The Taming of Xander Sterne(11)

                Sam had brought all the ingredients with her for the meals she would be serving over the weekend, knowing that she wouldn’t have the time, with Darius and Andy’s wedding tomorrow, to go shopping for food until Monday.

                She had decided to prepare something simple for Xander’s evening meal today: the asparagus, followed by steak and a fluffy stuffed potato and buttered carrots, and for dessert she had made a pineapple upside-down cake with ice cream; easy to make, but it looked and tasted good. And there was no denying that the kitchen was a dream to work in.

                Sam had always liked preparing and cooking food, and it was something she knew she was good at too. Which was why she had been deeply disappointed when Malcolm had refused to allow her to cook for him, insisting that it was what he employed his chef for. The most Sam had been allowed to do in that area was to approve the menus for the week.

                Unfortunately, since the separation and divorce Sam’s meagre budget had been a huge deciding factor in the meals she had been able to prepare for Daisy and herself.

                Happily, there would be no such limitations in Xander’s household. Sam very much doubted he had ever eaten a bowl of home-made stew in the whole of his privileged life!

                ‘What did you have in mind?’ He leant back in his chair to look up at her with those dark unfathomable eyes, his only concession to changing for dinner being to replace the black T-shirt of earlier with a white one. But then, he was in his own home, and so perfectly at liberty to wear whatever he chose, whenever he chose. Or not...

                It had been a couple of hours since he had dismissed Sam and Daisy from the kitchen, and Sam had made good use of that time, by unpacking their few belongings and putting them away in the empty drawers in their bedrooms. She had also put the food she had brought with her away in the fridge and kitchen cabinets, before preparing dinner.

                Sam’s cheeks warmed now as she heard the unmistakeable challenge in his tone. A challenge she chose to ignore. She had been married to a man whose wealth, and the power that wealth gave him, had rendered him both arrogant and selfish, to the point that Malcolm had ridden roughshod over everybody. Including Sam and her romantic dreams of their happy future together.

                She had no intentions of so much as acknowledging that Xander Sterne had that bad-boy look off to perfection, in the fitted white T-shirt that stretched tautly over his wide shoulders and chest, and revealing his tanned and muscled arms. Or that she was guilty of having noticed the tautness of his bottom earlier, in those hip-and-thigh-hugging black jeans.

                Enough so that it now made Sam’s heart beat faster just to look at all that blatant maleness, her palms feeling slightly damp, a tingling warmth in her breasts and between her thighs.

                None of which she wanted to feel for the arrogant man. ‘You made a comment earlier,’ she said coolly. ‘Something about rule number one being null and void?’

                ‘So I did.’

                ‘What did you mean by it?’

                ‘Where’s Daisy?’ He asked a question of his own rather than answer hers. ‘It seems very quiet in the apartment this evening.’ He raised questioning blond brows.

                Sam’s hackles were already up in regard to her daughter, but she stiffened defensively now; no matter what this man might think to the contrary, Daisy was not a noisy or a rowdy child. The opposite, in fact. Daisy was introspective rather than outgoing; no doubt a legacy of those early years of her childhood spent with a father who ignored her very existence, and had his own set of rules for ensuring he did so.

                A guilt Sam still lived with on a daily basis.