart like a bolt, before resuming work. “It’s the least I can do after I made a fifty-million-dollar-shaped hole in your pocket.”
“A fifty-million-dollar meal, eh?” He stepped away before he lost the battle and devoured her instead of the painfully tasty-smelling concoctions she was preparing. He walked back to the island, pulled out a stool and leaned his itching hands on the marble counter. “It had better be really good.”
“Of course it will be.”
There she went again with that supreme assurance. She’d never displayed anything near it in the past.
But then it hadn’t been the real her he’d known. She’d been playing the part of the part-time florist and kindergarten teacher who’d been out of her league in his world. In reality, with everything he was, everything he’d seen and done, the reverse might turn out to be true.
She now placed a plate heaped with triple the amount of hers before him, before taking a seat across from him.
He continued watching her, wondering if this was the real her this time, or if it was just another role.
She raised one elegant eyebrow. “You’re starving. Eat.”
A huff escaped him. She just kept surprising him with every word and action. “And you know that how?”
She pushed the cutlery pointedly at his hands. “Because I calculated that you haven’t eaten in at least six hours. I first saw you tonight five hours ago, and you hadn’t eaten at least an hour before that. I remember you needed to eat every three hours, with the level of exercise you maintained, and that nuclear metabolism of yours. You seemed to eat almost half my body weight every day. With your increased body mass, you must be in the red by now.”
He was. In every way. And he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He’d thought his appetite, which nothing had ever affected except her, had been stalled anticipating the ball. Seemed it had been an advance alarm. He had been anticipating her.
She started eating, and he gave in, followed suit.
The moment the thing he was eating hit his taste buds, an involuntary growl of hunger and appreciation rolled from his gut. “What is that?”