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“So’s this. Try it.”
He wrinkled his nose and dipped his fork into the colorful curry. As he took a bite, I watched him carefully, then grinned when his shocked gaze caught mine.
“Good, isn’t it?”
“Very,” he stated, his surprise evident in his tone.
“I should probably be offended, but I’ll hold off on the insult to my cooking skills.”
A snicker escaped him, but he didn’t deny he’d expected it to be shit. It wasn’t the prettiest meal in the world, but it was damn tasty.
“I used to eat this a lot when I was in culinary school,” I admitted as I took a bite and remembered that time with some nostalgia. “I was out in Poughkeepsie, doing my Associate’s, and it was the first time I’d been away from home. I was scraping by, but I refused to live off ramen.”
“How come you just got your Associate’s?”
“I should have stayed on for my Bachelor’s but…” I pulled a face.
“What?”
“It wasn’t where my heart was.”
“But you love cooking,” he replied, frowning even as he hummed his pleasure after taking another bite of his meal.
“I do. But I like this. Cooking for us. When it’s in a professional kitchen, it’s totally different. I like the creative process but when you’re working as a chef, you make like four new menus a year and the rest is just maintaining standards as you serve the same-old dishes.” I shrugged. “It was boring.”
“Didn’t you feel like that at the tea room?”
I shook my head, wondering how in the same evening we’d gone from talk of conspiracies and murder, to my time at college.
Christ, being married to a man in the Irish Mob certainly changed your conversational skills.
“No. When I was there, there were staples that I had to make every day, but I could create different cakes, whatever was seasonal or whatever I just wanted to eat myself that day. If I wanted to experiment, I could. I loved that side of it.
“But when Mom died and I had to start balancing things between the front of house and the kitchen, that’s when I didn’t like it.”
“Why didn’t you sell when we first offered for it, Aoife?” he asked me quietly, tilting his head to the side in that way of his that made the light shine in his ice-blue eyes.
God, he was handsome.
And he was mine.
Before the shitty visit with my dad, my doctor had visited and I’d been given the all clear. Tonight we were going to reaffirm who belonged to who too.
I couldn’t fucking wait.
My day might have started out shitty, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be ending that way.
Clearing my throat, I admitted, “I wanted to, but I felt like I’d be letting Mom down. It was her dream, and if I’d sold out…” I winced. “After her accident, things were tough. She was in the ICU for over a week, and the bills were just insane. I had a lot of debt, and my dad found out and paid things off for me.” That was one of the reasons why my mind had veered down a sharp curve this afternoon. Was it blood money? “When he did that, it gave me freedom in one sense, but it also tied me to the place even more. Every time Acuig offered to buy it, I dug my heels in. Especially because I knew what you were going to do.”
“And what was that?” he inquired, brows high.
“Knock it down, build some fancy condo like the one we’re eating in, make it so the locals can’t live in the area but pumped up city boys can.”
He winced. “It’s about time the area was gentrified.”
I snorted out a laugh. “Finn, pull someone else’s leg.”
“I’ll pull something,” he mock-threatened, making me grin at him when he winked.
