Heroes Are My Weakness(41)

Damn it. Along with coughing less, her appetite had begun to return, and she’d barely eaten all day. “Fine,” she said begrudgingly. “You cook. I’ll eat. Then you’re out of here.”

He was already rummaging through the bottom cupboard for another pot.

She put Leo away in the studio, then went to her bedroom. Theo didn’t like her—definitely didn’t want her around—so why was he doing this? She traded her boots for sock monkey slippers and straightened up the clothes she’d left lying on the bed. She didn’t want to be around a man she was more than a little afraid of. Even worse, a man some part of her still wanted to trust, despite all the evidence stacked against him. It was too much like being fifteen all over again.

The smell of sizzling bacon began to fill the air, along with the faintest scent of garlic. Her stomach growled. “Screw it.” She went back into the kitchen.

The delicious odors were coming from the iron skillet. Spaghetti boiled in the saucepan, and he was beating some of her precious eggs in a big yellow mixing bowl. Two wineglasses sat on the counter, along with a dusty bottle from the cupboard over the sink. “Where’s the corkscrew?” he said.

She drank good wine so seldom that she hadn’t thought about opening any of the bottles Mariah had stored. Now the lure was irresistible. She rummaged through the junk drawer and handed over the corkscrew. “What are you making?”

“One of my specialties.”

“Human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’re adorable.”

She wouldn’t let him dismiss her so easily. “You do remember I have a lot of reasons to expect the worst from you.”

He pulled out the wine cork with one efficient twist. “It was a long time ago, Annie. I told you. I was a screwed-up kid.”

“Take this in the spirit with which it’s intended . . . . You’re still screwed up.”

“You don’t know anything about who I am now.” He filled her glass with bloodred wine.

“You live in a haunted house. You terrify small children. You take your horse out in the middle of a blizzard. You—”

He set down the bottle a little too hard. “I lost my wife a year ago this month. What the hell do you expect? Party hats and noisemakers?”

She felt a stab of remorse. “I’m sorry about that.”

He shrugged off her sympathy. “And I’m not abusing Dancer. The wilder the weather is, the more he loves it.”

She thought of Theo standing bare-chested in the snow. “Just like you?”

“Yeah,” he said flatly. “Just like me.” He grabbed a cheese grater he’d found somewhere and the wedge of Parmesan, shutting her out.

She sipped her wine. It was a delicious cabernet, fruity and full-bodied. He clearly didn’t want to talk, which made her determined to force the issue. “Tell me about your new book.”

Seconds ticked by. “I don’t like to talk about a book while I’m writing it. It takes away the energy that belongs on the page.”

A challenge similar to the one that actors faced performing the same role night after night. She watched him grate the cheese into an oblong glass bowl. “A lot of people hated The Sanitarium.” Her comment was so rude she was almost ashamed.

He grabbed the boiling pot of spaghetti from the stove and dumped the contents into a colander in the sink. “Did you read it?”

“Didn’t get around to it.” It went against her nature to be so blunt, but she wanted him to know she wasn’t the same timid mouse she’d been at fifteen. “How did your wife die?”

He transferred the hot pasta to the mixing bowl and beaten eggs without losing a beat. “Despair. She killed herself.”

His words made her queasy. There was so much more she wanted to know. How did she do it? Did you see it coming? Were you the reason? That last question most of all. But she didn’t have the stomach to ask any of it.

He added the bacon and garlic to the pasta and tossed the mixture with a pair of forks. She grabbed some silverware and napkins and carried them to the table set in the living room bay window. After she’d fetched the wineglasses, she took her place. He emerged from the kitchen with their loaded plates and frowned at the garishly painted plaster mermaid chair. “Hard to believe your mother was an art expert.”

“It’s not any worse than a dozen other things in the cottage.” She inhaled the scents of garlic, bacon, and the roughly grated Parmesan on top. “This smells delicious.”

He put down her plate and sat across from her. “Spaghetti carbonara.”

Hunger must have fried her brain because she did the stupidest thing. She automatically lifted her glass. “To the chef.”

He locked eyes with her but didn’t lift his own glass. She quickly set hers down, but his gaze held, and she felt an odd prickling, as if something more than the draft coming through the bay window had stirred the air between them. It took her only a moment to figure out exactly what was happening.

Certain women were drawn to volatile men, sometimes out of neuroses, sometimes—if the woman was a romantic—out of the naive fantasy that her particular brand of femininity was powerful enough to tame one of these rogue males. In novels, the fantasy was irresistible. In real life, it was total bull. Of course she felt a sexual pull from all that dangerous masculinity. Her body had been through a lot lately, and this reawakening meant she was healing. On the flip side, her reaction was also a reminder that he still held a destructive fascination for her.