Free The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

sauce?” He pointed to the tall bottle in her hand with a squid on the label.
    “Oh!” She set it down on the counter and awkwardly wiped her hands on the wet dish towel. After a tense moment, she whirled past him to open the cupboard next to him. “I made coffee already.” She stretched onto her tiptoes to grab the mug from the middle shelf, and the hem of her shirt snuck upward, revealing the perfectly alluring cheeks of her ass and her white underwear.
    His dick dug at his fly, reminding him he’d skipped an important part of his morning routine two days in a row now. After the landscaping incident yesterday, it made a strange sort of sense that Esme could cause him to have a concussion, an overwhelmed sense of smell, and blue balls at the same time. The wide neckline of her shirt slipped to the side and revealed one of her graceful shoulders, and he drew in a slow, fish-sauce-laden breath. Blue and getting bluer.
    She snatched a mug down, poured coffee in, and held it out, smiling at him over the rim, green eyes sparkling. Sexy sleep-tousled dark brown hair with a widow’s peak crowned a heart-shaped face. “For you.”
    He accepted the mug and took a sip.
    “Good?” she asked.
    He nodded, but he actually had no idea what it tasted like. His senses were overloaded. By the burning fish sauce. And her. Seafoam, he decided. Not the flavor of the coffee, but the shade of her eyes. Seafoam green.
    Her smile widened, but after a moment she grew flustered and tucked the hair behind her ear. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “Like what?”
    “So long like that,” she said.
    “Oh.” He made himself look away and took another drink of coffee to give himself something to do. He still didn’t taste it. “I forget it makes people uncomfortable sometimes.” He didn’t have whatever sense it was most people possessed that told them when the eye contact was enough, so if he wasn’t paying attention he easily looked too long— or not at all. He cleared his throat. “I’ll try to do better.”
    She looked like she was going to say something, but she spun around and busied herself ladling soup into a bowl of thick rice noodles, which his mom had made by hand—
bánh canh
— with scallions, dry fried onions, shrimp, and thin strips of pork. Once she finished, she carried the bowl to the kitchen table and set it down next to a plate of sliced mango and other assorted fruits. Pulling out a chair, she said, “For you.”
    He approached the table and stared down at the food. “I don’t eat fruit.” And it was a workday. The routine was: inhale protein bar, drink a cup of water, run to work, shower in the work locker room, change, and be in his office in less than an hour. But today he had to drive Esme to the restaurant first, and now there was all this food someone had to eat. To top it all off, he really loathed being waited upon.
    Dammit.
    He had to deal with this for three more months. Three whole months of her in his life, folding his Kleenex and causing blue balls, confusion, concussions, and ... fruit.
    “Fruit is good for you,” she insisted.
    “I take a multivitamin.”
    “Fruit is better than a vitamin.”
    He shook his head and sat down when all he wanted to do was run out the door and get his day started. He should win an award for demonstrating this amount of self-control. A sainthood. Even better, a
knight
hood.
    Sir Khai, CPA.
    She took the chair across from him and put a cup of water on the table even though there was another one sitting on the counter, but instead of sitting in a regular fashion, she curled one leg underneath herself and hugged the other to her chest, waiting.
    “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.
    “I already ate.”
    So ... she was just going to watch him eat, then? And people called
him
strange.
    He had a spoonful of chewy noodles and savory soup. It was saltier than normal since she’d added more fish sauce, but it was good. He wasn’t in the habit of