In Bed with the Beast (Naughty Princess Club 2)

“You still want to make dinner, right? I probably should have called and asked first. . . .”

My despondency from moments ago vanishes in an instant. He sounds so nervous and unsure that I can’t help but comfort him.

“I’ll make dinner, but on one condition. You have to help me.”

He lets out a low growl under his breath, and I laugh.

“You’re going to give yourself a heart attack if you keep eating the crap you do. We’ll make something easy. It will be fun,” I promise him.

I come around the island, and together we start putting everything away that we won’t be using. He tells me about his night at work, and I complain about the stupid board at the library. The mood is light and easy, and I start wondering if I imagined the way he said we needed to talk earlier. Maybe this is what he meant. Maybe he just wants us to get to know each other better, since he seems to think I’m still not ready to have sex with him yet. I know I should be an adult and just come out and ask him, but I don’t want to ruin the moment if he’s going to say something that will break my heart. As long as he hasn’t changed his mind about liking me and wanting to see where this goes, I don’t care about anything else.

Twenty minutes later, we’re standing next to each other at the counter. I smile at his profile as I watch him concentrate on what he’s doing.

He made a fuss when I initially told him we’d make lasagna, saying that was in no way an easy first dish for him to learn how to make. When he realized how simple it actually was using precooked noodles and jarred sauce, he stopped complaining.

“Just keep layering everything. Sauce, cheese, noodles. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you get to the top of the pan,” I instruct as he spreads a spoonful of sauce on the third layer, slopping it all over the counter in the process, before grabbing a bag of mozzarella cheese.

“I’m getting shit all over the place,” he complains, his big hands unable to delicately sprinkle the shredded mozzarella on top of the dish.

“It’s fine. It doesn’t need to be perfect. The lasagna will still be delicious even if you get half the cheese on the counter,” I joke. “Did you know lasagna originated in Italy during the Middle Ages and the first recorded recipe was written in the early fourteenth century?”

“Your brain is like Google,” he mumbles as he crumples up the now-empty bag of cheese and tosses it on the counter. “Telling me this stuff has been around for centuries doesn’t make me feel any better about how much I probably fucked it up.”

“Okay, then how about we discuss the book I finished reading today? It was called Until the End and it was a second-chance romance about—”

“A single father who falls in love with his new next-door neighbor who never wanted kids until she met his precocious three-year-old daughter, who stole her heart,” Vincent finishes, shocking the hell out of me. “I saw it on top of the stack of books you left in my library the other day. I read it while you were at work.”

He grabs the canister of parmesan from the counter and sloppily sprinkles it all over the top of the dish, bits of grated cheese flying all around like snow.

“I thought you didn’t do romance,” I remind him, repeating the words he said to me the first time we spoke about books at my library. “I can’t believe you read a popular contemporary romance.”

He sets the container of cheese down on the counter and looks back over his shoulder at me.

“Did you like the book? What did you think about the plot twist?”

It’s not at all what I expected him to say. One of these days, I’ll learn that this man isn’t what he seems. I spend the next ten minutes completely forgetting about the lasagna and going on a tangent about the crazy plot twist that involved the man’s horrible ex-wife coming back to town to try to reclaim her family after she left them, and to get rid of his new love interest. Vincent leans against the counter smiling at me the entire time, and when I finish talking, I feel happier than I have in a long time. I have a feeling Vincent asked me about the book because he remembered me telling him about how my dad and I used to cook together all the time and talk books, and he knows how much I miss that.

The kitchen looks like a war zone, with grease from the ground meat he browned splattered all over the stove, tomato sauce slopped all over the counter, and mozzarella, parmesan, and ricotta cheese dropped on the counter and the floor—but he was a quick learner and the pan of lasagna looks amazing.