Wild and Free(18)

“Butter is fat,” Sonia replied and took a bite of her dry toast.

Callum watched her chew like it was fascinating in a watching the devastation of an earthquake in slow motion on TV kind of way.

“What’d you do to the bacon?” Callum enquired after she swallowed.

“I cut off the fat,” she informed him. “The meat is good. Protein. The fat is bad.”

His brows went up and he went on, his voice no longer polite but coated in disbelief, “You cut the fat off bacon?”

“Yep.”

He looked down at his plate. “The eggs are white.”

“That’s because I threw away the yolks. They’re filled with cholesterol.”

She trained her eyes on her plate and kept eating but she lifted her head when she heard him move.

Then she watched with surprise and not a small amount of annoyance as he rounded the counter, went straight to the trash bin and dumped everything on his plate inside it.

Then she watched with even sharper surprise and an ungodly amount of annoyance when he walked to her, grabbed her plate out from under her, pulled the remnants of toast right out of her fingers and dumped that in the bin too.

Sonia stood staring at him wordlessly as he opened the fridge, nabbed the bacon, dumped a huge lump of it into the skillet and turned on the burner. Then he gently moved her away from the range and grabbed the box of eggs she’d left on the counter.

Then, as he started cracking eggs into a bowl, she spluttered, “You just… you just… just, threw away my food.”

“That wasn’t food,” he replied.

“It was breakfast,” she shot back.

“It wasn’t that either.”

“Callum –”

He turned to her as the bacon started sizzling. He advanced, quickly. She retreated, not quickly enough. Her hips hit the counter and he closed in.

His hands on the counter on either side of her, he leaned down so they were face-to-face. “You’re too skinny. You need to eat. Not egg whites, not dry toast and not fatless bacon.”

He thought she was too skinny?

Was he blind?

Sonia couldn’t move but, even so, her mouth dropped open.

He ignored her astonished look and kept talking. “No more of that shit, Sonia. Not for me and not for you either.”

“Are you…” she paused, not thinking she could say it then she said it, “Telling me what to eat?”

“Damn right,” he replied, not having any problem saying what he had to say.

He pushed away from the counter and turned back to the range.

She watched in growing horror as he cooked breakfast all in one skillet.

He didn’t not only not cut the fat off the bacon and separate the yolks, he didn’t drain the bacon grease before he dumped the eight (yes, eight!) scrambled eggs into the skillet with it. Not done, he also chucked a handful (and his hand, as Sonia had noted on several occasions, was large) of pre-grated cheddar cheese on the lot and sprinkled it all with garlic salt.

Further, he slathered the toast in so much butter it was the added stroke on top of the heart attack that was the egg-bacon-cheese mess.

He served this all up on the plates, got himself a fresh cup of coffee, poured a warm up in hers, dashed it with not a splash of milk but a glug and handed both plate and mug to her.

Then he picked up his own plate, rested a hip against the counter, leveled his blue eyes on her and ordered, “Eat.”

She looked at her plate.

She had to admit, it looked really good.

And it smelled fantastic.

Then she looked at him.

“I can’t eat this.”

“Eat,” he repeated.

“This is… I can’t –”

“Sonia,” he said her name slowly in a way that denoted strained patience. “You can eat it or I’ll feed it to you.”

She felt her eyes grow wide before she asked, “You’re joking, right?”

He shook his head.

She looked at the plate.

He was, essentially, a kidnapper.

He was, she guessed, going to hold her for ransom if he didn’t charm her (in other words, con her) out of millions of dollars.

He had been, thus far, pretty nice even though he was a jerk.

But, she shouldn’t push it.

Sonia picked up her fork and she ate.

And, while doing so, she told herself it didn’t taste unbelievably great (even though it did).





Chapter Four

Explanation



After they ate their breakfast (Sonia couldn’t finish hers, which Callum allowed, but he cleaned her plate, an act she thought was borderline intimacy which caused her to feel warm and cold and scared and excited all at the same time), Callum demonstrated that he was not quite finished racking up his sins.

Firstly, he took Sonia’s hand and led her to the living room.