Chapter 7
Great. Excellent. What a normal week.
I lay there staring at a ceiling that probably cost more than my car, trying to get my bearings.
The penthouse was silent in a way that felt almost aggressive, no traffic, no neighbors, no radiator clanking.
Just the soft hum of expensive climate control and the distant awareness that I was sleeping approximately forty feet from a man who made my nervous system do things I hadn't authorized.
The smell hit me first. Coffee. Rich, dark, definitely not from a gas station. And something else, butter, maybe? Something cooking?
I pulled on yesterday's jeans and a wrinkled sweater, caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and immediately wished I hadn't.
My hair was doing something structurally ambitious that defied both gravity and good taste.
I ran my fingers through it until it looked less like a modern art installation and more like a person who'd had a rough night, which was at least accurate.
Then I padded out into the main living space.
The penthouse was exactly what I'd expected: chrome and glass and sharp angles, every surface gleaming with the kind of aggressive minimalism that screamed I have a cleaning service and no hobbies.
Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a view of the city that was probably meant to be impressive but mostly made me feel like I was in a very expensive fishbowl.
Then I reached the kitchen, and everything I thought I knew about Will Steele went sideways.
He was standing at the island with his back to me, sleeves rolled up again, always with the sleeves, whisking something in a glass bowl.
The morning light poured through the windows and caught the silver at his temples, the strong line of his forearms as he worked.
Copper pots hung from a rack overhead, actual copper, with the patina of regular use.
The cutting board on the counter was worn in the center, dipped from years of knife work.
Spices in little glass jars. A proper gas range.
This wasn't a showpiece kitchen. This was a kitchen that someone actually used. Frequently. With competence.
I stood in the doorway and had a small, private crisis.
Here's the thing about attraction that nobody warns you about: it doesn't escalate in a straight line.
It doesn't build gradually from "he's objectively good-looking" to "I have feelings.
" It ambushes you. You're fine, you're professional, you're handling it, and then the man makes an omelet, and something in your brain short-circuits so completely that you stand in a doorway like a concussed deer watching him whisk eggs.
This was not in my contingency plans. I didn't have contingency plans for this. I had contingency plans for forensic audits and hostile depositions and awkward conversations with my incarcerated father. I did not have a contingency plan for a vigilante in a Henley making breakfast.
"You're staring," he said without turning around.
Busted. Spectacularly, humiliatingly busted.
"You're making omelets," I said, recovering with what I hoped was dignity but suspected was not. I leaned against the doorframe, crossing my arms. "I thought you survived on a strict diet of scotch and the tears of your enemies."
A faint huff of air escaped him, not quite a laugh, but close enough that I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. He poured the eggs into a sizzling pan, tilting it with practiced ease.
"My mother taught me," he said, his voice quieter now. "She used to say a man who can't feed himself is half a man."
"She sounds wise."
"She was." He didn't elaborate, but something in his shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly.
He flipped the omelet, a perfect golden half-moon that I could never have achieved in a hundred years and I'd tried, once, in college, and the fire department had gotten involved, and reached for a plate.
"Coffee's on the counter. Mugs are in the cabinet above. "
I poured myself a cup and tried not to feel weird about knowing where his mugs were.
The coffee was excellent, because of course it was.
I was starting to suspect Will Steele approached everything in his life with the same relentless competence, and I was going to have to make peace with that or lose my mind.
"Sit," he said, sliding a plate across the island toward me. "Eat."
"So bossy." But I sat, because the omelet smelled incredible and I wasn't stupid enough to turn down free food. The first bite made me close my eyes involuntarily. Fluffy, perfectly seasoned, with something herby I couldn't identify.
"Good?" he asked, and when I opened my eyes, he was watching me with an expression that was doing the opposite of helping my crisis.
"Acceptable," I said, because admitting it was delicious felt like giving him too much power. "The eggs are adequately prepared."
"High praise from the woman who nearly poisoned herself with C-rated lo mein."
"That lo mein was transcendent and you know it. You ate half of it."
"I ate two noodles. For quality assessment purposes."
"You ate six. I counted."
"You counted my noodle consumption?"
"I'm a forensic accountant. I count everything. It's a disease."
He actually laughed. Not the almost-laugh, not the ghost of amusement.
A real laugh, short and startled, like it had escaped before he could catch it.
It changed his whole face. Made the sharp angles softer, made his eyes crinkle at the corners, made him look like someone you'd want to sit across from at breakfast every morning.
And there it was. The thought I'd been dodging for days, landing in my brain like a bird on a wire, settling in, making itself comfortable.
Every morning.
I shoved a large bite of omelet into my mouth so I wouldn't have to respond to my own thoughts.
We ate in something that resembled silence for a few minutes, side by side at the island, watching the city wake up through those ridiculous windows. He refilled my coffee without asking, which I decided didn't count as a unilateral decision. It was coffee. There were limits to my principles.
"Your mother," I said, partly because I wanted to know and partly because asking about his family felt safer than sitting in the silence, which had turned warm and domestic in a way that was making my palms sweat. "When did she..."
"I was twenty-two." He didn't look at me, just kept his eyes on his plate. "Pancreatic cancer. It was fast. Nicole was sixteen."
The math assembled itself in my head the way math always did: automatically, mercilessly. "You raised her."
"Through her last two years of high school." A pause. "I was in my second year of law school. It was... a scheduling challenge."
A scheduling challenge. He'd been twenty-two and grieving and suddenly responsible for a teenager, and he'd just called it a scheduling challenge. I wanted to reach across the counter and shake him. I also wanted to hug him, which was confusing and unhelpful.
"The cooking," I said slowly. "That's from then?"
He nodded, still not meeting my eyes. "It was the one normal thing I could give her.
Eggs and toast before school, no matter how late I'd been up studying.
Something that stayed the same when everything else was.
.. " He trailed off. Didn't finish. He did that, I'd noticed.
Started sentences about Nicole and then stopped, like he'd hit a wall he hadn't seen coming.
I didn't push. I'd grown up with a father who'd hidden everything, and I'd learned the hard way that pushing people to talk before they were ready just made them build the walls higher.
"Is that why you're so protective of her?" I asked quietly. "Not just because of what happened later. It goes further back than that, doesn't it?"
His fork paused halfway to his mouth. For a long moment, I thought he wouldn't answer.
"I've been trying to keep her safe since she was sixteen," he said finally, his voice so low I barely heard it.
"Couldn't keep her from losing Mom. Couldn't keep her from having to grow up too fast with a brother who was barely an adult himself.
" He set the fork down carefully, precisely.
"And then later, when it actually mattered, when I should have been able to. .."
He didn't finish that sentence either. But I heard what lived in the space where the words should have been. Seven years of it. A guilt so heavy it had calcified into something he mistook for identity.
"Will." I waited until he looked at me. Those ice-blue eyes were different than I'd ever seen them.
Not unguarded, exactly. More like the guard had stepped away for a moment, and what was behind it was exhausted.
"Cooking breakfast for your sister every morning while you were in law school isn't failing.
It's the opposite of failing. It's showing up. Every day. That's not nothing."
Something moved in his expression. I couldn't tell if it was surprise or pain or something else. He looked at me like I'd said something in a language he understood but hadn't heard spoken in a long time.
"The cooking is just what's left," he said quietly. "The one thing from then that I can still do. The one thing that doesn't get..." He stopped again. Pressed his thumb against the edge of the counter, hard, like the pressure was helping him hold something in place.
I wanted to touch his hand. Wanted to cover his knuckles with my palm the way he'd let me hook my fingers around his in the car last night.
But the morning light was different from the dark of the car, and daylight made things more real, more consequential, and I wasn't sure either of us was ready for what it would mean if I reached for him now.
So I did what I always did when emotions got too big for the space they were in.
I deflected.