Chapter 6 Wine and Want #2
"Say it again," he says, very quietly.
"Which part?"
"The part where you want me to kiss you."
"Cook me dinner first." I step past him toward the villa door, close enough that my shoulder brushes his chest, close enough to feel the hitch in his breathing. "Then we'll negotiate."
I don't look back. I don't need to. The heat of his gaze follows me like a physical thing, like sunlight concentrated through a lens, and I feel it all the way to the door.
Behind me, I hear him exhale. Long. Controlled. The sound of a man recalibrating.
"The dress should be illegal," he says to my back.
"It's demure."
"It's devastating." His footsteps on stone, following. "After you."
He takes over the kitchen like he built it.
Which, apparently, he did.
I perch on the counter, not the table, the actual counter, because height matters when the man cooking for you is six-three and you need every advantage, and watch him work.
Olive oil in a pan that's already warm because he preheated it while I wasn't paying attention.
Fish unwrapped from butcher paper with hands that handle the delicate flesh like they're defusing a bomb.
Fresh herbs torn, not cut, because he told me once that cutting bruises the leaves.
He told me that at a vineyard. While his thumb was still damp from my lip.
The kitchen is villa-small. Every time he turns, we're in each other's orbit. His elbow brushes my knee when he reaches for the olive oil. His hip grazes my thigh when he pivots to the stove. The contact is accidental and inevitable and neither of us moves to stop it.
"Tell me about Portland," he says, filleting the fish with a precision that should be frightening and is instead hypnotic.
So I do. Powell's City of Books, where I once spent an entire Saturday reading in the blue room and forgot to eat.
The food carts on Alder Street; the Thai place where the owner remembers my order, the crepe cart that's only open when it rains, which in Portland is most of the time.
My apartment with the kitchen window that faces a brick wall and the bedroom that gets six minutes of direct sunlight on the summer solstice if I stand on a chair.
He listens like every word matters. Not performing attention — actually absorbing, filing details, building a picture of a life I'm not sure I'll get back.
"You sound homesick," he says, not looking up from the fish.
"I am." I watch his hands — scarred, capable, terrifyingly gentle with the knife. "But I can't go back. Not yet."
"Why?"
The question is an opening. Soft. Undemanding. The kind of question you can walk through or walk past, and he'll accept either choice.
Maybe it's the wine he's already poured. Maybe it's the dress making me reckless. Maybe it's because I need this man — this specific man with the blade in his nightstand and the scars on his body and the unshakeable certainty that the world is dangerous — to understand why I'm here.
"I reported my company for falsifying drug trial data." The words come easier than expected. "MediVista Solutions. They were hiding cardiac side effects — serious ones. Arrhythmias in vulnerable populations. Heart attacks. People were going to die if the drug got approved with that data."
His hands go still on the cutting board. One heartbeat. Two. Then the knife resumes its work, steady as before, but something has changed in the quality of his attention. It's sharper now. Focused in a way that reminds me of the vineyard; that predator alertness, redirected from the horizon to me.
"That was brave," he says quietly.
"It was terrifying." I take a sip of wine. "I found the discrepancy in March. A pattern in the Phase III data that didn't match the published results. At first I thought it was an error — transcription mistake, decimal in the wrong place. But the more I dug, the more intentional it looked."
"What did you do?"
"Reported it to my supervisor. Like you're supposed to." The bitterness escapes before I can catch it. "He told me I was misreading the data. When I wouldn't drop it, he threatened my job."
Kaz sets down the knife. Turns to face me fully, and the kitchen suddenly feels much smaller than it did thirty seconds ago. "So you went higher."
"I went to the FDA. Filed a formal whistleblower complaint.
" My voice cracks on the word formal, because the formality of it — the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the clinical language used to describe a process that destroyed my entire life — suddenly strikes me as absurd.
"MediVista found out. They've been trying to discredit me ever since.
My lawyer thinks there might be people looking for me.
The kind who solve problems permanently. "
I wait for the reaction I've imagined a hundred times. The recoil. The calculations — how much danger has she brought to my doorstep? The polite distance of a man who's decided his guest is more trouble than she's worth.
Instead, he crosses the kitchen in two strides and plants his hands on the counter on either side of my hips. Not touching me. Caging me. His face inches from mine, and up close, in the kitchen's warm light, his eyes are so dark they're almost black.
"Listen to me." His voice is low and fierce and certain.
"What you did, standing against a company that size, risking everything for people you'll never meet — that's the bravest thing I've ever heard.
And I have known fighters, Edith. People who killed for a living.
Not one of them had the courage to do what you did. "
"I don't feel brave. I feel stupid."
"You're not stupid." His hands grip the counter edge. I can hear the marble protesting. "You had no weapons. No training. No backup plan. Just the data and the conviction that the truth was worth telling." A pause. "Do you have any idea how rare that is?"
Tears sting my eyes. Eight months of running, of second-guessing, of lying awake wondering if reporting was worth losing everything, and this man I've known for four days is looking at me like I'm the bravest person he's ever met.
"It cost me everything," I whisper.
"That's what makes it matter." His thumb comes up, hovers near my cheek where a tear has escaped.
The heat of his hand warms my skin from an inch away.
Then his hand drops, and the effort it costs him is visible — the restraint, the careful distance, the discipline of a man who doesn't trust what his touch might become.
"You're safe here," he says. "I promise you that."
"How can you promise that?"
"Because I am very good at keeping people safe." Something shifts behind his eyes — something hard and ancient and utterly certain. "And very good at eliminating threats."
The way he says it isn't bravado. It's the calm delivery of someone stating a professional qualification. Like a surgeon saying I'm good with a scalpel, or a pilot saying I can land in crosswinds.
"What were you?" I ask. "Before this? Before the resort?"
"Someone who solved problems with violence."
"Military?"
"Something like that." He steps back. Returns to the fish. The distance reasserts itself, and I can see the wall going back up — stones clicking into place, mortar hardening. "I'm trying to be better than I was."
"Is that why you're here? On a rock in the Aegean?"
"I'm not hiding." But his voice says otherwise.
"From what?"
He doesn't answer. Seasons the fish with steady hands, and I know I've reached the boundary of what he'll give me tonight.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it: "From what I'm capable of."
The words settle between us like something dropped from a height. I hold them. Turn them over. File them alongside the blade, the scars, the body that runs at temperatures that shouldn't sustain life.
He is capable of terrible things. He is also capable of feeding me figs and saying don't stop and cooking fish with the hands of someone who learned gentleness as a second language.
Both things are true. I'm choosing to sit in the kitchen with both of them.
"The fish is ready," he says. "Let's eat on the terrace."
We eat under stars so bright they look like someone left the settings on maximum.
The fish melts on my tongue — perfectly seared, lemon and herbs, the kind of cooking that turns protein into an argument for the existence of God. Roasted tomatoes that taste like summer distilled. Bread that's still warm. Wine that's dark and soft and makes everything feel like a confession.
"This is incredible," I say, and mean it with my whole body. "Where did you learn to cook like this?"
"Here. Retirement." He leans back, and the starlight catches the silver scar through his eyebrow.
"I spent a long time eating whatever was available — ration bars, mostly.
Food that kept you alive without bothering to be enjoyable.
When I finally had the freedom to choose what I ate, I wanted to make something. Create instead of —" He stops.
"Instead of what?"
"Instead of the alternative." He takes a sip of wine. "Cooking is the only violence I practice now. Against vegetables, mostly."
"And garlic. Thysa told me about the garlic."
His mouth curves. "Thysa talks too much."
"Thysa is the only reason I know your full name, your bread-baking habits, and the fact that you've been emotionally compromised since I arrived." I grin. "She's my favorite person here."
"She'll be thrilled." Dry as the Assyrtiko we drank at the vineyard. "I'll have to fire her."
"You'd never. She's the only one who tells you the truth."
Something flickers across his expression — surprise, maybe, at being read that accurately. "She is. Insufferably."
The wine is working on both of us. His shoulders have dropped. His voice has lost that careful, measured quality and found something warmer underneath — rougher, more present, the voice of a man who's stopped monitoring himself long enough to be real.
"You said you spent a long time eating ration bars," I say, circling back. "How long?"
"Longer than you'd believe."