After The Storm

by K. M. Scott

  No matter how much she stretched, she couldn’t reach the top shelf and the boxes of pasta remained just an inch away from the tips of her fingers. After a few moments of frustration, she looked back at him and asked, “Can you get this for me? I’m about a millimeter too short for your friend’s cabinets.”

  Happy to be of assistance, Roman walked over and easily grabbed a box of linguini. He’d never liked that particular pasta, though, and grimaced at the thought of eating it that night.

  Kate stood looking up as he held the pasta box in the air. Her body pressed against his as he stood there in front of the cabinet loving the feel of her next to him.

  “Not a fan of linguini? I think right next to where that was there’s a box of angel hair.”

  He replaced the box on the shelf and pulled out the second box of pasta. “Yeah, let’s go with the angel hair.”

  Handing it to her, he remained frozen to where he stood, looking down at her smiling at him as she said, “Okay, angel hair it is. But I’m going to have to move out of this corner if we actually want the dinner cooked.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, closing the cabinet door and then stepping back out of her way.

  “Not really a kitchen kind of person, huh?” she said, chuckling at him.

  He couldn’t disagree. At least not at the moment since he appeared to misunderstand the basics of spatial relations and conversation. He didn’t usually act so damn awkward, but then again, it wasn’t every day that a beautiful woman made dinner for him.

  It had been long enough that he couldn’t remember the last time a woman made the effort to do anything for him. More accurately, when he allowed a woman to do anything for him. Keeping people at arm’s length made gestures like the one Kate was about to make rare.

  And that was no one’s fault but his own.

  Kate began preparing the ingredients for the meal, starting with the garlic. After mincing four cloves, which filled the room with its fragrant odor, she turned on the gas burner. Then she drizzled virgin olive oil and tossed two spoonfuls of butter into a large frying pan.

  Stirring the mixture in the pan, she asked, “Can you look up in the cabinet in the corner for white wine? It’s there, but I forgot to take it out.”

  He walked around the island and searched for what she needed. He found the white wine and turned to hand it to her just as she said, “Oh, I need red pepper flakes too. I’ve got the salt and pepper, but I need the red kind too.”

  “Got it. Red pepper flakes,” he mumbled as he pushed aside seasoning bottles on the bottom shelf of the cabinet.

  Once he found them among the dozens of possibilities in herbs and spices, some he’d never even heard of, he closed the cabinet door and asked, “Anything else?”

  “Nope. Just the red pepper flakes. I just need a little bit, but it’s an important part of the recipe. I really adds that special touch to it.”

  Kate stood in front of the burner stirring the oil, butter, and garlic together in the pan, so he leaned over her and placed the bottle of red pepper next to the stove. She smiled at him and returned her attention to cooking, but he remained behind her just watching and enjoying the delicious scent of the meal as it filled the air.

  After a minute, she looked back at him and smiled again. “Is something wrong? Why are you standing back there? Come around and sit on the other side of the island so we can talk like normal people do in the kitchen.”

  Is that what normal people did? He honestly didn’t know anymore. He’d been on his own for so long that the kitchen was now merely the room that contained food of some sort and appliances to heat it up. Even at the estate he strove to be alone as much as possible, including meals.

  Not that he’d found a lot of success in that recently.

  Taking his seat again across from where she stood cooking, he watched her as she added the shrimp to the garlic mixture and stirred them around the pan for a few seconds before disappearing from sight to search the cabinet below. She popped back up a moment later with a large pan and filled it with water before putting it onto the burner to boil.

  “Do me a favor and open the box of angel hair, okay?”

  He did as she asked and handed it to her. “Here you go.”

  Twisting her face, she studied him for a second before saying, “You look like a big pasta eater. A man your size needs a lot of food, I’m guessing. I think I’ll do the whole box.”

  “What are you going to eat?” he joked.

  Her face lit up with a smile. “I’ll keep a few strands for myself. So since we’re to the point where we can kid with one another, why don’t you tell me something about yourself, just Roman?” she asked, resurrecting the nickname she’d given him back at the fleabag motel when he wouldn’t tell her his full name.

  Avoiding her gaze, he quietly said what he believed to be the truth. “There’s nothing to tell. I was a Ranger—am a Ranger—and now I work for Project Artemis watching women make shrimp scampi.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “I knew there was a sense of humor underneath all that seriousness, but there’s got to be more to you than your job for the past decade or so. What were you like as a kid? I bet you were all into sports and stuff like that, weren’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Not so much. Just football and baseball.”

  His answer made her stop stirring. “Not much? That’s two of the biggest sports. Did you play both in high school?”

  “Yeah.”

  The water in the pot began boiling, so she poured the angel hair into the bubbling water. “Yeah. So you played two huge sports in high school, which probably took up most of the school year. But you didn’t play much sports. I don’t get you, Roman. You don’t have to be so humble all the time. You were probably a BMOC and didn’t even know it.”

  “BMOC?” he asked, repeating the letters she’d just said. “What’s that?”

  As she turned off the heat on the skillet, she explained, “It means big man on campus. BMOC. I guess most people would say you were a BFD—a big fucking deal. Either way, I’m guessing it was a case of the girls wanting to be with you and the guys wanting to be like you.”

  She had no idea how wrong her assessment of his high school days was. True, he had shined in sports and those years weren’t filled with teenage angst and misery like so many people’s were. But that was mainly because he’d kept to himself most of the time.

  Kate waved the spatula in the air, as if she’d read his mind and didn’t believe he hadn’t been a BFD or a BMOC back then. “Let me guess. You don’t think you were, but if I met people you went to high school with, they’d treat you like some kind of minor royalty if they saw you again.”

  “You done?”

  The smile faded from her face. “I wasn’t trying to make fun of you or anything, Roman. I just wondered if you were a superstar back then.”

  She turned her attention to the food and turned off the burner under the pasta pan. Taking a spoonful of pasta water, she dumped it into the skillet with the shrimp and then drained the angel hair. A minute later, he had a plate of shrimp scampi with angel hair pasta and a glass of white wine in front of him.

  “Dinner is served,” she said, forcing a smile.

  Roman didn’t want to cut off the conversation like he did. He never meant to stop things like that. He just always did. All that time alone had made him pretty bad at interacting with others.

  He took a bite of the meal she’d made and couldn’t believe how incredible it tasted. With only a few items, she’d whipped up a shrimp scampi better than any he could ever remember having.

  “This is delicious, Kate. You outdid yourself with this.”

  She beamed at his compliment. “It’s nothing. Well, it’s my world famous shrimp scampi, but I’m trying to follow your example and being humble.”

  Raising his glass, Roman made a toast to this woman. In the short time they’d been around each other, she’d injured him, nearly driven him crazy, and made him want more
for the first time with a client.

  “To Kate and her meal—both incredible.”

  They clinked their wine glasses together and each took a drink. Both of them fell quiet and focused on eating for the rest of the meal, but Roman wanted to know more about her now.

  “Since you know all about me, tell me about you, Kate Sheridan,” he said as he pushed the empty plate away from him.

  She finished the last of her meal and picked up both their plates. “Me? I’m just Kate.”

  He didn’t believe for a second she was just anything. Since he hadn’t felt this way about anyone in years, he knew she had something great about her.

  As she rinsed the dishes at the sink, he said, “Turnabout is fair play. Tell me about you.”

  Kate took her time and turned around slowly after almost a minute. “I moved to New Orleans when I was thirteen, and I graduated high school wanting to be a lawyer. But as so many of us can say, I got sidetracked by a boyfriend during college. I can’t even remember his name now. How sad is that?”

  While he’d never let himself get sidetracked by his feelings before, Roman found it charming to think that Kate had thought she was so in love that she gave up going to law school. It made her seem softer in some way.

  “I wouldn’t say it’s sad. You were in love.”

  She quickly protested that idea. Shaking her head, she said, “I wasn’t in love. If anything, I let my hormones get the best of me. Not my finest hour.”

  “So this man of your dreams didn’t pan out. What happened after that?”

  “I dropped out of college because I had gotten so far behind in my classes. After a year or so, I knew I couldn’t just mope around, so I went back to school to be a paralegal. I got my associate’s degree a year later, and Jonas Flynn hired me right out of school. That was the only job I’d ever had as a legal assistant. And now, I’m on the run from the cops and making shrimp scampi for the man whose job it is to protect me.”

  “So even though you got distracted, you ended up doing what you wanted after all. I can’t think of anything more Kate than that.”

  Blushing from his compliment, she lowered her head and pushed the spatula around on the counter before turning to toss it in the sink. Roman hadn’t seen this shy side of her before. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking there was a lot to Kate he hadn’t experienced yet.

  And he wanted to see those other sides more than he knew he should.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dinner had gone over well, as she knew it would since she’d made her favorite recipe, so Kate assumed they’d continue their conversation after she got the kitchen cleaned up. She knew she’d thought wrong, though, as she turned around after washing the last dish and saw an empty chair where Roman had been sitting at the island just minutes before.

  Discouraged, she wondered if she had said something wrong again. It seemed like she was always doing or saying something that made him back away. Just when she thought they were past the point where whatever about her that made him uncomfortable bothered him, he turned into a ghost once again.

  Maybe he didn’t feel like she did. The thought had crossed her mind. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for someone like him who helped women in need as a job to have a hard and fast rule about getting involved with a client. It probably made sense for him to keep every woman he worked with at arm’s length. How effective could he be at protecting someone if he had feelings for her?

  Kate slumped against the kitchen island and wondered if she should just be honest with him. She quickly dismissed that idea. The mere thought of trying to have that conversation—trying to tell him that even though she knew they were complete opposites that she had developed feelings for him—just the thought of it made her cringe.

  Never in her life had she heard or seen that kind of honest admission of how someone felt turn out successfully. Only in the movies and in books did that happen. In real life, you told someone you had feelings for them and they more often than not sat with a forced smile as they mentally scrambled to find a gentle way to let you down easy. While she’d never herself admitted she had feelings to a man before he did, she’d witnessed enough emotional car crashes with girlfriends to know a session of true confession wasn’t what she wanted to do with Roman.

  Even if the image of him staring at her with his mouth agape as she told him how she felt made her think it might all be worthwhile just to see him like that.

  But no, that’s not the kind of woman she was. Independent, yes. Courageous in the face of people after her, maybe. Emotionally brave, though? No way.

  She knew her limits, and bearing her soul to a man who routinely turned away whenever she got close was at least three steps past her hard line. Kate had no illusions about the kind of men she found attractive.

  Tough, quiet, even sullen, they tended to be the brooding kind of guys other women ran away from like they were on fire, and for good reason. Those men required a strong woman who didn’t need to be fawned over day and night. They never failed to be there when you needed them, but they weren’t exactly sweetness and light, and they rarely remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

  Roman was exactly the type of man she’d always wanted. Looking around the living room and not seeing him anywhere in sight, she couldn’t help but think that every time anyone had ever said to her to be careful what she wished for in a man, they’d been more right than they could ever know.

  Pushing the idea of actually telling him how she felt about him out of her mind, she resigned herself to continuing dropping subtle hints and hoping he reciprocated at some point. It wasn’t brave or brash, but it was her style and she couldn’t change it for him or anyone else.

  No matter how much she wished she could.

  Kate looked around at Butcher’s home and shrugged. “Another night at home alone. Oh well. At least I know the terrain of that landscape.”

  She wasn’t tired, but still she headed for the bedroom she’d claimed earlier in the day. At least if she spent her time in there it didn’t feel like she was constantly chasing after Roman trying to get him to speak to her. That’s not how she wanted to spend her night.

  Instead, she settled into bed and prepared to watch back-to-back episodes of Dateline. She’d never really been a huge fan of television shows devoted to solving mysteries of lost people or murderous boyfriends or girlfriends, but recent events in her life now made them more interesting. She just hoped she didn’t end up as the subject of one of them someday.

  The first episode involved an ungrateful niece who had slowly poisoned her uncle in order to receive his estate worth nearly half a million dollars and a life insurance policy of over two hundred thousand dollars. After almost an hour of wishing the awful woman dead for her horrid behavior, Kate sat back on the pillows and watched as they sent her to prison for the rest of her life.

  Not exactly cheery nighttime TV but at least she could be sure others in the world were going through worse than her.

  The next episode focused on that famous child who had gone missing in Portugal a few years back. Still to that day, no one had ever found her body or any trace of her anywhere on Earth. After fifteen minutes of that, Kate changed the channel. An hour of that story would make her want to throw herself into Lake Pontchartrain.

  Glancing over at the clock on the nightstand, she saw in big red numbers it was way too early to go to bed. Nine o’clock was a fine time for farmers to go to sleep but not her, especially since she didn’t feel tired.

  But what else could she do? She had no idea where Roman had hidden himself, and leaving the house didn’t seem like a good idea since she had no idea if the people who may be after her had figured out where she was yet.

  Resigned to an early night, she slid under the covers and pulled them up over her head as she mumbled, “Guess it’s time for sleep, Farmer Kate.”

  “Let go of me! Let go!” she screamed, desperately trying to pry her arm free from the man’s hold.

  She sa
t bolt upright in bed and searched the dimly lit room for anyone near her. She saw no one. The sound of her heartbeat pounded in her ears, making it impossible to hear anything else. Her mouth was parched, so dry that she couldn’t imagine how she screamed at all. Licking her lips, she tried to moisten them, but nearly panting in terror didn’t help much to fix the problem.

  Had she screamed? Or was that all just a nightmare?

  A very vivid nightmare of a man grabbing her while she slept in that very bed she sat in now.

  As she struggled to separate reality from her dreams, Roman flung open the door and ran in, stopping dead right in front of the bed. His head swiveled left and then right as if he was searching for something, and Kate noticed he wore a different pair of pants and a shirt she hadn’t seen on him before that moment.

  Had he gone out shopping when he disappeared from the kitchen?

  Finally, he said, “I heard you scream. What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said shaking her head in disbelief. It had all felt so real. “I guess I had a nightmare.”

  At hearing there wasn’t some murderous killer there in her bedroom, Roman’s shoulders sagged. If she didn’t know better, she would have said he looked disappointed.

  “I thought something happened to you,” he said, taking a step back toward the door.

  “No. Sorry. I guess it was just a nightmare.”

  He stood there staring at her for a few moments before turning toward the door. “Okay, good night,” he mumbled gruffly.

  But she didn’t want to be by herself in that room for the rest of the night. She wanted someone next to her so if she had another nightmare she wouldn’t wake up terrified and alone.

  Just as he opened the door, she said, “Don’t go. Stay with me?”

  It came out as a question because she truly didn’t know if he’d say yes. For as much as he said it was his job to protect her, he seemed to only want to do it from a distance. Staying with her all night would shrink that distance he kept between them to almost nothing.