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“No matter what it is, I don’t care.” Andie looked at him, and all Luke’s anger and frustration melted away at the expression on her face. She looked desolate. She looked heartbroken and fragile with her windblown hair and the beginnings of a sunburn kissing her cheeks. “Why did you follow me here, Luke?”
“My pliers.” Feeble, weak excuse. He knew the real reason he chased after her, but with Jax here, there was no way he was going to try to fix things now. “You took ‘em when you left.”
She eyed him solemnly for a moment, with her full bottom lip caught between her white, straight teeth. “M’kay.” As if she had come to some decision, she nodded before stepping around him and picking his tool up from where she dropped it.
“Here.” She wasn’t looking at him as she held the pliers out to him, and it unsettled Luke for some reason he couldn’t name.
Luke cursed and caught her wrist in his grip when he looked down to take the pliers from her. With her gloves off, he got a good look at the damage she’d done to her hands. “Oh, baby,” he soothed with compassion in his voice. “That must hurt like hell.”
“Don’t.” The tremor in her voice brought his gaze up to meet hers. “Just don’t. You blew your chance to be nice to me.”
Luke knew she was right, but that didn’t change the fact that he felt like he’d just taken a kick to the gut. He lifted his hands in surrender and stepped two paces back before turning to put his pliers in the toolbox on the back of his ATV. One of the hardest things he’d ever done in his life was to get on his own quad and drive away while Jax wrapped his arms around Andie and held her.
* * *
“I’mglad you were here, but did I forget something? I don’t remember us having a meeting set up until next week.” Andie sniffled and pulled back from Jax’s comforting embrace. He looked handsome today, she noted, with the late afternoon sun showcasing his face deliciously.
“Well, my last two appointments cancelled, and I thought I might come out and see if I could maybe pitch in.”
“That’s so nice of you, Jax. Really.” Could the man get any more perfect? “But,” she hedged and gave him a skeptical look, “dressed like that?” Andie looked him over from head to foot. He was wearing jeans, sure, but they were designer and probably cost more than her whole wardrobe. “Look at you. You look like aGQad, not a farmhand.”
He smirked at her. “Wait here.” Then he walked to his car and reached into the open back seat. First thing Jax pulled out was a pair of beat-up Chucks with holes in the toes and then a wad of rolled up T-shirt and denim that looked much more work-friendly than what he was currently wearing.
“I would have changed at the office,” he told her, walking back to where she stood, “but there was the off chance you would wanna finish up early yourself and might be open to dinner with me instead.”
If he had told her he was a shapeshifting alien from Jupiter, she would have been less surprised. He’d been nothing but professional on their previous meetings, and although she had her share of fantasies about him, she hadn’t had a clue he might be interested in return.
“So I came prepared for either option.”
Andie really wanted to see the sexy attorney dressed down, but the siren’s call of an early end to her disastrous workday was too sweet to resist.
“You know what?” She smiled up at him. “Put those back. You won’t be needing them after all.” She was rewarded for her decision by his dazzling and quick smile then, before she could guess his intent, he gave her a quick, smacking kiss. Then he turned and jogged back to his car.
Andie felt her tummy flutter. He was seriously hot. She pressed a hand to still the butterflies that were clamoring around in her stomach then started for the house. “Come on in. I’m going to hop in the shower. Would you like a glass of iced tea or something while you wait?”
“I know where everything is,” he told her, climbing the steps and holding the screen open so she could pass through ahead of him. “You go ahead and get cleaned up. I’ll take care of things here.”
“Great.” She headed in but stopped just as she reached the second floor. “Wait, Jax?” she called, leaning over and peering toward the kitchen. “Where are we going? How should I dress?”
Jax sauntered into view, not from the direction of the kitchen but from the front door, and he looked up at her with that sexy squint at the corners of his eyes again. “Well, there are only two places to eat in town and neither one of them are fancy. Both good food, just not the suit-and-tie kind of places. Plus, I was thinking you’re most likely sore and exhausted, so if it’s all the same to you, I was going to cook. Unless you’d rather go out?”
Andie was flummoxed. She told herself that’s why she said what she did next. “You look like thatandyou can cook?” When the only response she got from Jax was raised eyebrows and a laugh, she felt her cheeks erupt in flames. “Sorry. But dude.” Might as well throw the baby out with the bath water. “Look at you.”
Jax pursed his lips and licked them, slowly, before answering her. Then had to answer her again when she failed to register his first response, because she couldn’t stop fixating on his mouth. “Yeah. I cook. Go shower and I’ll prove it to you.”
His look was challenging and intense and made Andie want to wrap around him like a vine. She refrained, however, mostly because she was woefully aware of her own stench at the moment. She settled for answering with a smartass remark aboutHell’s Kitchenthen took her smelly self to the shower.
“Oh my God.Will you marry me?” Dinner was a feast. A delicious, decadent feast. And Andie was pretty sure that if heaven had a flavor, it would taste like this.
“Sure,” Jax said, stuffing a forkful of angel hair pasta in his mouth. “I’ll book the church for next Sunday.”
The sauce Jax had made was bright and alive with flavors—garlic, basil, and it had a bit of a bite to it from the crushed red pepper he sprinkled in. As she took a delicate sip of the red blend wine that paired with the meal beautifully, she eyed him over her glass. “So, I’m not trying to be sexist, but seriously. This is amazing. How did you get so good?”
He sipped his own wine and then wiped at his lips with one of the cloth napkins he found from God knows where before answering. “In college, since pizza got old after a week, I picked up a cookbook from the library.” He smiled at her and took another sip before continuing. “If I’m being perfectly honest, I loitered in that cookbook aisle for a good hour waiting on a girl to see I was hungry and come rescue me. Can’t begin to tell you how crushed I was when that didn’t happen.”
“Oh, I bet.” Andie laughed, fully enjoying him and his story.
“Alas, no beautiful undergrad with culinary skills saved me, so I grabbed a book that had lots of pictures and took my starving ass to the grocery store.” The sun was setting, and the dining room table was awash in the red-golden rays streaming in from the window. As Andie savored every bite of the food and sip of the wine, she also savored the company of her dining companion.
