by Cara Colter
“You have the feet for a rottweiler,” he suggested.
She kicked off the slippers.
“Minus two for losing the slippers. Cute feet, though. Are your toenails lime-green? Plus twenty.”
“With flowers.” She held one up for him to inspect.
“Impressive. Plus twenty-five.”
“It’s not really my style, but Chelsea wants to work in a spa someday, once she gives up salsa dancing. Her toes are always showing for competitions, so she’s very good at nail polishes. Still, she likes to practice on other people, namely me. I don’t let her touch my fingernails, though, just the parts of me that usually don’t show!”
He eyed the glass of wine, the bottle beside it. “For someone a little inhibited it seems like it might be a bit early for that,” he said.
“Too early for anchovies?” She grabbed her wineglass. She took a defiant sip. Inhibited? Who had kissed whom?
“You better tell me what’s going on.” His shoulder was touching hers. Warmth radiated through his jacket. The leather was soft and supple, and if expense had a smell, the scent coming off the jacket would be it. Brand put the pizza box on the hassock and opened it.
She set down her wine and took the piece of pizza he offered. There was no way to eat an everything-on-it with any kind of decorum, but it was too late to make a good impression now, anyway. She was suddenly starving.
Come to think of it, she was all done making impressions. She took a huge bite of the pizza and chewing it gave her a few moments to put her thoughts together.
“You can see from the size of this place, I wasn’t making cookies here.” She kept her voice firm. “I rented space in a commercial kitchen. It burned to the ground two days ago, just as I was leaving your office, actually. Chelsea was there. I don’t want to say Chelsea burned it to the ground, but she does get distracted practicing her routines while the cookies bake. There’s some talk of a lawsuit. The building owner advised me to retain a lawyer.”
“Ouch.”
“Do you know what that costs?”
“Unfortunately.”
“If that wasn’t bad enough, I lost all my stock and some of my equipment and inventory. Insurance will cover some of the stock and inventory—unless Chelsea is found liable. Then I would have to sue her personally, which I don’t think I could do, under any circumstances, even if she was practicing salsa dancing and got distracted and caught the kitchen on fire. She’s so upset already.”
“Do you have another wineglass?”
“Kitchen cupboard beside the range.”
He got up and she watched him go. His shoulders practically touched either side of the galley-kitchen door frame. Her place was small, and now it seemed smaller, as if he was filling it—not just the floor space, but the air. He would leave, but still be here. She would breathe him in forever. She might have to move. On top of everything else.
She sighed heavily. Brand came back with a coffee mug instead of a wineglass. He poured himself some wine. He sampled it cautiously. “Not as bad as I thought it would be.”
“My story?”
“No, that’s worse than I thought it would be. The wine’s pretty good, though I’m just drinking this to keep you from downing the whole bottle yourself. Not that you don’t have reason, but I don’t want to see you get drunk. Lose your inhibitions—”
She cocked her fist at him.
“I wasn’t going to mention the thing that must not be mentioned.” His eyes went to her lips, and stayed there for a heated second until he looked away.
Had he deliberately paraphrased a very famous line from a series of books she had admitted, in an unguarded moment, to liking? Did that mean he had read them?
Possibly just seen the movies, which was way more resistible.
“A gentleman until the end,” she said wryly.
“I try,” he said.
“This is one of those surreal moments,” she decided. “Here I am in my hobbit-sized apartment with a view of the side of the building next door, serving cheap wine in a coffee mug to the man being lauded by City magazine as the billionaire businessman of the decade.”
“Don’t forget the furry-feet slippers and the shoelace,” he said, beautifully unimpressed with himself.
“This could only happen to me.”
“You’re probably right. Cheers.”
“Cheers,” she said. They rapped their glasses together.
“I like your hobbit-sized place,” he said. “It’s homey.”
“Humble.”
“Don’t worry about it, Bree. I’m not really a gentleman.”
“What? Of course you are!”
He wagged his eyebrows fiendishly at her, but there was something in his voice when he spoke again. “I’m just a pretender at the genteel life. What I come from makes this place look like a palace.”
“Really?” But then she remembered something he had said the night of the gala. He had said her family looked perfect, particularly to someone who came from one that was not. He had mentioned he had no father figure.
He nodded.
Suddenly, she needed to know. She needed to know something deeper about him, needed to know he could be vulnerable, too.
“Tell me about that,” she insisted softly.
He hesitated. She thought he might distract with charm. But he didn’t. After a long moment, he spoke.
“My dad left my mom and I when I was six.” His voice had a roughness around the edge of it that it did not normally have. “My mom was ill. We lived in places smaller than shoeboxes. On one memorable occasion, we lived in a car for three days. Sometimes we went to McDonald’s and stole creamers because she didn’t have money for milk. She would have considered this wine champagne.”
Somehow his revealing this part of himself was the most extraordinary of gifts. This was authentic, the edge of raw pain in his voice was real. That he had found her worthy of entrusting with this secret part of himself felt like the best thing that had happened to her in a long time.
Maybe even better than that kiss. Well, maybe not.
The moment of feeling he trusted her was extraordinarily brief. “I don’t know why I said that,” he said with a regretful shake of his head.
“You can trust me with it,” she said softly.
“Thanks,” he replied, but his tone was clipped.
She had questions, but assumed from the growl in his voice and his use of the past tense when talking about the champagne, that his mother was dead, and that it still caused him pain to think about it.
“Did my dad know how things were for you?” she asked.
He looked like he was very annoyed by the fact she was continuing the conversation, but after a moment he answered.
“Not all the details, but he knew I was shouldering a lot of responsibility. He helped me apply for scholarships at college. He wrote me letters of endorsement. I think he paid me more than I was worth when I worked for him. Your dad was one decent guy, Bree.”
“So are you.”
He lifted a shoulder.
“I think that’s why you’re such a decent guy,” she said softly. “You know firsthand what it’s like to have it tough.”
Maybe it was the wrong thing to say, because a veil went down completely in his eyes, as if he regretted sharing the confidence as much as she welcomed it.
“We’ll save my tales of woe for a different day,” he said smoothly. “Right now I want to hear the rest of yours.”
She would have liked to talk about him some more, but she could clearly see he had said all he was going to say for one day. She appreciated his confidence and did not want to appear to pry. So, she took a fortifying gulp of her wine before launching into the rest of the story.
“I thought I could rent another kitchen, but I’ve been unable to find a suitable space in m
y price range. I’m behind on orders. You can see I can’t work out of here. I’m going to have to cancel the Crystal Silvers contract. And Perks. I’m going to have to let Chelsea go, and she’s already a mess, poor kid. I know I will eventually get back on my feet, but for now—” Despite that fortifying gulp of wine her voice cracked.
“For now, I’m done,” she choked out. She finished her wine in one long pull. When she went to refill, he took the bottle and put it out of her reach, beside him on the floor.
“Bree, I might be able to help you out.”
So, here they were again. He was going to help her out. He still felt as if he owed her dad a debt of gratitude.
But she didn’t want to fight it anymore. She was so tired. She just wanted to sink into his strength. To let him take care of her. To let him rescue her from her life. There were worse things than letting a super successful man—who had a good heart and was decent to boot—look after you, take your troubles away.
Okay, so she had taken ten giant steps back from the woman in the beautiful cloak and high heels that she had been just two short days ago. She might never see that woman again, she realized sadly. The cloak was probably going to have to go to a consignment store. She couldn’t in good conscience take it back. The dog had slobbered on it.
“You probably have a team of lawyers,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Wasn’t even thinking of the legal aspects of your dilemma, but yes, I’ll run your liability issues by my legal eagles.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“A place for you to work.”
“I appreciate you wanting to help, but believe me,” she said, “I’ve already tried everything. I even hoped maybe I could rent a restaurant kitchen, after hours, work all night if I had to, but I just couldn’t turn anything up. Again, it’s the budget. And I don’t want you to offer to rent me a kitchen over my budget, because the cookie business can’t sustain that. It’s still a business, not a charity, and if I can’t run it in the black—”
“Bree, be quiet.”
She sighed. Was he hearing her?
“I have a kitchen,” he said softly. “In your price range. I have a commercial kitchen. That’s completely empty. And available. That no one ever uses.”
“Yeah, as if that would be in my price range.”
“It’s in your price range.”
“You don’t even know what my price range is. It’s laughably small.”
“The kitchen is free.”
“Are you kidding me?” She could not keep the skepticism out of her voice. “I would have to hate you forever if you rented a kitchen for me, and then told me it was free out of some kind of misguided—”
“I would never lie to you like that. Never. And I would never risk having you hate me forever.”
She could feel herself falling toward the most frightening thing of all: hope. She searched his face. She could see the innate trustworthiness of him. She felt that hope flutter to reluctant life in her chest.
“If you’re kidding me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that, don’t you?”
“I understand completely. I mean, it’s just theoretical, because I have a kitchen, but how would you go about killing me?”
“I’d have to think about it,” she said regally.
“Because I’m quite big, and you’re quite small. It’s not like I would just stand there, with my arms open, saying, ‘okay, kill me now.’ And to be honest, you don’t seem very threatening. I think it may be the slippers you took off a while ago that ruin your killer image.”
“Maybe those slippers shoot...things. Like in a James Bond movie.”
“You’d have to be more specific to convince me. Bullets? Darts? Cookies?”
She loved this bantering back and forth, but she had to know.
“Brand, please do not keep me in suspense another moment! We can discuss your potential demise another time. Tell me about the kitchen! No one has a kitchen, just sitting around, at their disposal.”
“Well, I do.”
Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself. She was crying. She couldn’t help it. “Where is it? Brand, I need to start right away. I’m so far behind. If I work night and day I might be able to get the Crystal Silvers birthday cookies done. Maybe.”
“You’ll get them done,” he said, with such absolute confidence in her that she cried harder.
“How can I thank you? Where is it?”
“It’s at my house.”
Her heart dropped, and the tears of relief stopped. She tried not to replace them with the despairing, hopeless kind.
She took a deep breath, and did her best not to sound too skeptical. But she’d already resigned herself to it. It was too good to be true.
“You have a commercial kitchen in your house? No one has a commercial kitchen in their house. Why would a bachelor have a commercial kitchen in his house?”
“When I bought the house, I renovated it, top to bottom. The designer told me a commercial kitchen was an investment. She said the kind of house I have is where large functions are catered.”
Of course he’d have that kind of house. Brand was a billionaire. Still, Bree was a little awestruck all the same.
“I gave my poor designer a pretty hard time about that kitchen. She just kept insisting that someday I’d be really glad I had it. And you know what?”
“What?” Bree breathed.
“She was absolutely right.”
His voice was soft and strong at the same time, the voice of a man who could make someone believe, all over again, even when they knew better, that magic was part of the fabric of life, that miracles happened all the time.
That when you had totally given up, when you had no hope left, life could surprise you all over again with how good it could be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BREE EVANS WAS in his house.
Brand recognized, on the danger scale, the needle was edging toward the top of the red zone.
Because she was so very complex. Adorable. But smart. An astute businesswoman. The daughter of a man who had helped him. A woman whose kiss he could not get out of his head.
He’d confided in her that he’d once lived in a car. No one but his mother knew that about his life. What kind of moment of ridiculous weakness had that been?
Brand watched her race around his kitchen, nearly beside herself with excitement, and it felt as if every ounce of that danger he had invited into his life was worthwhile.
She stopped at the Elvis cookie jar. She took out a cookie and examined it as if she had found a bug.
“Beau’s?” she said.
“He does have a weakness. Despite what Jenn said, I restrict him to one or two a week. He mostly gets dog biscuits, which he only tolerates.”
“When I get caught up, I’ll try making something for him that’s healthier and that he’ll love.” She put the cookie back in the jar, and examined the jar itself. “Somehow I didn’t figure you for an Elvis kind of guy.”
The less she figured out about him, the better. Especially now that he had given her hints. Especially now that she was under his roof. Making herself at home.
No, that wasn’t quite right. She wasn’t making herself at home, she was making it feel like home.
Without even trying. She was making it feel like home even before she tried baking cookies for his dog.
“What exactly would you consider an Elvis kind of guy?” he asked, intrigued despite himself.
“Sleazily oversexed?”
“Elvis?” he said, with pretended hurt. “That’s slanderous. You have enough legal problems without slandering the King.”
“I think e-Us matched me with him once. Complete with the sweaty scarf.” She shuddered delicately.
“Okay, here’s the deal. I said the kitchen was free, but it’s not.
”
“Don’t do this to me,” she moaned.
“No more e-Us. That’s the price.”
“Deal,” she said, way too fast.
He eyed her suspiciously.
“I’ve got my sights set on Kevin.”
“I hope you don’t.”
“I do,” she said and whipped her phone out of her back pocket. “Look. There’s an app that teaches you to speak Klingon.”
He saw she was teasing him. Or he was pretty sure she was teasing him. But she did know about the app.
“I’m going to be way too busy to have a social life,” she declared happily.
Why was he happy, too? What did he care about her social life or lack thereof?
She was dashing around the kitchen again, opening drawers, looking in cupboards. She ran reverent hands over one of the ovens. “A steam oven. I could not have dreamed.”
She opened it up. “You’ve never used this,” she said with faint accusation.
“How do you know?”
“The racks have cardboard on the corners.”
“Oh.”
“Three ovens,” she whispered, looking around. “Have you used any of them? Oh!” she squealed, before he had a chance to answer. “Look at this!”
He came over to see what was causing such excitement. She had changed out of her pajamas, and put her hair up with a band. He liked the shoestring better, not that he wanted her to know he’d noticed. She was wearing snug jeans and a white top.
She was bent over a lower cabinet looking inside it. He could look at that particular sight for a long time, but it made him feel like an oversexed Elvis so he made himself focus on what she was looking at. Something huge and ugly and red was in his cupboard.
“What is that?” he asked, astounded.
“It’s in your kitchen. You don’t know?” She tossed an amused look over her shoulder.
“See that thing over there?” he said, and pointed. “It’s called a microwave. I know that. And the fridge. I’ve used the coffeemaker a couple of times.”
“That explains why it’s so clean in here.”
