She blinked in consternation. “What’s the point of sleeping with someone after you divorce them?”
“Convenience.” At her uncomprehending stare, Alex elaborated, “No dinners, no pretenses, no manners. It’s the equivalent of a takeout meal.”
“I don’t like takeout meals,” Zoë said, affronted. “And that’s the worst reason I’ve ever heard to have sex with someone, just because they’re convenient. That’s … that’s swallop.”
He arched a brow, his stony belligerence seeming to fade. “What’s swallop?”
“Something reconstituted. Always terrible. Like dried potatoes, or processed canned meat, or powdered egg product.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “If you’re hungry enough, swallop isn’t so bad.”
“But it’s not the real thing.”
“Who cares? It’s a bodily function.”
“Eating?”
“I was referring to sex,” he said dryly. “But not every meal—or sex act—has to be a meaningful experience.”
“I don’t agree. To me, sex is about commitment, trust, honesty, respect—”
“Jesus.” He had begun to laugh quietly, not in a nice way. “With standards like that, do you ever get laid?”
Zoë stared at him indignantly.
As Alex looked back at her, his amusement dissolved. He braced his hands on the table on either side of her, their bodies close but not touching. Her breath shortened, and her heart began to beat in a wild staccato.
His face was right above hers, the touch of his breath cool and sweet, like cinnamon gum. “Haven’t you ever had sex just for the hell of it?”
Zoë blinked. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she managed to say.
“I mean rock-your-world sex with someone you don’t give a damn about. Raw, hard-core, wrong on every level. But you don’t care, because it feels too good to stop. You do anything you want because you don’t have to talk about it afterward. No rules, no regrets. Just two people in the dark, roughing each other up in all the right ways.”
For a split second, Zoë’s unruly imagination seized on the idea, and a jolt of heat went to the pit of her stomach. She could feel her pulse beating at the front of her throat. Alex’s gaze tracked the visible throb before returning to her dilated eyes. In an abrupt motion, he pushed away from her. “You should try it sometime,” he advised coolly. “Looks like your ex is available.”
Zoë tucked her hair behind her ears and made a show of retying her apron. “Chris didn’t visit me for that,” she eventually said. “He just broke up with his partner. He needed to talk it over with someone.”
“With you.” Alex gave her a sardonic glance.
“Yes,” she said warily, sensing the approach of an insult. “Why not with me?”
“A woman who looks like you? If your ex shows up to talk over his problems, cupcake, it’s not for your keen psychological insight. It’s a booty call.”
Before she could reply, the oven timer went off.
Stung, Zoë was tempted to order him out of her kitchen. She picked up a couple of potholders and went to the oven. As soon as she opened the door, the heady fragrance of hot cake poured out in a perfumed steam of apricot and vanilla and heady spices. Taking deep breaths of the opulent sweetness, Zoë reflected that Alex was the most cynical man she’d ever met. How terrible it would be to view the world the way he did.
If he weren’t such an arrogant bully, she might have felt sorry for him.
Reaching into the oven with a potholder in each hand, Zoë grasped the heavy-gauge steel pan. As she pulled it out, the burning edge of the pan touched the inside of her arm, and she inhaled sharply. She was so accustomed to minor kitchen mishaps that she didn’t say a word, only set the pan calmly on the counter.
Alex was at her side in an instant. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
His gaze shot to the angry red splotch on her arm. Scowling, he pulled her to the kitchen sink and started cold water running from the faucet. “Hold it under there. Do you have a first-aid kit?”
“Yes, but I don’t need it.”
“Where is it?”
“In the cabinet under the sink.” Zoë moved a few inches to the side, so he could open the door and extract the white plastic box. “It’s just a little burn,” she said, pulling her arm out of the water to look at it. “Not even enough to blister.”
Alex took her wrist to reposition her arm under the water. “Keep it there.”
“You’re overreacting,” she told him. “Do you see the marks on my hands and arms? All cooks have scars. This spot on my elbow”—she showed him her free arm—“that was when I tried to rest my arm on the counter after forgetting that I’d just set a hot pan there.” She pointed to places on her left hand. “And these marks are from knives … this was from trying to pit an avocado that wasn’t ripe enough, and this was from deboning fish. Once I stabbed right through my palm while shucking oysters—”
“Why aren’t you wearing protective gear?” he demanded.
“I suppose I could wear a chef’s jacket,” Zoë said, “but on hot days like this, it wouldn’t be very comfortable.”
“You need Kevlar welding sleeves. I can get you some.”
Darting a bemused glance at Alex, Zoë realized he wasn’t joking. Some of her irritation faded. “I can’t wear welding sleeves in the kitchen,” she said.
“You need some kind of protection.” Alex took her free hand and examined it with a lingering frown, his fingertips moving from one small white scar to another. “I never thought about cooking being dangerous,” he said. “Unless one of my brothers or I were trying to eat something we’d made.”
The brush of his fingers caused a ripple of sensation to run up her arm. “None of you can cook?” she asked.
“Sam’s not too bad. Our oldest brother, Mark, is limited to making coffee. But it’s good coffee.”
“And you?”
“I can build a great kitchen. I just can’t make anything edible in it.”
Zoë made no protest as he adjusted her arm under the water again. He cradled her hand as if it were an injured bird.
“You have scars, too.” Zoë dared to put her fingertip against a thin line on the side of his forefinger. “What’s that from?”
“Box cutter.”
She moved to another healed-over mark, a deep gouge on the pad of his thumb. “And this?”
“Table saw.”
Zoë winced.
“Most carpentry accidents come from trying to save time,” Alex said. “Like when you need to construct a jig to hold something in place while you’re running a router. But instead you wing it, and then you pay for it.” He released her hand and opened the first-aid kit, rummaging until he found a small bottle of acetaminophen. “Where do you keep the glasses?”
“The cabinet over the dishwasher.”
Alex took a juice glass from the cabinet and filled it with water from the refrigerator dispenser. He gave two tablets to Zoë, and handed her the water.
“Thank you,” she said. “I think my arm’s okay now.”
“Give it a little more time. Burn damage keeps going for a few minutes after it starts.”
Resignedly Zoë stared at the water as it streamed over her skin. Alex stayed beside her, making no move to touch her again. Unlike the companionable silences she’d shared with Chris, this silence was tense and voltaic.
“Zoë,” he said in a rough-soft murmur. “What I said to you earlier … I was out of line.”
“Yes, you were.”
“I … apologize.”
Guessing that he was a man who made apologies rarely, and never easily, Zoë relented. “It’s okay.”
In the charged silence that followed, Zoë became acutely conscious of Alex’s solid presence beside her, the steady counterpoint of his breath to her own. He reached out to test the temperature of the water, his forearm heavily muscled and dusted with dark hair.
She glanced discreetly at the hard perfection of his profile, the dark-angel handsomeness of a man who stole his pleasures wherever he could find them. The hints of dissolution—the subtle shadows beneath his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks—only made him seem sexier, elegantly lethal.
An affair with him would cost a woman every ideal she had.
Justine was right—if Zoë wanted to start dating again, Alex was not the one to start with. But Zoë suspected that even though going to bed with him would inevitably turn out to be a mistake, it was almost certainly the kind a woman would enjoy making.
The prolonged exposure to the cold water sent fine tremors through her. The more she tried to steel herself against them, the worse they became.
“Do you have a jacket or a sweater around here?” Alex asked.
She shook her head.
“Should I ask Justine—”
“No,” Zoë said immediately. “Justine would call for an ambulance and a team of paramedics. Let’s keep her out of this.”
Amusement flickered in his eyes. “Okay.” He settled a hand on her back, the warmth of his palm sinking through the thin fabric of her T-shirt.
Zoë closed her eyes. After a moment, she felt Alex’s arm slide across her shoulders. He was big and warm, his body practically radiating heat. A pleasant sun-bleached, faintly salty smell clung to him.
“I have to tell you something,” she managed to say. “About how I know that Chris’s visit wasn’t a booty call.”
Alex’s arm loosened. “It’s none of my—”
“The reason I’m sure,” she said, “is because …” She hesitated, the words lodging behind a lump in her throat. Alex might blame her for the failure of the marriage, the way her father and Chris’s family had. He might be insulting or even cruel. Or worse, he might not care at all.
There was only one way to find out.
As she forced herself to say it, the lump broke, and her chest and throat filled with heat. “Chris left me for another man.”
Eleven
Upon hearing Zoë’s words, the ghost, who had been lingering inconspicuously in the background, blurted, “Outta here,” and fled.
Stunned, Alex looked down into Zoë’s upturned face. Before he could react, she hurried on in a nervous rush. “I didn’t know he was g*y when we got married,” she said. “Chris didn’t know, either, or at least he wasn’t ready to face it. He genuinely cared about me, and he thought … hoped … that marrying me would solve all the complications. That I would be enough for him. But I wasn’t.”
She paused, a deep carnelian flush covering her face. Her free hand dipped under the water, and then she patted her cold wet fingers against her cheeks. The sight of the sparkling droplets sliding down her smooth skin was nearly too much for Alex. Carefully he removed his arm from her back.
Encouraged by his silence, Zoë continued. “ ‘A woman who looks like you’ … I’ve heard that phrase all my life, and it never means anything good. People who say that always think they know exactly who I am without ever bothering to get to know me. They think I’m dumb, or fake, or conniving. They assume that all I’m interested in is ha**ng s*x or … well, you know what they assume.” She slid him a guarded glance, seeming to expect mockery. Finding none, she bent her head and resumed. “I matured a lot earlier than everyone else—by the time I was thirteen, I had to wear a C cup bra. Something about the way I looked caused other girls to not like me, and spread rumors about me in school. Boys shouted things at me when they drove by in cars. In high school, they asked me out only so they could make passes at me and lie to their friends about how far I had let them go. So for a while I stopped going out at all. I didn’t trust anyone. But then I became friends with Chris. He was smart and funny and nice, and it didn’t matter to him what I looked like. We became a couple—we went everywhere together, helped each other through tough times.” A melancholy smile hovered at her lips. “Chris went to law school, and I went to a culinary arts school, but we always stayed close. We talked on the phone all the time, and spent summers and vacations together, and … eventually it all just led to marriage.”
Alex wasn’t quite certain how he’d come to be in this position, standing at a sink with Zoë while she confided in him. He didn’t want to hear any of it. He had always hated talking about personal problems—his own, and other people’s. But Zoë kept on talking, and he couldn’t seem to find a way to shut her down. And then he realized that if he had really wanted to shut her down, he would have by now. He actually wanted to listen, to understand her, and that scared the hell out of him.
He heard himself ask, “Before you got married, did you and he …”
“Yes.” Zoë’s face was partially averted, but he could see the pink curve of her cheek beneath the dark sweep of her lashes. “It was affectionate. It was … nice. I wasn’t sure if either of us was really into it, but I didn’t have enough experience to know how it should be. I thought in time we’d get better at it.”
Affectionate. Nice. Alex’s brain summoned thoughts of Zoë’s luscious na*ed body, and what he would have done to her, given half a chance. The glinting locks of her hair trailed like curled ribbons, and he couldn’t stop himself from touching them, playing with the tousled silk. “When did you find out?”
Zoë took an extra breath as his fingertips reached the curve of her scalp and stroked gently. “He told me he’d been having an affair with another man. A lawyer at the firm. He hadn’t meant for it to happen. He didn’t want to hurt me. But something was missing in our relationship, and he’d never been able to figure it out.”
“Given the fact that he slept with another guy,” Alex said, “it’s pretty obvious what was missing.”
Zoë looked at him quickly, but when she saw the glint of humor in his eyes, she relaxed.
Sliding his hand to the nape of her neck, Alex relished the texture of cool, soft skin, the fine muscles beneath. The kitchen seemed to breathe around them, stirring currents of toasted air that carried the bittersweet zest of lemon rind, the dank sweetness of scrubbed wooden cutting boards, the floating richness of cake, the crisp bite of cinnamon, and the black tang of coffee. All of it whetted a deep thrill of hunger. It seemed as if Zoë were part of the feast all around him, made to be tasted and felt and sensually enjoyed. The only thing that held him back from her was a thread of honor that was stretched nearly to the breaking point. If he let himself do what he wanted, if Zoë didn’t stop him, he would end up being the worst thing that ever happened to her. He had to make her understand that.