Chapter 13 Jennifer
JENNIFER
Back in the kitchen the washing up starts and the morning finds its rhythm. Soap and steam and the satisfaction of a thing that went mostly right and catastrophically only in the private dark. My strawberry scent is warm and slightly smug. The rose is nowhere.
Which is when Santos appears in the doorway.
I nearly drop a ceramic bowl worth more than my first car.
He's broader than I remember, which feels genuinely rude of him.
Sun-warmed skin, open collar, dark hair slightly undone in a way that is either natural or expensive and I resent that I cannot tell which.
His scent arrives a beat later, saffron and heat and the specific brand of trouble that has never once in its life felt bad about itself.
The man who spent forty-eight hours making me feel like the most interesting person in any room he had ever entered, then left cash on a nightstand like I charged by the hour.
My hand tightens on the bowl.
Apparently we are doing this before nine in the morning.
He leans against the frame with the relaxed ease of a man with nowhere better to be, which would be more convincing if this kitchen weren't tucked around the back of the hill and not on the way to a single thing. He didn’t wander here.
He chose a direction and then walked down it, and the direction was mine.
You need the job. Not this.
He pushes off the frame, crosses to the counter, pours himself coffee from my pot without asking, and leans against it like he is settling in for the morning.
"Can I help you," I say, not a question.
"No," Santos says pleasantly.
"Then what are you doing in my kitchen?”
"The coffee's better here."
I set the bowl down before I throw it. "It’s the same coffee. Beans. Machine. Island. Try again."
He shrugs, untroubled. "The view's better."
I turn back to the stove. "Go away, Santos."
"I just got here."
"I noticed. I'm asking you to reverse that."
He doesn't move. I can hear him not moving, I grip the spoon and stir and tell my strawberry scent to behave itself, which it doesn’t.
"Did you come down here to seduce me again?" I ask, keeping my eyes on the pan. “Whatever worked in Vegas, the language barrier included, isn’t going to work in a professional kitchen at nine in the morning while I'm trying to reduce a stock."
I turn around at that, because I want him to see my face when I say the next part. "Santos. I work for you. I live forty meters from your house. We met at Vegas, and you decided to pay me…”
Memories of the night stand flash through my mind, bringing me back down to Earth.
“So whatever you think is happening right now, I’m not doing it."
He looks at me with those warm brown eyes and says nothing for a moment, and that is somehow worse than anything he could have said. Then he sets down his cup, pushes off the counter, and crosses the kitchen toward me.
He stops two feet away.
Close enough that the saffron in his scent wraps around my own before I can pull it back.
"You're right," he says.
I blink. "I am."
"About all of it." He glances at the stove behind me. "Your stock is catching."
I spin around. It’s absolutely catching. I grab the spoon and rescue it and hear him step closer, and now he’s one foot away and the kitchen is warm and smells of both of us and this is a disaster I walked directly into with my eyes open.
"You could step back," I say, stirring.
I point the spoon at him without turning around. “I’m holding a utensil."
"I noticed." He reaches past me to move the salt to a more useful position, and his arm crosses the air next to mine and the saffron is everywhere and my rose scent does something complicated and I stir the stock with great focus and professional intensity.
"Santos."
"Jennifer."
"Why are you really here?” I ask losing my patience.
A pause. Then, quiet and without any of the charm attached: "I wanted to see if you were real."
I don't have an answer for that. I stare at the stock, and the kitchen holds the two of us in it and his scent sits in the warm air around me like it has always known where it was going.
"The onions need doing," I say finally. "Black-handled knife. Board's on the left."
A longer pause.
"I don't really chop onions," Santos says.
I turn around fully. “What?”
"Men like me don't typically—"
"If the next word is billionaire," I say, "you can leave my kitchen and take your coffee with you."
His mouth closes. Opens. "I was going to say Italian."
"Italians invented half the food I'm cooking." I hand him the knife. "Board's on the left."
He takes it. He goes to the board, and picks up the knife with a grip that is completely and impressively wrong.
"That's going to end badly," I say.
"I know what I'm doing," Santos says.
I cross the kitchen, come around to his side of the board, and reach over to fix his grip.
My hands over his for four seconds while I reposition his fingers, and his hands are warm and he goes still in the way he went still in the elevator, and the saffron spikes and my strawberry spikes back before I can stop it and the kitchen is very small all of a sudden.
"Like that," I tell him, stepping back. "Knuckles curled, the blade guides along them. You won't cut yourself if you do it correctly."
"And if I do it wrong?"
"That's what the first aid kit is for."
He tries. The onion goes sideways.
"You laughed," he says.
"The onion was funny," I say, getting the laugh under control.
"You laughed in my kitchen."
"My kitchen," I correct, taking the knife and showing him the motion, the onion coming apart in clean even pieces in about fifteen seconds, and I feel him watching the whole time, and not the onion.
"You're very good at that," he says.
"Yes," I say simply, because I am and false modesty wastes everyone's time.
I push the onions toward him and go back to the stove, and he tries again with better results.
I hate this island already.
In fact working on this island and avoiding the three of them is going to be a lot harder than I envisaged, because they know where to find me.