Chapter 9 #2
“Maybe, and also you just gave me an idea about a plotline involving a maid who’s actually a countess in disguise.
” I flaked off a piece of salmon with my fork and felt my eyes popping open at the first juicy bite.
It tasted delicately of soy, ginger, and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Holy crap, if the rest of your recipes are anything like this, you might have to give up OnlyFans and become a full-time Domestic Duke. You’d make bank. ”
The nectarines were crisp and juicy, the chèvre just the right amount of creamy, and the arugula… Well, there’s only so much that can be said about edible leaves, and none of it’s too complimentary. But the whole thing was amazing.
Dash couldn’t hide how pleased he was. “What are the odds of us convincing the Barefoot Contessa to do a collab with us? Something about nobility in the kitchen?”
“Send her a plate of this and she’ll be begging you to let her cook your recipes.”
“Us,” Dash corrected me, and I almost let out another holy crap. “We’re in this together, remember?”
“If by together you mean you develop the recipes, cook them, and plate them.” I shrugged, sinking the tines of my fork into a firm slice of nectarine. “I can do the eating part just fine. Everything else, though…”
“Don’t tell me you can’t cook.”
“It’s my deepest shame. I got a little too used to having Yaz’s mother around.
” At Dash’s raised eyebrow, I elaborated.
“You know, Tía Nena, the award-winning chef. Growing up, Yaz and I were part guinea pigs, part vacuum cleaners. You’d be surprised at how many things taste good with a little sprinkle of brown sugar. And bacon.”
“Remind me to buy you candied bacon from Morgan’s Barbecue the next time we’re in Brooklyn,” he said. “Do she and your mother still live together?”
“Nope. Not for a while. Tía got married a while ago, and they moved to the DR to open a restaurant.”
If Dash noticed that I didn’t elaborate on what my mother was up to, he was too polite to comment on it. Or maybe I was just too good at distraction. I swung into a story about the restaurant’s opening week, then smoothly segued into asking Dash about the videos he was planning on uploading.
“The thumbnails and metadata are all ready to go—I literally just have to click the upload button.” Holding his fork between his lips, he flipped open the laptop resting on one of the unoccupied place mats and poked at the keyboard to reveal his OnlyFans profile.
“Do you need a drumroll?” I asked, banging my palms on the table in something that could, maybe, if you were super tone deaf, be called a rhythm.
One of Dash’s hands descended on mine, pressing down firmly, and at the warm touch I had to remind myself again about not swooning. Or hyperventilating, or jumping into his lap.
“I would really like to not give my neighbors an excuse to call in a noise complaint about us,” he said, his eyes crinkling with humor.
His fingers were graceful and strong, and I was having a hard time figuring out why romance novel heroes always had calloused fingers, because his felt like actual silk against my hand and that was clearly the hottest thing ever.
Until he did a little stroke-y thing with his middle finger and I almost spontaneously combusted.
On the pretense of taking a sip of my water, I slipped my hand out from under his.
“Do you want to do the honors?” he asked after a few moments, gesturing at the upload button on the screen.
“Let’s do it together,” I said, and made sure to place my fingertip a respectable distance from his on the trackpad. “One… two… and… let’s goooo!”
We were off.
Dinner was forgotten as Dash quickly uploaded the second, non-spicy video into Fling, plus the teasers that he’d made directing people to our main profile from our other social media channels.
“Aaaand I just let out a breath I definitely realized I was holding,” I said once that was done.
“I know what you mean. I don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous to post a video before.
I know how important this is to you. And I mean, it is to me, too, but I know you have so much riding on this.
If it’s any consolation, I happen to think that we’re the best partnership since Ben and Jerry and our videos are going to do amazing.
” Dash started to do a hair flip, then remembered the tiara and settled for smiling.
I was all for immediately refreshing the handy stats counter to see how many views we’d gotten, but Dash gently closed the laptop and we went back to our meal.
“Oh, and Mariel. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
The way my heart quickened at that harmless sentence, it was a struggle to keep my face blank. “Yeah?”
“Have you heard about the new series that’s being developed based on Georgie Hart’s books?”
I almost did a spit take. “What? That is extremely my shit. How have I not heard about it?”
“Maybe you’ve been a little busy with your own Regency duke,” Dash said, laughing.
“I think it’s mostly based on The Wallflower’s Bargain, but I think they’re taking couples and plots from other books and sort of threading them together.
They’ve only released a couple of stills, but the whole thing looks like a Regency novel come to life. ”
“Shut up, really? That’s like incredible timing. If it gets popular, our videos are going to explode.”
Dash nodded. “That’s not all, though. A bunch of influencers got invited to this costume ball they’re throwing to celebrate the series premiere. Some poor, misguided PR person got me confused for one of them and put my name on the invite list.”
Neither one of us should have been surprised.
Dash had spent all week posting the short teasers he’d filmed in his Duke of Harding getup, and the response he had gotten was staggering.
The last time I’d checked, the Duke of Harding account had almost twenty thousand subscribers, almost half as much as his personal one.
I didn’t exactly leap out of my chair and squeal, but I didn’t not do that. “Dash, that’s perfect for you. You have to go. I mean, you already have the costume.”
“Well, yeah. I was planning to. But I was actually wondering if you would go with me.”
“Sure, why not? I mean, every duke needs his entourage. Should I be your valet or your groom?”
Dash smiled. “I was thinking more along the lines of my willful, feisty heiress.”
I could feel it in the air, the growing awareness—not just of the short distance separating us from each other, and how close our knees were to brushing under the table, but of the attraction between us, too insistent and obvious to deny.
I made one last-ditch attempt to break the tension with a joke. “And settle for a pretty dress instead of a fake mustache?”
“Wear the mustache if you want. Just as long as there’s also petticoats,” he murmured, and yes, I would definitely have described his voice as husky.
My knees were tingling. My knees were tingling. Bare below the poufy skirt of my dress, inches away from Dash’s, which were also left uncovered by his jogger shorts.
Then he shifted, and his foot bumped into mine and—
I didn’t combust. But some kind of chemical reaction was going through my body as I scraped back my chair, saying something about needing a glass of water even though there was a half-full one right in front of me.
Dash stood up, too, probably out of desire to be a good host and fetch me said water.
All he did, though, was put himself in my path so that I brushed against him on my way to the fridge.
Hesitation made me pause long enough to catch the faint scent of coffee and laundry detergent emanating from his clothes.
What was left of my resolve melted away as my skin became suffused with tiny little tingles that popped and fizzed like my blood had been replaced with champagne.
If there was still a minuscule, rational part of me listing out all the reasons why I shouldn’t give in to what was clearly about to happen, it was small enough that I was able to silence it as I stepped closer to Dash.
“There’ll be petticoats,” I assured him. “Probably a corset, too.”
He huffed out a low laugh, and it trailed over my lips like a promise as he cradled my face between his hands. The plastic tiara nestled in his curls caught the light and sparkled. “There better be a corset.”
I wasn’t touching him. The only point of contact between us was his hands on my face. And yet, as he looked down at me with heat in his eyes and tenderness softening his mouth, he might as well have been holding all of me.
“You want this as much as I do,” he said, a little stunned, as if he’d only just realized what should’ve been obvious five seconds into our first meeting.
“I do.” I wasn’t sure if by this he meant just the kiss or something more, and I didn’t care. I wanted it, all of it. I wanted as much of Dash as I could possibly have. As he was willing to give me.
He hadn’t taken his eyes off me. I pushed lightly against the cradle of his hands, hungry to finally feel his lips on mine. Maybe it was just my usual impatience, but the moment felt like was stretching on and on, and I was probably going to ruin it by making some sort of inappropriate comment and—
His lips brushed mine.
They were just as silky as his fingertips and they tasted of summer. That was as far as I got.
It wasn’t so much that my brain shut down, but that the sensation of Dash’s lips against mine took over and overwhelmed every potential thought before it had a chance to coalesce.
Which was fine. The last thing you wanted when you were kissing a man who could make your heart flutter with a mere smile was to get all intellectual about it.
Especially since he was currently stroking my lower lip with the tip of his tongue.
If my knees had been tingling earlier, now they were going weak at the feathery touch.
Lucky for me and my failing appendages, I was able to brace myself against the hard planes of his chest.
The tension was building, twining around us like tongues of smoke or the sparkles that circled Cinderella when the fairy godmother magicked her up a gown.
I was the one who deepened the kiss, grabbing handfuls of his T-shirt as I rose higher on my tiptoes to better reach the tantalizing warmth of his mouth.
He pulled away slightly, but only to tease me, laying a soft kiss on the corner of my lips that made my heart flutter, before letting me reclaim his lips.
There was a sweetness to the way he kissed me, tempered with the rougher edge of his uneven breaths. It was as if he was pouring all his joy into the kiss, and every spun-sugar dream he’d ever had.
Dash’s large, warm hand moved down to my neck, his thumb making little circles just below my ear. And I…
I was spiraling.
I’d had more than my fair share of first kisses, enough to know without a shred of uncertainty that this thing that was building between Dash and me was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was more than mere attraction, brighter than a blaze of summer sunshine and more inevitable than fate.
This thing with Dash… it felt real.
Or like it had a potential to be. Which only meant that it would hurt all the more when he inevitably ghosted me.
The thought slammed into me with the force of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. I broke off the kiss, panting as hard as if I’d just run across the Brooklyn Bridge—at noon, on the hottest day of the year.
“You okay?” Dash murmured, sweeping back a stray curl and tucking it behind my ear. Below his furrowed brow, his velvety brown eyes were wide with mingled concern and surprise.
I stared at him for a long moment, willing myself to come up with a coherent explanation for why I was suddenly enveloped in a haze of panic.
The thing was, whatever reason I offered him, he would have understood. He would have nodded and stepped back and done the gentlemanly thing, even if it meant sitting back down to our quickly cooling salmon and pretending that the past few minutes hadn’t happened.
I didn’t want that. But neither could I step back into his arms as if the sparkles and magic pulsing through my veins hadn’t been replaced with hot, sour panic. So instead, I just…
I bolted.
Literally. Without pausing to offer some sort of excuse or even grab my bag, I ran out of Dash’s apartment, bursting out into the street and barely making it around the corner before I doubled over, gasping.
Yaz was wrong.
Milo hadn’t just broken my heart, or my life. There was a good chance that he’d broken me, too.