“No, don’t be embarrassed. We did this together,” she told him. “It’s a group project. Do you have a serving bowl for this spaghetti?”
“Honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea,” he admitted.
“Yeah, youreallydon’t cook, do you?”
“I have a personal chef,” he admitted.
She laughed. “I should have known you would have something like that. Tonight’s his night off?”
“Well, I kind of gave him the night off. I wanted to do this,” he said. “I wanted to make you dinner. I thought I would be able to manage it. I overestimated myself, clearly, but… I just didn’t think it would be as special if you got here and found a stranger cooking. If it’s going to be like that, we might as well just go out to a restaurant, right?” He shrugged. “I guess I was being silly.”
Stephanie had stopped what she was doing and turned to face him. There was a softness in her eyes now that he had never seen there before.
“You weren’t being silly,” she said quietly. “It was a really nice thing to do, and it means a lot. I’d much rather have something you tried to make for me, even if it isn’t exactly gourmet cooking. This was thoughtful.” She grinned. “And I do like that we ended up working together on it. Should we set the table?”
“I need to put the salad together,” he remembered. “I can handle that on my own, though.”
“Let me do the table, then.” She started opening cabinets. “Ah.” She’d found the plates, and now she pulled them down and set one before each of the chairs that faced each other at the table. Then she went on the hunt for silverware.
Elijah pulled the lettuce, onions, carrots, and tomatoes out of the refrigerator and threw them together in the big salad bowl Ernesto had left there for him to find. This really had been set up perfectly for him, making it nearly impossible for him to strugglewith it in any way. He’d managed, though. He rolled his eyes at himself as he carried the bowl to the table and put serving tongs in it. “All right,” he told Stephanie. “Dinner is served.”
She sat down. Then she jumped up again. “Oh, drinks!”
“No, that much I can handle.” He produced a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. “I may not be a Michelin-star chef, but I can open a bottle with the best of them.”
She grinned. “It’s good to know that you have at least one skill in the kitchen.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m great at this.” He uncorked the wine, stood up, grabbed a couple of glasses, and brought them back. He poured a little bit into each and handed one across the table.
She took it and raised it. “To teamwork?”
“To teamwork.” He clinked his glass against hers and took a sip. “And to learning new things from each other.”
“Hear, hear.”
“So maybe next time we will go out, though,” he said, digging into the spaghetti. “This didn’t exactly go as planned, even though we did manage to save the situation.”
“Maybe next time you come to my place and I’ll cook for you,” she countered easily, as if the idea of him coming to her place hadn’t been a bone of contention right from the very start. As if she wasn’t even thinking about things in those terms.
And maybe she wasn’t. Maybe they’d come far enough in their relationship to be more relaxed with each other now. Maybe she would feel comfortable bringing him home. She had felt comfortable enough to come here. And come to think of it, hehadn’t intended to put those kinds of moves on her when he’d brought her here. It really had just been about the food for him. About the chance to cook for her.
Now he was thinking about it, though. How had she taken it when he had asked her to come over? What had she thought it might mean?
She had agreed to come, whatever she had thought. It hadn’t been enough to compel her to stay away.
This is turning into a real relationship. A serious relationship. If things keep going the way they have been… who knows. We might even end up putting a label on it.
The strangest thing of all was the fact that that idea didn’t scare him.
In fact, it kind of appealed to him.
What would it be like to be able to call Stephanie his girlfriend? It was a difficult thing to imagine. He hadn’t been tied down in a very long time.
But with someone like her, someone who made him laugh even when everything was going wrong…
Well, suddenly the idea of being tied down didn’t sound so bad anymore.
CHAPTER 15
