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She could like this man.
Don’t go there, Olivia. Don’t even think about it.
‘Okay. An omelette sounds great.’ Because she actually was starving, now that she thought about it, and...well, she didn’t want to go back and stare at the ceiling all night by herself, wondering just what was going on between her and Ben Chatsfield, if anything.
* * *
Back in her suite—or really, Ben’s suite—he made himself at home in the kitchen. He’d put on a pair of faded jeans over his boxers and a worn grey T-shirt to cover up that amazing chest, and he looked, Olivia decided after some leisurely perusal, just as sexy in those beat-up clothes as he had in a tailored suit. Maybe more.
She slid onto a high bar stool and watched as he cracked six eggs into a bowl one-handed and then whisked them to a froth.
‘So how did you come to be a chef?’ she asked. He’d retrieved a bell pepper and some mushrooms from the fridge—which now that she’d had a peek inside she could see was well stocked—and started dicing them with lightning-quick precision.
‘I fell into it.’
‘You mean you weren’t whipping up cupcakes as a boy?’ she teased, and he gave her a narrowed look.
‘I’m a chef, not a baker.’
‘Same difference, right?’
‘No.’ He took an omelette pan from under the stove and tossed a knob of butter into it.
‘All right, so how did you fall into it?’
He hesitated, and Olivia thought at first it was because he was concentrating on the omelette, but then she realised Ben Chatsfield, owner of seven restaurants, could probably make an omelette in his sleep. He was hesitating because he was wondering how much to tell her. How much to share. And didn’t she know how that felt. Her whole life was a closed book. She’d much rather regale people with a performance than the deficiencies of her own character, deficiencies she’d come face to face with when she’d been only twelve and her mother had been dying. Her mother who had needed her, and Olivia hadn’t been able to step up to the plate. At all.
‘I left home when I was eighteen,’ he finally said, his back to her as he poured the egg mixture into the pan. ‘Ended up in the south of France, working in the kitchen of a restaurant. The sauté chef was off sick one night and I stepped in. I took it from there.’
‘From temporary sauté chef to world famous restaurateur? That was definitely the abridged version.’
He glanced over his shoulder, a smile glinting in his eyes if not quite curving his mouth. ‘I suppose it was.’
‘Why did you leave home?’
He turned back to the eggs, and Olivia waited. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked the question; maybe that wasn’t the kind of relationship, if any, that they had. But she wanted to know. She was curious about this man. Something had shifted between them tonight, from the support he’d given her at the premiere, to the kiss, to chatting over eggs. Something she liked.
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he finally said, and to her chagrin Olivia heard the implacable note in his voice that signalled loud and clear he did not want to talk about it any more.
‘So why did you push me away tonight?’ she asked instead. Better to clear the air about that one, and she’d already endured enough awkwardness not to care if there was much more. Well, not to care too much. Hopefully.
Ben added the diced vegetables to the omelette and flipped it neatly. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone with that one.’
‘I’m a woman. I don’t take rejection lightly.’
‘It was hardly rejection.’
‘Felt like it at the time.’ She kept her voice light, slotting into her insouciant ingénue performance with ease. This was a role she knew how to play.
His mouth tightened, his eyes flashing dark. ‘I told you before, I don’t like the pretending element to this whole thing. It feels too much like lying. And it got to me when you kissed me in front of the crowds, just because some reporter asked you to.’
That wasn’t, Olivia knew, the real reason she’d kissed him. She’d kissed him because she’d been thinking about it all night, because he’d held her hand when she’d needed him to and believed in her when it felt like no one else did. But she was not about to tell Ben Chatsfield all, or any, of that. ‘That kiss didn’t feel all that fake to me, Ben,’ she told him with a flirty smile.
‘I can hardly deny we’re attracted to each other.’ Hardly a compliment, yet she still felt a thrill at the simply stated fact. He slid half the omelette onto a plate which he put in front of her.
