his near nudity had. She swallowed, and it was hot and prickly.
“Dinner should be ready,” he said.
She blinked. “Dinner?”
“Yeah, I put something in the Crock-Pot.”
“I have a Crock-Pot?” She wrinkled her nose.
“Actually, I don’t know if you have a Crock-Pot. My future sister-in-law sent one. To be clear, I didn’t cook, I just followed her instructions.” He smiled, sure and easy. She didn’t feel sure or easy. She felt clumsy, awkward. She couldn’t figure out why.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, following him out of the barn and back up the well-worn footpath that led to the house.
She didn’t really know what to expect when they got to the front porch. If he would stop at the door or assume he was joining her for dinner.
When he opened the door and held it for her, she assumed he would be taking his leave. But then he came inside behind her, his heavy footsteps making that first floorboard squeak. It made her feel conscious of how long it had been since she’d spent any meaningful time in the house with someone else. That second squeak upon entry.
It made her feel unaccountably lonely. Sad.
She didn’t know why a squeaky floorboard had the power to do that.
Alex walked across the kitchen and opened a few cabinets, his movements confident even though he clearly didn’t know where anything was. His gestures were broad, firm. When he took the bowls out of the cabinet and set them down on the counter, he didn’t do it tentatively.
It was funny because she had watched Asher make her drink this morning and yet again she had thought of his movements as elegant. There was nothing elegant about Alex’s movements. They were like the rest of him. Rough, masculine. Somehow lethal-looking.
She had imagined that when Asher put his hands on her skin, if he ever touched her hand, he would apply that same fine elegance to his actions. If Alex ever touched her, with all that hard-packed muscle, and those work-roughened hands, he might break her.
Why are you comparing them?
A good question. Probably because she had such limited interaction with men. And these particular two men were as opposite as they came.
Anyway, Alex didn’t fare well in the comparison. And she ignored the strange tightness in her lungs that accompanied that thought.
She didn’t want to be broken. She was broken enough.
He opened the Crock-Pot, and ladled a couple big scoops of stew into one of the bowls. “Come get it,” he said, pushing the bowl away from him slightly, before picking up the second one to serve himself.
Her throat tightened. Almost closed completely. She opened the silverware drawer and took out a spoon, then retrieved the bowl. “Thank you.”
“Sure.”
He got his own spoon, then took two cans of Coke out of the fridge, sliding one over to her before he popped the top on his own and took a seat.
That was two times he had served her first. It shouldn’t matter.
But she noticed.
She pressed her spoon down into the thick stew and tilted it sideways, grimacing when she unveiled an onion. She carefully shunted it off to the side and scooped a chunk of meat onto her spoon.
“I’m thinking it’ll probably take about two weeks to get the facility prepared to bring in animals,” Alex said, taking what appeared to be a very reckless bite of stew as far as she was concerned.
“Two weeks? That’s it?”
“Should be about that long.”
“That’s not much time for me to prepare for big stinky animals to be on my property,” she said, flicking another onion off to the side before she took another bite.
“Well, there are already stinging animals on your property, so why not?”
She shrugged, then took another bite of stew, grimacing when she bit into a carrot that clearly had a hidden onion welded to the back of it. She looked around and cursed the lack of napkin.
She decided she wasn’t going to try to muscle past it out of politeness. It wasn’t like Alex himself made the stew.
Clara stood and took two quick strides to the sink, leaning in deep before she spit the carrot and onion down the drain. She turned the sink on, then the disposal and tried to ignore the fact that she knew Alex was watching her.
She straightened, brushing her hair out of her face. “I don’t like onions.”
She walked stiffly back to her seat and sat down, making a point to be a little more careful with the dissection of the stew from that point on.
“And you don’t like coffee,” he noted.
She furrowed her brow. “I like coffee.”
“You don’t.”
Clara narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know my life.”
“You don’t like coffee, you don’t like onions. You do like SpaghettiOs and apparently prefer Coke to beer.”
“Beer is gross,” she countered.
“Right, but SpaghettiOs are fine dining.” He shook his head. “Okay. You don’t like beer. What else don’t you like?”
“The list of what I like is shorter and takes less time,” she said.
“Okay. What do you like? Because if I’m going to bring you food sometimes, it would be nice if you didn’t have to tiptoe through your dinner like it was full of land mines.”
She sniffed. “Nobody said you had to bring me food. But if you must know, I like pasta as long as there are no onions. Or excess greens.”
“Hamburgers?”
She nodded. “Without lettuce.”
“What are your thoughts on kale?”
She frowned. “What are your thoughts on evil?”
“Chard?”
“Satan’s preferred salad fixing.”
“Do you like any kind of lettuce?”
She scowled. Then she realized that she was doing a very good impression of a cranky child. But, oh well, she didn’t like feeling she had to give an account of the things she enjoyed eating. No one had cared if she ate her vegetables for a long damn time.
“A salad with iceberg lettuce is fine,” she explained. “As long as it has cheese. And a lot of dressing. Good dressing, though. And not blue cheese.”
“I think I’m getting the picture. Pretty sure I can
