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“I thought commercial air travel was restricted?”
Thank god. She’s just being practical.
“It doesn’t really matter if commercial air travel is restricted. I have my own plane.”
She sticks her tongue out at me.
“Of course you do. And I guess you have your own sailboat too, since you told John to tell his dad you would go sailing after the pandemic.”
I grin back at her.
“I do. It sleeps six. Do you like boats?”
She cocks her head to the side.
“I don’t know, I’ve never been on one. It’s funny, we’ve spent a lot of time exploring each other sexually but we don’t really know that much about each other outside of the bedroom or outside of the restaurant business.”
“Well, that’s easy to fix. Let’s get some sleep and we can get to know each other better over breakfast. I admit, I bought fresh blueberries hoping you would be here to make me muffins in the morning.”
She smiles sweetly at me.
“Oh really? Do you have lemons? Lemon-blueberry muffins are a specialty of mine. The lemons cut some of the sweetness.”
“I will make sure there are lemons here. You know, Whitney, I wasn’t kidding when I said I need a consultant. I really could use your help coming up with some new shake flavors for my summer menu. Would you consider it? I’d pay you a generous fee.”
She blushes and takes a deep breath.
“Thanks Pete, I’ll think about it. I’d want to make sure I could come up with recipes that work for your type of restaurant. I imagine there can’t be too many ingredients and it can’t be too complicated because you need to maintain your speedy service. I’ll see what I can come up with while you’re out of town.”
That’s the most I can hope for right now, and I pull her curvy form closer, nuzzling into the softness of her skin.
11
Whitney
My internal clock wakes me up at 4:30 a.m. It’s dark and for a minute I forget where I am. Then the weight of a heavy arm on my hips reminds me that last night was not a dream. He’s huge and muscular against my back, and I smile to myself for a moment. What bliss.
My eyes stray to the large windows by the bed, and I gasp slightly. I’ve never seen New York at this time of the morning from way up here. It’s beautiful. The panoramic windows of the bedroom provide a view of the moon’s reflection on the Hudson that reminds me of the Seine and my time in Paris. While New York is never completely dark, this pre-dawn time is as shadowy as it gets. It’s something I never really had time to appreciate before.
I snuggle back in and hope Peter’s smooth rhythmic breathing will put me back to sleep for a couple of hours. I want to take in the warmth of his body beside me and drink in his clean, spicy scent. His plane doesn’t leave until noon, so I have plenty of time to make muffins. My mind starts racing. I feel guilty about how Peter and I met and all the money he’s paid me. I feel guilty about lying to my parents. The thoughts are stormy, and I realize I won’t get any more sleep like this. I slide out of the bed, trying not to wake Peter.
I don’t want to start banging around in the kitchen just yet, so I head to the library to grab a book. As a baker, I’m highly attuned to smells and all the leather bound tomes on the shelves give this room a special, old feeling among all the modern gloss and shine of the rest of the penthouse. I’m not sure if the library or the kitchen is my favorite room in the house.
I find he has an original copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, one of my favorites. But then I put the book down, because it’s one of the ones I like to read around the holidays. There is Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, which are tempting, but I have my mind set on something a bit more adventurous. I spot my selection with embossed tentacles snaking around the spine: it’s Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is one of my dad’s favorites. We read it together at bedtime on a couple of occasions throughout my childhood.
Forty pages into Captain Nemo’s adventures, I hear the elevator ping. I panic, wondering if it’s too late to make muffins. I dash to the stairs in time to see the front desk clerk silently crossing the hall entryway with a bag of lemons.
“Good morning,” I quietly greet him from the top of the stairs, making him jump in the darkness.
“Good morning, Miss Porter. I hope I didn’t wake you. Mr. Coleman left instructions to bring these up as soon as they arrived.”
