STEPHANIE
“That was amazing,” Stephanie said, grinning at Elijah across the table. “A really wonderful dinner.”
He rolled his eyes and smiled. “I’ll pass your compliments along to the real chef,” he said with a light laugh.
“Don’t do that. You had every bit as much to do with this meal as I did, and now you’ll know for next time what to do when the pasta starts clumping.” She got up and carried her plate to the sink.
He followed her. Coming up behind her, he wrapped his arms around her and eased the plate out of her hands. He placed it in the sink and turned her back around to face him, and Stephanie couldn’t help it—she sucked in a breath, and her heart began to beat faster.
“Don’t worry about dishes,” he said. “The housekeeping staff can deal with that tomorrow.”
“I feel bad… I’m not used to having staff.”
“You don’t have anything to feel bad about,” he said. “It’s their job, and they’re well paid to do it. I take care of my people.” He grinned at her, leaning so close that for a moment their foreheads nearly touched, and suddenlyI take care of my peoplesounded like the sexiest thing anybody had ever said out loud. Her blood rushed.
“We don’t want to spend tonight washing dishes,” he said. “Bad enough that you had to come over here and help with the cooking. I’m not going to have you start doing chorestoo. You’re my guest, and that’s not what guests of mine do while they’re at my house.”
She smiled. “All right,” she said, stepping away from the sink. The movement took her out of the circle of his arms, too, which allowed her racing heart to return to a normal rhythm—although she had to admit to herself that there was a part of her that would have liked to stay right where she was.
He moved past her toward the far side of the kitchen. “You should see the rest of the place,” he said. “Can I give you a tour?”
Stephanie swallowed. It had been a while since she had been on a date that had ended up in a man’s house, but she knew this move. It started out with a tour, but the tour ended in the guy’s bedroom. And then, he would turn to her expectantly, everything in his face and his body language communicating that it was her turn to make the next move.
It was a move she wouldn’t make.
Probably.
But she was less sure of herself with Elijah than she had ever been. Somehow, she felt both intensely at ease and incredibly excited. If it hadn’t been for their complex circumstances—circumstances he knew nothing about—she wouldn’t have had any reservations about allowing the night to lead wherever it might.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take a tour.” She could control herself.
He surprised her yet again. The tour didn’t lead to his bedroom. Instead, he stuck to the first floor of the house. He showed her a dining room that looked like it hadn’t been touched in years, a living room with a lot of nice furnishings, and a room he called the screening room, with a massive TV and a lot of recliners facing toward it. They finished up in a room he described as the den, with warm lighting and a fireplace.
“Can we have a fire?” she asked.
He smiled. “Sure, if you want one.”
“You know how to do that yourself?” she teased. “Don’t need to call your fire staff?”
Elijah laughed. “No, fires I can handle,” he said. “Though it’s really just a matter of lighting this log.” It was the easy-light kind, wrapped in a flammable paper, and he held a lighter to it in two places and caused it to catch. Drawing the grate over the fireplace, he sat back, not bothering to get up off the floor, leaning his back against the sofa. After a moment, Stephanie joined him there.
He gazed at the flames. “Can I say something that might sound strange?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I like you like this,” he said. “I wish we’d done this sooner. Come back to my place. Or maybe gone to yours.”
“I knew you were trying to get us behind closed doors,” she chuckled.
“Well, yeah, I was,” he admitted. “But that isn’t what I mean. That’s not the reason I’m glad you came over tonight. It’s just… you seem more relaxed here than you do when we’re out in public. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but you seem like you’re having a better time than when we went to the steakhouse. And a much better time than you were at my father’s product launch.”
“You aren’t misreading it,” she told him. She closed her eyes briefly. How could she explain this to him without giving away the things she couldn’t talk about? “When we go out… sometimes it feels like a performance. It feels like I’m being watched all the time.”
“Because you’re with me,” he murmured. “And Iambeing watched.”
“I guess I wasn’t quite ready to have my picture show up on the internet the day after our first date,” she said.
His voice turned rueful. “I should have warned you something like that could happen. Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking about it. It’s such a regular part of my life that I never do think about it.”
