Chapter 2
River Stone
The caviar was a mistake.
I stare at the small glass jar in my hand. Sixty-eight dollars’ worth of fish eggs. What possessed me to buy it? Actually, I know exactly what possessed me. Panic shopping at the gourmet market because I wanted to make sure Kiera had every possible ingredient she might need.
Which is how I ended up with caviar. And truffle oil. And saffron threads that cost more per ounce than gold.
I open one of the kitchen cabinets and try to find a logical place for the caviar. Next to the flour? No, that seems wrong. In the fridge? Probably. I pull open the refrigerator door and survey the ridiculous amount of food I’ve crammed in here over the past two hours.
There’s imported cheese I can’t pronounce, three different types of butter (regular, European-style, and something called “cultured”), and enough fresh herbs to stock a small farm stand.
The vegetable drawers are bursting with produce—heirloom tomatoes, baby bok choy, purple carrots that looked cool at the store but now seem pretentious.
I’m an idiot. A well-meaning idiot with no common sense about grocery shopping. Why didn’t I just have Kiera pick up what she needs?
The counters aren’t much better. Bags of groceries still wait to be unpacked, and I’ve got everything from basics like baking powder and sugar to exotic spices with names I can barely read.
There’s a whole bag dedicated to different types of oil because apparently, I thought Kiera might need options. What even is grapeseed oil anyway?
I shove the caviar onto a shelf next to some Greek yogurt and close the fridge. Maybe she won’t notice. Maybe she’ll just ignore the weird stuff and focus on the normal ingredients buried somewhere in this chaos.
The doorbell rings.
My heart does this stupid leap in my chest, and I wipe my palms on my jeans. It’s just Kiera. Just a girl coming over to cook dinner. A completely normal, professional arrangement that I definitely haven’t been obsessing over since her text last night.
No weirdness. You pay me, I cook, that’s it.
Right. No weirdness. I can do that.
I head through the living room, which suddenly feels way too big and pretentious, and open the front door. Kiera stands on my front stoop, and my brain momentarily short-circuits.
She’s wearing dark jeans and a simple black t-shirt, her pink-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Nothing fancy, nothing trying too hard, but something about the way the late afternoon sun catches her features makes my heart stumble.
A denim bag is slung over one shoulder. Her brilliant blue eyes are taking in the house behind me, and I can see the exact moment she registers just how big it is.
Those eyes flick back to mine, and her hand goes up to fidget with a strand of hair that’s escaped her ponytail. She tucks it behind her ear, shifts her weight, and I realize she’s nervous.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” She glances past me again, then back at my face. “So, uh, this is your place?”
“Yeah,” I say, because apparently, my vocabulary has been reduced to monosyllables.
I shake my head at myself. It’s because I can’t stop seeing the way she danced with Skyler at Levi’s wedding—it was like watching pure joy.
It did something to me. I clear my throat.
“Come in.” I step aside, and she walks past me into the entryway.
I watch her take everything in. The two-story ceiling, the massive living room with a staircase winding up the side, the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the backyard and, beyond that, a slice of ocean view.
It’s a beautiful house. I know it’s a beautiful house.
But now I see it how Kiera must be seeing it, and heat creeps up my neck.
“Wow,” she says, and there’s an edge to her voice I can’t quite read. “This is... quite the bachelor pad you’ve got here, Hollywood.”
I chuckle at her nickname for me. “I guess.”
“Well, you’re not exactly living like a starving artist, are you?” She turns to face me, one eyebrow raised. “What is this, like, five bedrooms? Six?”
“Five,” I admit. “And three and a half baths.”
“Three and a half.” She shakes her head, and there’s that sarcastic bite I’m learning to recognize as her default defense mechanism. “Because Heaven forbid you have to walk more than ten feet to find a bathroom. Must be rough living all alone in this massive place.”
I laugh. “Yeah, it’s a real hardship. I get lost sometimes. Had to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way back to the bedroom last week.”
Her lips twitch like she’s fighting a smile. “Sounds tragic.”
“It is. Very tragic.” I gesture toward the kitchen. “Come on, let me show you where you’ll be working.”
She follows me through the living room, and I’m hyper-aware of her presence behind me, the way her footsteps are quiet on the hardwood floors. I sneak a glance back and catch her looking around with this expression that’s half-impressed, half-skeptical.
“So what happened?” she asks. “Did you feel claustrophobic in your tiny LA apartment and decide to compensate by buying a small mansion on a coastal island?”
“Something like that.” I run a hand through my hair. “My apartment in LA was about eight hundred square feet. I felt caged in there. When I decided to move here, I guess I went a little overboard.”
“A little?”
“Okay, a lot overboard.” I pause at the entrance to the kitchen and turn to face her.
“But I had the money from Kid Logic residuals, and this place was just sitting here, and it has an ocean view, and—” I stop myself before I start rambling about the natural light and the way the sunrise looks through the windows. “Yeah. Overboard is accurate.”
“Understatement of the century,” she mutters, but there’s less bite in it now.
We step into the kitchen, and I watch her expression shift from sarcastic amusement to something closer to panic.
The entire kitchen is, admittedly, a disaster. Half unpacked grocery bags cover the counter space. The truffle oil sits in its little container near the sink. The saffron is perched on top of a bag of rice. And right there, in the middle of the chaos, is a wedge of cheese that cost seventy dollars.
Kiera stops walking. “What…is all this?”
“Groceries?”
“That’s Pule.” She points at the cheese I left sitting on the massive center island. “And is that—” She moves closer, picks up the small container of truffle oil. “Truffle oil? River, do you have any idea how much these things cost?”
“Yes?”
She sets down the truffle oil and turns to face me, eyes wide.
“You expect me to cook something amazing with ingredients I’ve only read about in textbooks?
I haven’t even gotten into culinary school yet.
I’m not a real chef. I’m an eighteen-year-old who works part-time at a bakery and whose main qualification is that I can follow a recipe without burning down the kitchen. ”
Her cheeks are flushed, and she’s fidgeting with her ponytail again. I realize I’ve managed to do exactly what I was trying not to do. Intimidate her.
“Hey.” I hold up my hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out.
I just—” I look at the chaos on the counters and feel stupid.
“I had no idea what to buy. I walked into that gourmet market on the mainland, and there were all these ingredients, and I thought, ‘What if Kiera needs truffle oil? What if she wants to make something fancy and doesn’t have the right cheese?’”
“So you bought everything?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” I give her what I hope is an apologetic smile. “But you don’t have to use any of this. Seriously. The truffle oil, the goat cheese, the weird fancy stuff…ignore it. I just wanted to make sure you had options. You can make whatever you want. Scrambled eggs. Spaghetti. Anything.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and I can’t tell if she’s going to laugh or walk out.
Then she sighs. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I know.”
“Who buys truffle oil for a Sunday night home-cooked meal?”
“Someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing and is trying to compensate by over-buying?” I offer.
That gets a small laugh out of her. “At least you’re self-aware.”
“It’s one of my few redeeming qualities.”
She shakes her head but sets her bag down and starts pulling out one of the grocery bags. “Fine. Let’s put all this away before it goes bad, and then maybe we can figure out what I’m actually going to cook tonight. Something that doesn’t cost more than my car, preferably.”
“Deal.”
We work in semi-comfortable silence, unpacking bags and finding homes for things.
Kiera takes charge quickly, organizing the refrigerator in a way that actually makes sense, although she does stop to give me a raised eyebrow at the caviar.
She’s efficient, moving with the kind of confidence that tells me she’s done this before, probably many times.
I try not to stare at her as she works, but it’s hard. There’s something about the way she moves, the way she bites her bottom lip when she’s concentrating, that makes it difficult to focus on putting away the dizzying selection of pasta shapes I bought.
“Okay,” she says after we’ve put everything away. She turns to face me, hands on her hips. “What are you hungry for?”
“Whatever you want to make.”
“That’s not an answer.” She crosses her arms. “I need to know what you like. What’s your go-to comfort food? What do you crave?”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “I’m really not picky.”
“River.”
“Anything is fine. Seriously.”
“You’re paying me thirty dollars an hour to cook for you, and you won’t even tell me what you like to eat?” She raises an eyebrow. “Come on. What would you make yourself right now if I wasn’t here?”
I look at the floor. “You’ll laugh.”
“Probably. But I still need to know.”
“A peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” I mumble.
She pauses. “I’m sorry, what?”
“A peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” I look up and meet her eyes. “It’s what sounds good to me right now.”