Chapter 17 Trad Wife Dreams
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Trad Wife Dreams
HENRY
Iwoke groggily to clattering sounds coming from the kitchen and a feminine curse. In Romanian. Rubbing sleep from my eyes and fumbling for my glasses, I squinted at the clock beside the bed. Eight am.
Stumbling out of bed, I almost tripped over Trinket, who meowed with such horrified entitlement that I wondered if the crew had forgotten to give her dinner the night before.
“Sorry, Trink,” I mumbled, rubbing my neck and stretching. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”
With Trinket on my heels, we headed out into the living room. A cupboard door banged, and Irina’s voice wafted from the kitchen.
“Seriously? What the fuck even is caster sugar anyway? Zah?rul este zah?r al naibii!”
I stifled a grin at her angry Romanian, taking the last few steps to the island bench. She was on tiptoes, peering into a high cupboard. The T-shirt she’d slept in the night before barely covered her backside. I watched her for longer than was appropriate before I cleared my throat.
“Morning.”
Irina squawked, leapt a foot in the air and clutched at her chest. “Henry! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“What do you need caster sugar for?” I asked, noticing a bowl and flour, eggs and milk sitting on the bench. “Are you baking?”
She pouted prettily, pushing her hair off her face. “We didn’t have wedding cake yesterday … so I was going to bake a cake for us … you know, since we’re all about tradition in this marriage.”
“Very traditional,” I deadpanned. “I picked you for a trad wife the second I laid eyes on you.”
She smirked in my direction. “What, when you found me in your bedroom with no panties on? Yes, that’s how every trad wife gets her husband.”
I opened my mouth to explain that the first time I’d laid eyes on her she was pleasuring herself on camera … but I thought better of it. “Can I let you in on a secret?” I said instead.
Irina leaned her elbows on the counter, rested her chin in her hands and smirked at me. “I want to know all my new husband’s secrets.”
I fought the blush … and lost. Her grin widened.
“I don’t like cake,” I confessed.
Irina’s shocked gasp pulled a bark of laughter out of me. “You cannot be serious! Who doesn’t like cake?”
I raised my hand sheepishly. “Cakes come in such a wide variety of textures and flavours, and then there’s frosting—which is entirely too sickly sweet for me—and don’t even get me started on fondant.” I almost gagged just saying the word.
Irina’s brow creased. “So … what did you have on your birthdays then, when you were a kid?”
She might have joked that she wanted to know all my secrets, but some of them were just too sad to say out loud. Like the fact that no one had ever cared enough to celebrate my birthday with anything more festive than a Vegemite sandwich.
“Fairy bread. I used to devour the stuff like it was going out of fashion as a child.” It was true enough.
It had been a staple in my lunch boxes for most of primary school.
Until one kid in year six decided I was a giant pussy for still eating fairy bread, snatched my lunch box and beat me over the head with it.
He got a suspension. I got a concussion and a rant from my father about learning to eat like a ‘normal’ kid …
and I never ate fairy bread at school again.
Her confused expression deepened. “What the actual fuck is fairy bread?”
“It’s a classic Australian dish. Here, let me see if we have everything to make it.
” I rounded the bench, squeezing past her in the small kitchen.
There was two-day old bread in the bread bin.
Although it wasn’t the soft, pillowy perfection that fairy bread deserved, it wasn’t mouldy, which was really the only test someone with a past like mine bothered with.
There had been times in my childhood when bread had been deemed ‘still good’ if the mould was able to be scraped off the crust.
“Ideally we’d start with fresh bread, but beggars can’t be choosers,” I explained, setting the loaf on the counter. Irina peered at me, her expression perplexing.
“Henry, you’re a literal billionaire … you’re thinking of buying an island for fuck’s sake! If you want to make this fairy bread stuff with fresh bread, I’m pretty sure we can make that happen.”
She slid her phone off the counter and pulled up Uber Eats.
Nibbling on her lip, she tapped at the screen.
“What’s the address here … that’s something your wife should probably know off the top of her head, right?
” Her eyes darted up to mine, a hint of a challenge in them.
“Especially if she’s expected to move in with you.
But we’ll discuss that later. Right now, we just need fresh bread for the rich yacht man. ”
I rattled off the berth number and the street address in a daze, and with a flourish, she announced that a loaf of fresh white bread would arrive within twenty minutes.
“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” I mumbled, running fingers through my messy hair. “As you said, I’m a literal billionaire. I should be buying my own bread.”
She shrugged. “This fairy bread stuff, that’s my wedding gift to you. Now, what other ingredients do we need?”
I headed for the cupboard where I was sure I’d packed away the sprinkles when we moved in.
I could just make them out, right up the back of the cupboard behind the coffee and tea bags and Lucian’s protein powder.
I stretched for them, and when I finally snagged them and turned triumphantly to Irina, I found her rubbing her lips, eyes fixated on my low-slung pyjama pants.
“I think I’m going to enjoy being married,” she murmured, letting her gaze rove over my bare torso. I flushed, like I always did, and quickly turned for the fridge and the margarine. I didn’t want to admit how much I was already enjoying having her in my kitchen.
Setting both ingredients down on the bench, I dusted my hands. “And now we wait for the bread to arrive.”
“You’re kidding.” Irina gestured at the items. “Three ingredients? What do we do with them?”
“Well, you spread the margarine on the bread—it has to be margarine. Butter’s just too fancy.”
“Right.” She sounded dubious. “And then …”
“Then we cover the margarine with sprinkles and cut the bread into triangles.”
“That’s it?”
I nodded. “That’s it.”
Irina’s bubbly laughter filled the room.
“This is my kind of recipe! Just so you know, because the last thing I’d want is all of this” —she ran her hands down her T-shirt and over her thighs— “to trick you into thinking your trad wife dream is coming true … I’m a terrible cook.
Honestly. I’m not lying. I never learned to cook growing up, and it shows. ”
Mouth dry, my gaze lingered on her bare legs. “And yet you were going to bake a surprise wedding cake?”
She rolled her eyes playfully, and heat zinged through my body. “I promise you would have awarded me an A for effort … Hubby.”
Her smile was like sunshine melting my insides, and I felt my own mouth mirroring hers … when sharp pain sliced into my calf. I yelped, leaning down to disentangle Trinket’s claws from my pyjamas and my skin.
“Bloody hell, cat! I’m sorry,” I muttered as she yowled in protest. “I’ll feed you now. Where’s Abernathy?”
“Oh, I fed him earlier,” Irina explained breezily, tossing her hair back over her shoulders. “He’s such a polite boy! Woke me up with a gentle pat to the cheek and led me right to his food bowl! Last I saw he’d gone back to sleep on my bed.”
“Catnip indeed,” I murmured, scooping up Trinket and carrying her through to her bowl. “Why can’t you be as nice to me as your brother is to Irina?”
Trinket glared at me as if to say, ‘I did remind you politely ten minutes ago, but you forgot about me to flirt with the new lady,’ and then fell ravenously on her kibble.
Apparently, even my cat had the ability to make me blush. Thankfully, Irina seemed distracted, bustling around the kitchen. I closed my eyes as her T-shirt lifted while she reached for a mug, revealing plain black cotton underwear—modest, unassuming and somehow more devastating than lace or silk.
“Who keeps their teaspoons in the drawer? Everyone knows they go in a jar next to the kettle!”
I cracked my eyes, hoping my body was under control. “They’re cutlery. They go in the cutlery drawer.”
She threw me a withering look, spooning instant coffee into a mug. “But they’re only used to make coffee and tea, so it just makes sense to keep them close by!”
I scratched my forehead. “You don’t eat with them? Yoghurt or dessert? Cereal?”
She opened her mouth then closed it. Tilted her head to the side. Nodded once. “I concur. Teaspoons are a valid eating option for some people. But maybe we could keep half of them near the kettle?”
“Already putting your stamp on the place, are you?” I teased, then sobered, recalling the way she’d seemed genuinely frazzled by our conversation the night before.
“What I said last night, about moving in. I wasn’t trying to impose my will on you.
I … sometimes I’m very blunt. But I think that, if we want this charade to be believable when it comes time to handling the legal side of things, it’s going to be important that we have been cohabiting.
Immigration isn’t just going to hand you a partner visa because you’re married to me.
There will be questions. They’ll want to make sure we are genuine.
And we’ll need to know … things about each other. ”
My face was getting hotter by the minute as Irina regarded me, chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip as she stirred her coffee.
“Okay,” she eventually said. “How do you take your coffee? We should start with the basics. I like mine strong and white and bitter as fuck.”
Some of the tension eased from me. “Black. With two sugars. One spoon of coffee, three quarters boiling water, and then topped up from the tap to make it immediately drinkable.”
“Okay. Sweet black water is your thing. Got it!” She winked, her phone buzzing on the counter.