JENNIFER
Back in the kitchen the washing up starts and the morning finds its rhythm. Soap and steam and the satisfaction of a thing that went mostly right and catastrophically only in the private dark. My strawberry scent is warm and slightly smug. The rose is nowhere.
Which is when Santos appears in the doorway.
I nearly drop a ceramic bowl worth more than my first car.
He's broader than I remember, which feels genuinely rude of him. Sun-warmed skin, open collar, dark hair slightly undone in a way that is either natural or expensive and I resent that I cannot tell which. His scent arrives a beat later, saffron and heat and the specific brand of trouble that has never once in its life felt bad about itself.
The man who spent forty-eight hours making me feel like the most interesting person in any room he had ever entered, then left cash on a nightstand like I charged by the hour.
My hand tightens on the bowl.
Apparently we are doing this before nine in the morning.
He leans against the frame with the relaxed ease of a man with nowhere better to be, which would be more convincing if this kitchen weren't tucked around the back of the hill and noton the way to a single thing. He didn’t wander here. He chose a direction and then walked down it, and the direction was mine.
You need the job. Not this.
He pushes off the frame, crosses to the counter, pours himself coffee from my pot without asking, and leans against it like he is settling in for the morning.
"Can I help you," I say, not a question.
"No," Santos says pleasantly.
"Then what are you doing in my kitchen?”
"The coffee's better here."
I set the bowl down before I throw it. "It’s the same coffee. Beans. Machine. Island. Try again."
He shrugs, untroubled. "The view's better."
I turn back to the stove. "Go away, Santos."
"I just got here."
"I noticed. I'm asking you to reverse that."
He doesn't move. I can hear him not moving, I grip the spoon and stir and tell my strawberry scent to behave itself, which it doesn’t.
"Did you come down here to seduce me again?" I ask, keeping my eyes on the pan. “Whatever worked in Vegas, the language barrier included, isn’t going to work in a professional kitchen at nine in the morning while I'm trying to reduce a stock."
I turn around at that, because I want him to see my face when I say the next part. "Santos. I work for you. I live forty meters from your house. We met at Vegas, and you decided to pay me…”
Memories of the night stand flash through my mind, bringing me back down to Earth.
“So whatever you think is happening right now, I’m not doing it."
He looks at me with those warm brown eyes and says nothing for a moment, and that is somehow worse than anything hecould have said. Then he sets down his cup, pushes off the counter, and crosses the kitchen toward me.
He stops two feet away.
Close enough that the saffron in his scent wraps around my own before I can pull it back.
"You're right," he says.
I blink. "I am."