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“Your restraint is duly noted,” I mumble. “Also, appetizers sound amazing. I’m famished. I don’t think I’ve eaten today.”

“Say less. Stepan, book it.”

Stepan pulls out, tires squealing. We go roaring over the bridge and up the FDR.

The restaurant is on the twelfth floor of a building on Central Park South, and there’s no sign on the street, just a doorman who says “Mr. Makov” and holds an elevator.

Upstairs, a maître d’ in a white jacket walks us past the main dining floor and through a doorway into a private room. One table and two chairs, and a wall of window with the park below it, black in the middle and strung with lights around all four edges like somebody outlined it in gold.

I stop in the doorway.

“Is this whole thing just ours?”

Kane pauses. “Would you prefer to have a lot of strangers watch us eat and pretend they aren’t checking you out?”

Again with the blush. Dammit.

“It just feels like a lot for the two of us,” I explain. “That’s all.”

“You’ve been on your feet for sixteen hours,” Kane replies. “I thought you might want to sit someplace quiet where nobody can ask you for anything.”

When you put it like that, it does sound nice.

Kane smirks, because he knows he’s got me there.

He stops the maître d’ from taking off my coat so he can do it himself. He hands it off, then lingers for another moment behind me so he can graze his palms down my arms.

“You look beautiful,” he murmurs in my ear.

Then, once he’s induced the goosebumps he was aiming to cause, he sweeps away and pulls out my chair for me.

I settle down, then a server approaches and hands me a menu. It’s a fourteen-course tasting menu and enough foie gras, wagyu, and caviar to make my cardiologist need a cardiologist of his own. There’s also not a dollar sign in sight.

In a better world, that would mean this was all free.

Alas, nothing in this world comes free, ever.

“Order whatever you’d like,” Kane says. “We don’t have to stick to the menu.”

“Are you ordering for me?”

“No.”

“Because a lot of men in movies do that.”

“Do you want me to?”

“God, no.”

“Then why would I?” He sets his own menu down without looking at it. “Tell me what you want and it happens. That’s how tonight works.”

I smile, then hide my face behind my menu so he can’t see just how humiliatingly red my cheeks are getting.

I decide to just do the tasting menu as is. The server comes to unfold my napkin and lay it in my lap for me, but I reach to do it so he doesn’t have to.

Kane catches my wrist.

“What?” I ask.