Seeing Red(19)

He dragged his tongue over his lips. “I understand now why people think redheaded women are witches.”

She pursed her lips at him and narrowed her eyes. “Well, some husband you are, insulting your wife that way.”

His jaw dropped open, and seeing the shadow cast by the barman, she unhanded Seth’s jewels and drew her hand away just before the staff member stepped into the cabana.

He cleared a space on the table, set down the covered tray, and handed Seth a receipt to sign.

Seth scribbled his signature on it and thrust it back with a grunt.

The barman strode away, taking the platter’s lid along with him.

She wriggled her eyebrows at her husband and propped her chin up on her fists. Goading him shouldn’t have been so fun. She didn’t know why she was doing it. Maybe she wanted him to react in some way? So far, he’d been exhibiting an enviable cool.

He stared at her momentarily, opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it. Setting his bare feet on the sand, he drew the food tray closer and plucked a shrimp from the mound of cold seafood. In short order, he freed it of its shell and popped the meat in his mouth.

“Been enjoying your stay at the resort, Mr. Rozhkov?” she teased.

He crammed two more shrimp into his mouth and reached for his book. “Mm-hmm.” After a while, he swallowed and said, “I don’t cook, so it’s always nice to have a meal that’s out of the ordinary from the local fast-food fare.”

“I’d heard that about you.”

“What?”

“That you don’t cook. None of you do, really, huh? Not you, not Curt, not Grant. Stephen sure as shit doesn’t. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“There’s a difference between being unable to cook and lacking the knowledge to do it well. I assume we all fall into that latter category, though I can’t speak for Stephen.”

“You’re thirty-five. Haven’t you ever had any ambitions to do better for yourself? Feed yourself something that didn’t come out of a paper wrapper or off a menu?”

He shook his head and clamped a steamed oyster between his fingers. “People can’t be good at everything. Cooking isn’t the sort of science I excel in. And I make enough money to eat well without learning to cook.”

“So you can’t even grill a steak?”

He chewed thoughtfully a moment, then looked down at her, conceding, “I could grill a steak, if you could call it that. I like ’em bloody.”

She turned her lip up and made a gagging sound.

“You seem concerned about my dietary preferences, and yet I haven’t seen you eat so much as a forkful of lettuce the entire time we’ve been here,” he said.

“I eat,” she countered. There was that cheese Danish and… Well, there might have been a chicken breast prior to the wedding. It was hard to keep track.

“Right. If my grandmother were alive, she’d tie you to a chair and spoon fatty broth into a funnel shoved into your mouth until you perked up a bit.”

Now she sat up, curling her legs beneath her.

Seth’s eyes cast downward to the open vee of her legs, and he grinned before leaning toward his tray again. She could guess what he saw, given her bikini bottoms were a far cry from full-coverage, but she wasn’t going to double-check for quality assurance.

He’d seen it all anyway in the dim light of the bedroom.

She did wonder, though, why it was so easy for him to be calm when any other man would have tried to touch…arouse.

“Are you insinuating that I’m too skinny?” she asked him.

“Tell me what answer you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

Burn. Sad thing was, she didn’t know what answer she wanted, so she let the subject drop.

“So, really, what’s your book about?”

He tossed an oyster shell onto the tray and turned the book around so she could see the cover once more. “Theoretical spacecraft construction, more or less. It’s a couple decades old, but it’s always good to read the original source material you see cited.”

Oh.

“And that…makes sense to you?”

He snorted and smiled so the wrinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes deepened. “Does grammar make sense to you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me in any language. That’s the way I’m programmed. I understand space, as much as any man can, I understand physics, and I understand engines. Subject-verb agreement might as well be oncology for all the sense it makes to me.”

“Even before I majored in English, I had a gut feel for the language. Could tell that things looked wrong, even if I couldn’t specifically put a label on why. Made sense that I became a technical writer.”