Faking It(45)

I haven’t been entirely honest here. The one thing I could do besides fight was cook. Maybe that’s selling myself a little short, but I was a hell of a cook. It threw me when I heard about Mason, because knowing him it wouldn’t have surprised me if he turned out to be the best cook in the entire world. But that feeling passed. I was no slouch in the kitchen. “My family is really into food,” I said when I ushered her into the dining room, where I had set the table.

“My mom always said it was the easiest way to make people happy.”

“Nothing about this looks easy, Braden,” she said, taking it in. “In fact, it looks like you put a ton of effort into it. Who taught you?”

“My mom, mostly. But she taught us all to love it. Then we’d experiment. After a while, it turned into a competition. Big surprise, right?” And now I’m competing with your dad. We’d all cook and try to outdo each other. My brothers and I. Then we’d let Janie be the judge. That was always her favorite part of the week. Taste test day.”

“Janie’s your sister?”

“Yeah. You’ll get to meet her soon. She will bully you into a list of reading recommendations that you have never heard of. But I don’t want to say more than that right now. Might spoil your sixth sense. I want to see how in tune you are with the universe.” I pulled out her chair and sat her down. “Be right back. First course coming up.”

I brought out the appetizer, a batch of medium-sized oysters. “I shucked these myself.”

“Were you wearing that suit when you did it?”

“Unfortunately, no. I’m many things, including messy. I like this suit but I doubt it’s oyster proof.”

“Probably not.”

“You know, even if you were a picky eater, these oysters are good enough that I think I could have swayed you towards them either way.” I had also heard that oysters were an aphrodisiac. Not that I needed any help getting revved up for her, and she seemed like she was into me.

When she tried one her face lit up and the effort was immediately worth it. Knowing that I got that reaction out of her—with a little help from the highest quality oysters in town—was pure joy. Within minutes we had polished off the plate. The pleasure I felt at someone else’s pleasure was exquisite. No, not just anyone. Hers.

For the entree, I had prepared a duck with orange sauce. Dessert was a tiramisu that had taken forever. Most people think that Olive Garden is the height of tiramisu, but those people still have not had a real tiramisu. No king has ever dined in an Olive Garden. I had been prepared to answer questions throughout the dinner, but for a while, the only thing she wanted to talk about was the food, how I had made it, what the ingredients were, and to tell me what a bad cook she was.

“We always had a cook,” she said. “My dad always wanted us to eat healthy and he said hiring someone to prepare for to our specs—his specs, of course—was the best way to make sure it always happened. That was the one thing about him—no matter how good his food was, it was all fattening and fun. When dad cooked it was usually for special occasions when we all wanted to hog out. It still took a professional cook to keep us healthy.”

“I can’t say he’s wrong about that,” I said. “What with that figure you’re rocking.” I laughed, worried that I’d overstepped, but she smiled and looked at her plate, then looked back up at me with her head lowered. It was one of the sexiest things I’d ever seen. The weirdest thing was that it was also something I had seen before in other women. They just hadn’t had the same effect on me.

“You know,” she said, “That’s one of the first things you’ve said to me that didn’t annoy me. You were absolutely impossible that first night.”

“Well, I annoy most people way quicker,” I said. “You’re right, though. I was an idiot. A big, naked idiot.” There was a quiet moment and she opened her mouth. But before she could say anything, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my mom, saying she was ready for a skype call. “I think this might give you a better idea of what I’m like,” I said, nodding to the living room. “Come on out here and meet the family. This might work better to answer your questions that I could do on my own. Let’s see what happens. These people know me better than anyone. They’ll keep me honest.”

I could tell it surprised her, but she was into it. She got out her recorder and checked her equipment. I wasn’t sure if she would need it, but she was welcome to record anything she saw.

What she saw as the screen flickered into life was my mom and Janie, smiling like they had just won the lottery. If that didn’t melt Alyssa’s heart, nothing would.

Not that I was planning on melting her heart. Or running game on her. None of that. I was determined, for the first time, to show a woman the real me, for better or worse.



Chapter 7



There was nothing quite like having all of your expectations of a person blown away. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t even begin to cover the discrepancies between Braden’s former and current selves. Who was this man who cooked duck, calamari, shucked oysters, and talked about me meeting his family? Who gave me the kind of sincere compliments that I would have loved hearing from anyone, but that made me shiver when they came from him? I hoped that I had hidden it well, but I spent that dinner in full-on fever mode. I wanted to knock everything off the table, throw him onto it, and show him just how wild he had made me. Effortless charm. That’s what he had. Most men I had been with tried so hard to flatter me that, by the time I gave in, even if I had wanted to, it was nearly always more effort than it was worth. And when it happens that way, it’s not even real charm. When it’s calculated, it’s something else. It occurred to me that I had never actually been seduced. I had told myself that I had, but I had been fooling myself.