Chapter 2
Tuesday stopped by her apartment, both annoyed and grateful for the nuisance of security at the gate, but only stayed long enough to put her own purchases in her fridge and freezer before leaving to take her grandmother’s order to her.
She loved her grandmother’s cooking and was looking forward to the promised fried pork chops and mashed potatoes, but most of all, the made-from-scratch carrot cake.
Three hours later, she was back in her own kitchen and focused on the day-before prep for the Wellington: searing the tenderloin and sliding it into the fridge to chill, then making the duxelles and trimming the prosciutto into a tight, even layer around the meat once it’d cooled.
Letting it all sit together and chill overnight would make the puff pastry wrap easier the following day, before the whole thing went into the oven.
Her kitchen was big for an apartment, and had really good appliances, but wasn’t ideal. The huge island made it work, though. And the quartz counters. She’d rather have one of the latest and greatest ovens, but she didn’t need it.
She could buy a house if she wanted, but the idea of being responsible for fixing the plumbing, the HVAC, replacing the roof every-so-many years, hiring people to do renovations… just no. Plus, she was often out of town for one to three weeks at a time, and apartments just work better for that.
So she’d found a bougie apartment complex with a large, wooded area behind it, and she’d managed to get a unit right beside the small little forest. It was a twenty-minute drive to pack lands if she wanted to let her wolf out, but having a little bit of forest so close soothed her inner beast.
She finished cleaning the kitchen and wiping everything down, and then it was time to figure out what to wear for a meal and probably, hopefully, a fun fuck with a biker.
She wanted to broadcast the fact she was there to be fucked the moment she stepped out of her car, so she went to the section with her little black dresses.
Most people say you should have one go-to LBD, but she had a dozen.
You don’t wear the same thing to a funeral that you do to a fancy restaurant opening, and neither of those things works as a fuck-me-now dress.
She reached for her black sweater dress and took it to the bathroom. She had scarves that were heavier and more substantial, because this one literally stretched around her body, hugging and highlighting every curve.
And she had lots of curves. Her NFL-playing father was biracial, which made her a quarter black, but her blonde mother gave her dark brown wavy hair. Her skin wasn’t pasty white, but light enough no one clocked her as anything other than white — unless they met her dad.
But she had all the curves from her dad’s side of the family.
So, some time with her trimmer because the hairless look didn’t suit her, but neither did a seventies bush, then a shower, the diffuser on her hair while she scrunched it for some extra waves, makeup with carefully precise eyeliner, sexy lacy undies… and then the dress.
And four-inch heels.
She took a look at herself in the full-length mirror and smiled. She’d been blessed with beautiful hair, abundant tits, and a nice ass — and tonight, she looked like she expected to be fucked.
Traffic was a little heavier than normal, so she left ten minutes earlier than she’d planned, and then let her supercar fly once she hit the interstate.
She’d looked his place up while at her grandmother’s house, even going so far as trying to see his house on the Google street view, but the camera had only caught glimpses of it through the trees.
He didn’t live all that far from his work, but the last couple of miles truly felt like she was in the middle of nowhere.
- - - ? - - -
Knife heard the sports car from miles away when it turned onto his street. Why hadn’t he paid attention to what she was driving that morning?
He’d opened his gate ten minutes earlier, and he watched her pull through in a blur on the camera before he closed it behind her with the app on his phone.
He stepped out onto his front porch and nearly goggled when he realized she was driving a Maserati MCPura Cielo, the black lines gleaming under the dying sunlight.
Knife’s father was a race car driver — and a getaway driver for some of the best thieves on the planet. His father had taught him how to drive from the mindset of both, and Knife had driven a lot of supercars, but never this particular one.
And then she stepped out in a dress that looked painted on, and his dick went granite hard.
He’d planned for dessert in the backyard — s’mores around a fire — but the dress made him mentally revise the order of events.
“Sweet ride,” he said, because it was the safest thing he could say while his brain caught up with his body’s reaction.
She smiled up at him from the bottom of the porch steps, and he could tell from the smile that she knew exactly what the dress was doing. “Nice house,” she said. “What I can see of it. Your wolf must love being tucked away in the forest.”
“That’s the idea.” He held the door open, and she came up the steps, close enough that he caught her scent — arousal she wasn’t bothering to hide wrapped around the primal scent of wolf. He kept his face neutral and followed her in.
She stopped just past the threshold to look around, and he watched her take the place in with the same focused attention she’d given the rail that morning.
“You built this,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“The house was already here, but I modified it substantially, and I built the garage.”
He watched her clock the commercial freezer, the gas range with an inset gas grill beside it, the smart oven, the stainless countertops. Her gaze paused on the knife displays.
She crossed to the nearest one and looked at the knives without touching them.
“Shun,” she said. “Bob Kramer.” A pause. “And you really like Wüsthof.”
She looked up from the magnetic countertop displays to the strip beside the stove. “And a MAC for your common, everyday use. Excellent choice.”
She’d recognized all four, and he was duly impressed.
She looked at him over her sexy-as-fuck shoulder and noted, “You cook seriously.”
“I take most things seriously.”
It came off like a corny double entendre, but he scented a little more arousal from her, which made his dick answer with more throbbing.
She turned to him and held the wine up. “I brought a Barolo. I figured you weren’t a Chardonnay kinda guy.”
He was just going to have to take her word on that, since he didn’t have a clue what a Barolo was, so he handed her the opener and moved to the counter.
“Steaks are ready for the fire. I’ll just walk them outside. Baked potatoes are resting.” He picked the plate up. “Charcoal grill is outside. Be right back.”
When he returned, she was pouring the wine into two glasses.
“You have a perfectly good gas grill in here, but you opted for the pain in the ass of charcoal, and that takes patience most people don’t have these days.
You don’t mind going the extra mile to go from good to excellent.
I figured that out about you this morning, but it’s nice to see it again. What’s the cut?”
“Ribeye. Dry-aged twenty-one days.” He accepted his glass of wine and leaned against the counter across from her. “I pulled them this afternoon, after a woman with curves I didn’t even know about yet agreed to come to dinner.”
She laughed, and he scented her wolf more, as if it perked up at his words.
They talked about the Wellington prep she’d already done, about the duxelles and whether truffle paste was a shortcut worth taking or a cop-out.
He disagreed with her about the truffle paste and said so, and she narrowed her eyes at him and then argued her position with the fastidiousness of someone who knew how to back an educated stance.
He enjoyed it more than he’d enjoyed a debate in… possibly years.
They ended the conversation on the deck, so he could watch the steaks.
He noticed her register the firepit — wood and kindling already set, ready to light. She looked at it and then at him, and he told her, “I have everything necessary for s’mores, but I gotta admit, that dress is making me rethink the order of events.”
She gave him a mock toast and took a sip of her wine, and he figured that was her way of letting him know he was on the right track.
He’d set the table with sour cream, butter, salt, and pepper, along with steak knives and forks, so it was just a matter of plating the steaks, adding the potatoes, and then sitting down to the table.
The steaks were exactly right, and he watched her take the first bite, quickly followed by expressions of approval and pleasure.
“Okay,” she said. “These are legitimately exceptional.”
“I know where they come from.”
“You know how to cook them, too.” She cut another piece. “The fat rendering is perfect.”
“Patience,” he said. “Like you said.”
She tilted her head. “You were listening.”
“I was listening from the first word you said to me this morning.”
That landed, and she held his gaze for a moment before looking back at her plate, and the slight change in her scent told him she liked being heard, not just seen.
They ate in companionable quiet for a stretch, the kind that didn’t need filling, and then she said, completely conversationally, “My safeword is ketchup.”
He set his fork down and looked at her.
“Because I’m a snob about ketchup,” she said, as if this were a normal dinner topic, which it apparently was for her. “It belongs on fries and not much else. My brother’s girlfriend puts it on spaghetti.” She said it the way someone described a crime scene. “I nearly had to leave the room.”
“Ketchup,” he repeated.
“No way it comes up during normal or abnormal sex. That’s the point.”
He picked his fork back up. “No,” he agreed. “Can’t imagine it would.” He let a beat pass. “You always jump straight to the topic of safewords for dinner conversation?”