Her gaze deliberately dropped toward the cutlery in his hands. The fork and knife were trapped in such a tight grip that his knuckles had turned pale.
Slowly, her eyes lifted back to his face.
“I can see it very clearly,” she muttered under her breath.
Elias pretended not to hear her.
He simply picked up his glass and took a slow sip of water while carefully avoiding her eyes, which only made her amusement deepen.
Amara reached across the table for her phone. Since she was still eating, she didn’t lift it to her ear. Instead, she tapped the speaker button and left it on the table beside her plate.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” Jasper’s voice came through immediately.
He sounded like he was outside somewhere. Faint traffic noises echoed in the background along with slightly hurried breathing.
“You didn’t come home last night,” he continued quickly. “I was actually looking forward to taking you to dinner at your favorite place across the street. You know, that charcoal restaurant you love.”
He let out a dramatic sigh.
“But you weren’t there, so I ended up eating alone.” His tone turned pitiful. “Honestly, it was depressing.”
A faint smile appeared on Amara’s lips.
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Do you want me to come pick you up?” Jasper asked immediately. “Where are you? I’ll come get you, and we can go there tonight instead.”
The moment those words left Jasper’s mouth, Elias’s eyes slowly shifted from the phone toward Amara.
His expression darkened visibly.
His gaze lingered on the small smile resting on her lips while she spoke to Jasper, and something sharp flickered behind his eyes as if he wanted to punch a hole through that phone, grab Jasper by the neck, and wring him out like a chicken.
“Making plans to pick her up again…” he muttered under his breath, jaw tight. “Should just make a list of every damn place she likes and take her all over the country like he’s got nothing better to do than be her personal driver.”
His words were low, but Amara was sitting close enough that she heard every single one of them.
A faint smile tugged at her lips, but she quickly lowered her gaze to her plate, hiding it as she cut into her food.
“It’s fine, Jasper. I’ll come back on my own. You don’t need to pick me up.”
A brief pause followed as she shifted slightly in her seat.
“And yeah, that restaurant sounds good. We can go there tonight.”
“Great,” Jasper replied immediately. “I’ll wait for you.”
Amara tapped the screen to hang up the phone and set it beside her plate.
When she lifted her gaze again, Elias was still staring at the phone. But the second his eyes met hers, everything on his face shifted.
The anger, the irritation—gone in an instant. He forced a smile. Quick. Stiff. Stretched just enough to look real, but failing.
Amara didn’t react.
She simply lowered her gaze and continued eating, the faint smile she had been hiding vanishing behind the fork she lifted to her lips.
