Pull You In (Rivers Brothers 3)

"That's true," I agreed.

"I'm gonna go get this chill out of my bones. Then maybe we can find something to eat."

"I, ah, I can make something," I offered.

"Yeah?" he asked, turning back, eyes bright.

It was such a cliché, that thing about men and their hearts and their stomachs. But I'd yet to see it be wrong.

"Yeah," I agreed, my lips curving up. "What do you think of crêpes?"

"Sounds like you just offered to make all my breakfasts from now until we leave here I think," he told me, eyes dancing, and my heart did an embarrassing little shimmy at the sight. "I'll be down in ten. Not to help," he added, shaking his head. "Just to watch. Give completely unhelpful commentary. That kind of shit."

"Looking forward to it," I said, getting a wink from him before he was off.

"Oooh, boy," I sighed when I was alone, planting my hands on the cool counter, taking a couple of deep breaths, reminding myself that this was just how Rush was.

He was charming. And playful. And boyish. And effortlessly sexy.

It wasn't personal.

It was never personal.

I was just the woman with the crêpes to a man with an empty stomach.

Nothing more, nothing less.

No matter how much I might have wanted it to be more.

And how sad that was.

To put my mind off those negative thoughts I was so known for, I gathered my ingredients, giving each step a careful consideration I hadn't needed to do for decades, not since my grandmother first taught me the recipe. This would be the first, and likely the last, chance I would get to cook for him. And I wanted it to be good. Maybe he would remember me as something other than the mumbling, bumbling, uncomfortable office mouse."Uh oh," he said after his fifth crêpe, gaze going to the window where the clap of thunder was loud enough to make the window panes rattle in their frames. "Hope no one is on the road," he went on. "You alright?" he asked, brows furrowing. "You haven't eaten anything."

"I'm not anorexic." The words shot out of me, knee-jerk, defensive, my voice a mix of frustration and desperation.

"I, ah, yeah, baby, I wasn't saying that. You just haven't touched your food. And it's banging. So I figured something was wrong."

"Sorry," I said, eyes fluttering closed for a long moment, my stomach wobbling. "That was just a knee-jerk reaction. People assume I don't eat because I'm so thin," I admitted, sucking in a deep breath, feeling it settle the anxiety that skittered across my nerves. "I had the stomach flu once. It came on while I was at school, and I was throwing up in the bathroom, and every day after that, the whole school joked about me being bulimic."

"Okay, first. Everyone you went to school with was a dick. Secondly, it never crossed my mind, Katie. Some people just have that kickass metabolism."

"I would like it if mine kicked a little less," I admitted. My weight had always been an issue for me. And as far as we had come as a society with body positivity, people still felt like it was okay to tell thin people to eat a cheeseburger, as if we wouldn't have thought of that ourselves. I used to sneak weight-on pills into the house in high school, desperate to get a body that rounded out in all the nice ways the other girls' bodies had, while mine stayed stubbornly flat and narrow.

I thought, largely, that I'd overcome the insecurity about it. But I found it still crept up. Especially where men were concerned.

I remembered crying in the bathroom after I found out my ex's browser history included anime porn where the women had boobs bigger than my head.

And, apparently, it mattered just as much that Rush know I had no control over how my body chose to metabolize the food that I very often shoved in my mouth.

I would deal with the clear dysfunction of that when I was back in Navesink Bank.

"So, is there, ah, something wrong?" he asked, eyeing my plate. "Or are you just not feeling the crêpes?"

"You're a pig," I told him, feeling a smile pulling at my lips as I passed him my plate, feeling no small surge of pride as he dug in with gusto, even with a stomach full already.

"You should open a breakfast place," he decided, scraping the plate clean of strawberry filling and powdered sugar.

"You're going to have a stomach ache. That was a lot of sugar."

"Oh, sweetheart, you underestimate my ability to eat complete crap without feeling bad about it. "I'm already planning something cheesy for dinner. Just gotta figure out if we have enough for whoever shows up. If they can make it in this. That street sucked in good weather," he said, getting up, gathering the dishes, taking them to the sink to wash. "Get a look at this wind," he went on, making me get up, walk over to his side to look out the back window.