Chapter 21 #2
The living room was sparse and peaceful and squared-away.
He had good, high-quality furniture, no clutter, everything at parade rest. Quiet, like the man.
It suited him, honestly, the same way the immaculate lawn did.
But there were exactly two items on the mantel, dead center, propped up in pride of place like a state medal, and I crossed the room to it and put my hand over my mouth.
The festival awards. Gold satin tails and all. BEST COSTUME and BEST PUMPKIN.
“You display them,” I said.
“They’re the only trophies I’ve ever won.”
“You have an entire wall of commendations somewhere. You win everything. Cade told Harper. Harper tells everyone.”
“Those are certificates,” he said, with grave precision, heading back toward the stove, “for doing my job. That one’s for standing in front of the whole town in your grandmother’s pot while you pinned a ribbon on me and I forgot how to breathe.
And the pumpkin award, which should be half yours.
” He said it over his shoulder, completely level, stirring his sauce like he hadn’t just taken my knees out at the joint.
Dinner was spaghetti. The sauce was his specialty, from scratch—real tomatoes that he grew in his yard and put up himself back in September, which he mentioned like it was normal, like every cop on the Sweetbriar force cans his own tomatoes—and it had been going low and slow since before his shift ended.
The bread was baked in that kitchen from scratch, and he moved through all of it with the easy sureness of a man doing the one task on earth that has never once stressed him out.
He was good. Not home-cook-who-tries good.
Good good—tasting off the wooden spoon with his eyes half closed, adjusting nothing, trusting his hands—and I sat on his counter stool with my chin in my palm and watched those forearms work and understood that I was not in the normal amount of hot-guy-trouble; I was in a great deal of grown-man trouble.
“Where does a cop learn to cook like this?”
He shrugged one shoulder in answer, and for a second, I thought that was all I’d get. Then he said, without turning around from the stove,
“Dinner at our house wasn’t really a thing.
My folks were home, mostly, but not—” He turned his hand over, looking for the word, and gave up on it.
“The TV’d be on in another room. Everybody orbiting, nobody landing.
So I started messing with the stove. Mostly so the house would smell like something was happening in it. ”
“Matt.”
“It wasn’t tragic. It was just quiet.” He tapped the spoon on the pot rim.
“And then it turned out I loved it. Best hour of the day, even now. You put good things in a pot, and you pay attention to them, and it comes out better than it went in.” A small pause, the spoon going around. “Not much else works like that.”
It landed in me sideways, that—the picture of a quiet kid in a quiet house, finding the one room where the care you put in came back out again.
He didn’t say it was sad, so I didn’t take it as sad.
But I filed it away with the rest of what I was learning about Matt Hartford, which was that every soft thing about this man had been built by hand, by him, on purpose, out of whatever was lying around.
“And Becca? She cook too?”
“Becca,” he said, with the gravity of sworn testimony, “used to set the smoke alarm off making toast.” Almost a smile, remembering. “She took dish duty.”
He tapped the spoon on the pot rim, considered it, and then held it out to me across the counter, one hand cupped underneath to catch the drip, his eyes coming up to mine.
“Here. Tell me it needs anything. I dare you.”
So I leaned in and tasted sauce off a wooden spoon held perfectly steady by Matt Hartford in his warm kitchen, his gaze dropping to my mouth and staying there, and if you want to know what the sauce needed, it needed nothing; it was perfect, and I’d have told him so if I could have remembered any words in any language.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, low, entirely too satisfied about it, and turned back to the stove. “Set the table, Starling. And quit looking at me like that, or nobody’s eating tonight.”
I set the table.
“Nine,” I announced, after taking my first bite.
He looked up. “Nine.”
“Solid nine. Genuinely excellent.”
“Out of ten?” He asked, brow furrowed.
“Out of ten,” I confirmed, grinning at his confusion.
Something moved across his face that I’d never seen there before—he was pleased, actually pleased, and trying to hide it, and failing, and then all at once he narrowed his eyes at me. “Where’s the tenth point?”
“It’s withheld.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that we tasted off the same wooden spoon back there, Officer, which is a health code violation, and I’d hate to think what the county would say.”
“You put your mouth on my spoon. I didn’t force you.”
“You offered me the spoon.”
“I offered you a taste. There’s a difference. You went in like you were being timed.”