“Not even a bite,” she said, taking a big chomp of a peanut butter cup. “Oh my God, I’m so hungry, though.”
“Didn’t Mr. Tinder feed you?” Or did you just skip right to the main event?
“Oh, he did. I ate a huge plate of pasta at one of the spots on this strip. We had tiramisu, too. I don’t know why I’m so hungry.”
Because you worked up an appetite after dinner? Christ, he had to stop it. Torturing himself like this was not productive. “Did you sleep with him?”
She turned pink. Good. Let her feel a little discomfort. “I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.”
“It isn’t. But I still want to know.” He hoped she didn’t ask why, because he wasn’t sure he had an answer.
She buried her head in her hands, and it was a moment before a muffled, slightly tortured sounding “no” emerged. Then her stomach growled.
He refrained from fist-pumping. “Change of plans,” he said, standing up. “Let’s go eat.”
She blinked. “But what about your thing where you have to see all three movies?”
“I’m over it.”
…
Half an hour later, Amy found herself seated at the kitchen island in Dax’s condo in the Saint Lawrence Market area while he whipped up a cheese sauce on the stove. When he’d asked her what she wanted to eat and she’d said, “nachos,” this wasn’t at all what she expected. And it was kind of funny to be eating something so lowbrow as nachos in this palatial condo. She’d known his company was successful, but taking in the views from the impeccably decorated, cavernous penthouse made her wonder if she’d underestimated the extent of that success.
“My dad was really big on everything from scratch,” he said while he whisked. “It was his signature thing at the restaurant. So I can do a homemade version of pretty much every category of late-night junk food.”
“My version of homemade nachos would involve dumping grated cheese over a plate of chips and sticking it in the microwave,” she said, craning her neck to try to see into his living room. It was weird to be with him, acting like everything was normal, when their last encounter had been that intense, almost-angry kiss in the elevator at work.
“You’ll like this. It’s made from aged cheddar. Anyway, this is easy. Whenever I go out with Kat, she ends up wanting eggs Benedict afterward. Drunken hollandaise making—now that’s a skill.”
“Oh! Speaking of Kat.” She grabbed her phone and opened her messages. “I forgot to tell you. She texted me yesterday asking me to come to dinner at your parents’ house tomorrow. Apparently she has a bunch of house listings she wants me to look at.”
He shot her a look over his shoulder that she couldn’t decode. “And what did you say?”
“I said yes.” She hadn’t wanted to renege on her offer to help Kat. And honestly, she’d had so much fun with his family last Sunday. This whole functional family thing was a little addictive. “But I don’t want you to think I’m trying to elbow my way into your family.” Was she trying to elbow her way into his family? She wasn’t sure.
“S’okay. I appreciate any help you can give Kat. And hey, maybe my parents will listen to you. Kat and I have been trying to get them to move out of their house for years. They’d be so much better off in a place with less maintenance. My dad won’t even let me buy him a snowblower—he still insists on shoveling himself. And they won’t let me put in central air. But the minute I broach the subject of moving, my mother acts like I’m trying to lock her away in a nursing home.”
He tipped the pot, scraped the liquid cheese into a bowl, and plunked it in front of her, where he’d already dumped the bag of tortilla chips they’d bought into another bowl. She whipped her attention back—she’d been listening to him but also leaning back to try to see around the corner into his dining room.
He grinned. “You’re welcome to snoop around.”
“This is definitely your ‘public-facing’ house. It looks like something out of Architectural Digest.” She dipped a chip. “Oh my God, this is amazing.” The sharp cheddar had been spiked with brandy and deepened with caramelized onions. She’d seen him do everything as she’d been sitting there, but somehow she hadn’t been prepared for results that were so off-the-charts delicious.
“Well, I grant that this place isn’t home in the same way that the island is.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult.” She tried to immerse her next chip in as much cheese as she could without looking like an animal. She had to pause to chew and moan her delight before continuing. “This is more what I would have expected Casa Dax to be like—luxurious, big. But it still feels like you, which is funny because so does the cottage, and the two places are so different.”