“Are you telling me you disobeyed?”
“Of course I did,” she snaps. “I’m not your dancing monkey; I’m a chef. I used my professional experience to make you a great dinner. Better than the one you had planned yourself.”
I take a step toward her. She pretends to stand her ground, but I don’t miss how she subtly scoots backwards until her ass hits the edge of the counter. I don’t miss the fear in her eyes, as much as she tries to hide it. I don’t miss the quickening of her breath.
“I’m paying you to do what I want,” I growl in her face.
“Well, then you picked the wrong chef. I make my own menus.”
“You’ll make me a steak.”
Her cheer wilts instantly, but I can see the lingering brightness in her eyes. Say what you want about the girl, she likes a good fight.
“You’ll eat what I put down in front of you and you’ll like it, asshole.”
“This is the battle you want to go down fighting?” I ask, amused by how stubborn she’s being right now. Infuriated, yes, but also amused.
She scoffs up at me. “I’m the one fighting a stupid battle? What about you? ‘Anton want steak,’” she says in a caveman-skewed imitation of me. “‘Give Anton steak.’ For fuck’s sake, you’re such a spoiled brat!”
I raise my eyebrows and inch closer to her. “You wanna say that again?”
Her eyes flit around the kitchen and then she grabs a knife from next to the sink. “I’m not above stabbing you in the neck, you know.”
I laugh. “Do you even know how to use that thing?”
“Hello? I just spent the last hour fileting fish. I know exactly where your spine is.”
She raises the knife like she’s prepared to use it, but I stride right into it on purpose. She gasps, pulling back, trying to twist the blade away from me so that she doesn’t actually cut me.
I grab her hips and hold her in place so she can’t escape me.
“Stop it,” she exclaims. “You’ll hurt yourself.” The blade is poking in my chest. Any more pressure and it will break the skin.
“Would you care?”
She stumbles a little, trying to think of an appropriate response to that. “I don’t want to be killed by your people,” she huffs eventually. “That’s the only reason I wouldn’t want you dead.”
“Mhmm. Very wise.”
She pushes back and sets the knife back on the table as though she regrets picking it up at all. Then she turns to me and smooths back the loose strands of hair that have fallen out of her bun.
“Dinner will be served in a few minutes,” she tells me in a prim and proper voice. “Now, get out of my kitchen.”
When Marina ordered me around, it just pissed me off. But when Jessa does it, it has the opposite effect. It makes me want to bend her over this countertop and tease her until she’s ordering me to fuck her. And then fuck her until she’s ordering me to make her come.
Those are orders I wouldn’t mind taking.
I let my hands fall from her warmth and step back. “The fish better be good,” I tell her. “Oh, and by the way, you’re going to be serving me yourself tonight. Since you said you liked to work alone, I dismissed the waitstaff.”
Before she can protest, I walk out of her kitchen with a satisfied smile on my face.
It’s not as good as sex, but it’s pretty damn close.