“I warned you about the puff of smoke,” she said, only half joking as she slid into the seat.
Tyler shook his head as he rounded the island and headed toward the shiny pots hanging from a rack suspended above the counter opposite. “Don’t give up your day job for the comedy.”
It gave her the perfect opportunity to admire the way he filled out a pair of suit pants—well. Very, very well. He set the pot down on the counter, turned, and rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing some premium-level arm-porn forearms thick with sinewy muscle and a smattering of dark hair. Oh mama, that’s not fair. Arm porn was a weakness. Whatever he did when he wasn’t on the job or being a pain in her ass was working—between the strong shoulders, highly smackable ass, and arms that made her bite her lip to stifle a groan, the man was an underwear model in suit pants and a button-down shirt.
Pull it back, Ribinski! The mental reminder stopped her from drooling on the island, but it had been close. “Didn’t you know I have my own comedy YouTube channel?”
He strutted—yes, strutted—across the kitchen and filled up the pot with water. “Is it called Being Salty?”
She laughed out loud, caught off guard by the easy comeback. “That was pretty good for someone who went to a fancy prep school.”
“On a scholarship.” He pushed down the faucet lever and put the pot on the high-end gas range.
“What?” Oh, that didn’t make any sense at all. Everything about Tyler, from the custom suits to the jaw-dropping wine selection in the built-in wine cooler next to the restaurant-grade refrigerator, screamed Daddy’s money.
“You thought I was like the Carlyles?” he asked, something cautious in the response.
Shutting her mouth before she could utter, “Hell yeah,” she considered the question as he started the gas flame under the pot of water and got a package of spaghetti from a cabinet. Okay, so she’d been a little overeager to paint him with the rich douchebag brush. He was just so infuriating with his cocky confidence, swagger, and laissez-faire coin-flipping addiction that it short-circuited her brain and set her straight to flipping-off-the-world mode, blocking out the details she should have noticed.
“Not exactly like them,” she said, articulating what she hadn’t really put into words until now. “You do live in the same building as I do, which while being nice isn’t exactly in the Carlyles’ neighborhood. I figured you for a slightly less rich upper-crust Harbor City guy.”
He grinned at her. “I’m from Waterbury.”
Uh-uh, she wasn’t falling for that. “No way.”
“What?” he asked, his voice dropping into the unmistakable accent from the other side of the harbor. “You think ya the only one who changed zip codes?”
“No shit?” she asked, her brain playing catch-up. “But you don’t sound like you’re from there, and you sure have the cocky I-can-buy-you-and-sell-you Harbor City attitude down pat.”
He shrugged and dumped the pasta into the boiling water. “Years of practice to talk correctly—we won’t mention the voice coach I stupidly mentioned to you before—and the attitude I was born with, if not the money.”
There were two kinds of people who made the transition from one side of the metaphorical tracks to the other. One, those who held onto their roots and attitude. Two, those who cut out almost every part of their old life like a skilled surgeon with a scalpel. She was more the first kind. Tyler? She’d have to put him in the second category, if only because he hid his roots so well.
“So how did all of that happen?” Nosy? Her? Hell yes.
He crossed to the wine fridge, pulled out a bottle of white, and opened it up. “Mrs. Diaz, who taught sixth grade algebra and thought she saw something special in a kid she caught doing calculus on his own in the library.”
She processed this tidbit as he got two glasses from the cabinet and brought them and the wine over to the island.
She could totally see a young Tyler elbows deep in boring math books. “That was you, huh?”
“Nah.” He poured a glass of white wine and slid it across the island to her, then poured one for himself. “I was the guy beating him up.”
Her jaw dropped, and he laughed hard enough that he nearly choked on the sip of wine he had just taken. After a short spluttering, he caught his breath and gave her a shit-eating grin.
Cocky bastard.
“Okay, you’re right,” he said with a hoarse chuckle. “I was the math nerd, and that led to a full scholarship to prep school.”
The pieces clicked into place. “And that’s how you met Sawyer and the Carlyles.”
“Yeah, my family life was…interesting, and I ended up spending time over at Sawyer’s house.” He took a drink, something dark brewing in his eyes that made her think he didn’t like all the memories bubbling to the surface. “By the time we graduated from college, the new doorman thought I was a cousin, and I’d promised myself that I was never going to be just another guy from Waterbury again. I was going to be more, and I was going to have it all.”
It was a nice story, but it didn’t make any sense. The guy had been a class-A dick to that same friend. “And you walked away from that because you had a disloyal bitch of a fiancée? That’s pretty weak.”
One of his eyebrows went up. “Don’t take it easy on me or anything.”
“I won’t.” Okay, maybe she was being a bitch, but she had the feeling that there just weren’t that many people who called Tyler on his shit, and he needed to be. She took a sip of the wine—oh my God delicious, so crisp and fresh—and waited.