Free Heiress Behind the Headlines by Caitlin Crews Page B

over his shoulder at her, her eyes were veiled. She stood by the rough-hewn wood table, running her fingers over the nooks and crannies.
    “I value my privacy,” he said with a shrug. “That means no staff and no deliveries, even if there was any place that delivered out here.” He waited until her eyes rose to meet his. “And as I am not feral, that means that yes, I cook.”
    “The Manhattan glitterati would be so distraught if they had any idea that you were so competent,” she said, moving toward him, a smile flirting with her mouth. “It would destroy whole fantasies about how much work a man like you must be.”
    “But it depends on what you consider onerous,” he said, rummaging through the well-stocked shelves of the whitewashed cupboard above him. “Having thoughts that do not revolve around parties and shopping? Having a purpose in life beyond depleting the family fortune? Is that too much work?”
    “You know that it is,” Larissa said, once again with that thread of laughter woven through her voice.
    She moved to stand next to him, and Jack had the strangest sensation, like some kind of déjà vu. As if she belonged there, standing close to him like this, in a kitchen of all places. In
this
kitchen. As if this was their life. As if they shared something more than that unforgettable, unquenchable fire. Where did
that
come from?
    She frowned down at the items he’d laid out on the counter, wrinkling her fine nose as he pulled dry pasta from a canister in the overhead cupboard. He’d put out a few sausages.
    Tomatoes and basil. A hunk of good cheese and a bulb of garlic.
    She glanced at him then, and he had the oddest feeling that she’d seen it too, that almost-hallucination. That fantasy of a life he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Not really. He wanted Larissa; perhaps he always had. But that was just sex. Explosive, white-hot sex that he’d briefly mistaken for something more emotional during the darkest period of his life. It was only that she was here, he assured himself, in Scatteree Pines. In this house, where no one from his other world was ever allowed to come. That was what made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t—didn’t—want.
    “I’ll chop the garlic,” she offered.
    It was so incongruous. And yet … it was as if she fit. As if that odd feeling was still working its way through him. He told himself it was just the rain, just the storm. Making the very shadows seem meaningful when they were not.
    “I’m not at all sure how I feel about you brandishing a knife in my kitchen,” he said. And she smiled. It wasn’t that fake smile of hers, that mysterious bit of nothing she trotted out for the masses. This smile showed the faintest hint of a dimple in her cheek, and the flash of her teeth. He even saw it in the gleam of gold that warmed the green of her eyes. That was real, he thought, dazed by the punch of it, the way it electrified him.
He’d just seen the real Larissa.
    Something warm moved through him then, and that was when he was sure of it: he should never have invited this woman here. Ever. He should have pretended he hadn’t seen her in that bar, and gone about his business. But he had always had a regrettable weakness where Larissa Whitney was concerned. What was one more bit of proof?
    It was like a dream.
    Larissa chopped garlic and basil, then cut into the plumptomatoes. Olive oil sizzled in a cast-iron pan on the big stove top, and the kitchen seemed to glow with warmth and laughter, as if such things shone down from the walls. As if they had been trapped there over the course of long, happy years, and blossomed at the rich scent of garlic and the leftover summer brashness of the basil.
    Jack whipped things together in a selection of pans with a briskness that spoke of long practice, then finally poured the mixture of ingredients over the hot, fresh pasta. Larissa picked up the pasta bowls without being asked and took them over to the table, as if they’d