Chapter 24
“You sure you don’t want me to take you home?” Marcus asked her after the epic scrapyard tour.
She still needed days of wandering around to appease her curiosity.
“Are you trying to get rid of me already?” she asked in jest, but part of her was wondering if the novelty was wearing off.
“Absolutely not. I just wanted to give you an out if you wanted one.” He paused with his hand on the front door that led into his place.
“I can go if you want me to,” she said. Because she wanted to be one hundred percent sure that he wanted her to stay.
“Flynn, I don’t want you to go. At all. In fact, I think it would be really awesome if you stayed. All night. And tomorrow. And tomorrow night.”
Warm tingles flooded her whole body. “Really?”
“Really.” He opened the door and gestured for her to enter first.
She grinned. “So … about what you said earlier …”
“About what?” he asked, even though she knew he knew exactly what she was talking about.
She stopped in front of him. “About that generous offer you made.”
“About the sex?” he asked, as if it needed clarifying.
“About the great sex.”
“We should talk about that inside.” He glanced toward the big white house. “Pop’s probably telling Ma he’s canceling poker night for your birthday party and asking her to make a cake.”
Flynn froze on the doorstep. “What?”
“Pop wants to throw you a birthday party at the house.”
She blinked, totally and completely confused. “Why?”
“Because he likes you, and he likes that I think you’re cute.” The warm tingles spread outward from her heart.
“But your mom—”
“Can’t say no to Pop for anything. How do you think they ended up with four kids?”
She couldn’t help but smile. “He is very charming.”
“It runs in the family.” He guided her inside and closed the door behind them.
“Does it?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Sure I did. I just … never thought you’d turn it on full blast for me.”
His hands rested lightly on her hips. “You want me to?”
“Absolutely.”
“Done, which means I’m making you dinner.”
“You are?”
“Yep. Which works out because we skipped lunch, and I’m getting hungry. Besides, we’re going to need fuel for our next activities.”
With his big hands on her hips, Flynn shifted from foot to foot in her new Pumas at his mention of their next activities.
“You ready for that, Stiglette? No worries if you want to wait. Nothing has to happen tonight.”
She pressed her lips together as she tried to think of how to reply without sounding like a ho. Then she decided to let the words spill out, unfiltered. He wanted honesty. She had it.
“I would’ve fucked you in the driver’s seat of your Porsche last night.”
His lips quirked, and his chest shook with silent laughter. “Is that right?”
“Damn straight.” She lifted a hand to his chest, like she had the right to put it there … and maybe she did. “I’m not afraid of anything you might want to do tonight.”
He covered her hand with his. “Not even help me make dinner?”
Flynn winced. “Okay, maybe that.”
His hand curled around her fingers, and he lifted them to his lips. His kiss was barely there and oh-so-charming. “Let me take care of everything. Let me take care of you.”
“Okay,” she whispered as he kissed her fingers again.
“This way, my lady.”
Marcus led her into the tiny kitchen and pulled the stool out at the counter. “Sit. Watch. Hopefully be amazed.”
“That shouldn’t be hard.”
“Excellent. Now, how does lemon herb chicken with mashed potatoes sound?”
Flynn’s brown eyebrows climbed almost to her hairline. “Amazing.”
“Perfect. It is one of my specialties. You’ll love it.”
He turned to the fridge and opened it, removing a package of chicken breasts, three lemons, a stick of butter, and some herbs he’d grabbed the other day from Ma’s little pop-up greenhouse, and set them all on the counter. Then he reached for two cutting boards and two of his favorite knives.
Last, he pulled out a glass baking dish and grabbed the salt and pepper.
“My mise en place might not be as perfect as a French chef, but I like to prep everything I can before I start assembling the dish.”
“Mise en place? I am suitably impressed.”
“Just wait until you taste it. First, the oven goes to three hundred sixty degrees.”
Then he started with the herbs and stripped the thyme, sage, and rosemary from their stems. Once they were all on the cutting board, he used his favorite knife to chop them finely. The herbaceous scent filled the small kitchen.
“That’s amazing,” Flynn said as she breathed deep. “I always thought it would be cool to know how to use fresh herbs. They make everything so much better.”
“They do. It’s easy. First, grow them—or steal them from someone’s garden. Then, use them.”
“Sure, sounds easy when you put it like that.”
“Most things are, Flynn. You just have to do it.”
Once he was satisfied the herbs were chopped finely enough, he sliced the lemons, setting the ends aside, and lined the bottom of the baking dish with thin rounds. After removing the wrapper, he thinly sliced a couple of tablespoons of butter and scattered them across the lemons in the baking dish.
“Next up, chicken. But we use a different cutting board because it’s raw meat, and we still need to peel and cube up the potatoes. Safety first.”
He slid his first cutting board aside as she watched, seemingly cataloging all his moves.
He made quick work of the chicken package and took out three breasts. “We cut them like so.” He flipped the first one over so she could see the back. “See this line? We cut down it, separating the halves. Then we look for weird shit we don’t want to eat.”
“Weird shit? Like what?”
“Weird red stuff. Any meat that looks weird. Just … be picky.” He sliced a few chunks off, and cut them into strips.
“How did you learn how to do this?”
“Watching Ma and Pop. They both cook. They’re both good at it. We all helped.”
“That’s so cool.”
He wanted to ask if her mom ever cooked, but he had a feeling he knew what the answer would be and didn’t want to raise a sore subject. “Stick with me, and you’ll learn. I promise.”
“Be careful, you might actually get stuck with me,” she said.
“A privilege. Never think it’s anything but.”
Her lips wobbled, as if she didn’t know what to make of that comment.
“Moving on, we lay the chicken strips on the lemons and butter, like so, and then wash our hands.”
“Because raw meat.”
“Winner, winner chicken dinner.”
She laughed at his cheesy joke as he turned the sink on to wash his hands.
When he returned, he reached for the lemon ends and squeezed them over the chicken.
“A little juice to help everything stick and for extra flavor. And then a little salt and pepper.” He gave each a few cranks over the chicken before reaching for the herbs and sprinkling them over the meat.
“Then the herbs to make it look fancy, followed by a few lemon slices on top to make it look extra fancy.” He added his final touches with a flourish. “Et voilà.”
“Okay, that looks beautiful, and you did it so fast.”
“And in thirty minutes from start to finish, you get a gourmet-looking meal that’s nutritious and delicious.”
“How are you not married yet?” Flynn blurted out the question.
“That is a story for another day,” Marcus replied.
“No way. Seriously?”
“I’m charming you and feeding you dinner, not telling my story.”
“There’s a story?” Her green eyes stared up at him.
“Isn’t there always a story?”
Her chin dipped an inch. “Yeah, I guess there is. You know mine. At least the shittiest parts. Seems only fair that you share yours.”
Marcus let out a sigh. He shouldn’t be surprised she wanted to hear it. “First, the chicken goes in the oven for twenty minutes, with a pan of water on the rack above so it doesn’t dry out.” He grabbed another dish and filled it with an inch or so of water and then slid both in.
“And then?”
He knew what she was getting at.
“If you really want to hear it, I’ll tell you as I peel potatoes. I gotta get them boiling so it’s all ready at about the same time.”
“I can help.” Flynn stood. “It can’t be that hard, right?”
He stared at her pale hands with her short, shiny nails, and he wasn’t sure they had ever done any physical labor of any kind.
“Have you ever peeled a potato?”
“No.”
“Used a vegetable peeler at all?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“Then sit and watch. Next time, it’s your turn.”
Flynn liked the sound of next time a lot. But what she didn’t like was that Marcus looked uncomfortable about sharing his story.
“I’m not going to judge. I promise. I’d be the last person to.”
He pulled a bag of potatoes from a drawer and set them on the counter before holding a utensil out in front of her. “Potato peeler. Peels potatoes. Also hurts if you catch it on your fingers or knuckles.”
“Duly noted.”
Then he started with the first potato. Brown strips hit the flattened plastic bag as he worked the peeler like a pro.
“I always had a thing for rich girls,” he started, meeting her gaze and watching for her reaction.
“Rich girls?” she repeated with shock filtering through her.
“You asked me if I had a type. That was it for a while. Untouchable rich girls. The ones who lived in a completely different world. A universe away from this scrapyard.”
“Oh,” she said as he set the first peeled potato on the cutting board and reached for another.
“Yeah, you wondered why I was so determined to ignore you? It wasn’t personal. If I’m totally honest, it’s because I learned my fucking lesson once, and I never planned to walk that road again.”
“Oh.” It seemed like the only word left in her vocabulary.
“I was young, dumb, and in love. She was rich—not like you or Scarlett—but back then, I didn’t understand that there were levels to that stuff.”
Instead of saying oh again, Flynn kept her mouth shut.
“She loved slumming with the Puerto Rican kid who was hung and kissed her ass like she was a queen.”
He set another potato aside.
“I thought she was the one. I was saving my money for a ring. Trying to figure out how I was ever going to provide for a girl who was used to the finer things.” He shook his head. “Young and stupid.”
He grabbed another potato. “And then, one night, I had a dream, and it sucked. It was about her.”
“What kind of dream?” Flynn asked quietly.
He kept his dark brown eyes on the potato as he spoke. “A prophetic one, apparently.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He looked at her. “God speaks in dreams sometimes. The one about you wasn’t my first.”
Chills rippled across Flynn’s skin. “What happened?”
“In the dream, I was walking up to a car, at the old drive-in, and there she was, in the back seat, getting plowed by some college prick. She had a ring on her finger too.”
“No …” Flynn whispered.
“Oh, yeah.” He switched to a new potato. “That was a Thursday night. I tried to put it aside, but when my friends asked if I wanted to come to the drive-in on Saturday night—a night she was busy with some family thing—I couldn’t say no.”
Flynn’s heart pounded. “No way …”
“We missed the first movie so we could get in for a dollar. And as we were driving in, I noticed a car that looked just like the one from my dream. A Buick. With a roomy back seat.”
Flynn inhaled with her hand on her chest, her heart already breaking for him.
“I told my buddies I was going to take a leak while they hit the concession stand.”
She held her breath.
“But I walked over to that Buick instead.”
He set down the potato.
“And sure enough, there she was, in the back seat, another dude’s face in her tits and a ring on her finger.”
“No way.” Flynn breathed out the words.
“His ring. Her fiancé’s ring. She’d been sneaking around with me. I was the one she was cheating with, and I didn’t even know it.”
Flynn gasped. “No …”
“Yeah. So, that’s why I’m not married, and I’m not a huge fan of dating. That’s also why I was not a fan of Gabe and Scarlett in the beginning. And it’s a huge reason I avoided you for so long.”
Flynn started to say she was so sorry, and then she stopped. “Thank God for that dream. You got saved. What if you’d proposed and she said yes to you and broke it off with him? You could’ve gotten stuck with a cheating whore for a wife. How lucky are you?”
Marcus froze with his hand on the knife he’d used to chop herbs and slice lemons. “How lucky?”
“Sure, she broke your heart, but temporary pain is nothing compared to being trapped with a cheating whore your whole life. What if she’d gotten pregnant? You never would’ve gotten rid of her.”
He blinked several times before he spoke. “I have literally never thought about it like that.”
“You dodged a bullet, Marcus.”
The beginnings of his first smile since she’d asked him why he wasn’t married tugged at his lips. “You know, you’re right. I totally did.”
“That’s why you acted on the dream you had about me.”
He nodded. “Yeah. It felt so real, just like the other one.”
“You know what that means?”
He shook his head. “No, tell me.”
“Without the cheating whore who broke your heart, you wouldn’t have acted on the dream about me, and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. You would’ve missed my deadline, and I would’ve had to find some other guy to teach me how to peel potatoes.”