He fetched them from the fridge, where he must have detoured before continuing along to his room to catch her red-handed in her search, and began assembling his other ingredients. He drew a broad chef’s knife out of the knife block on the bench and extended it to her, handle first.
‘Care to do some chopping?’ His eyes were gleaming as brightly as the wicked, shiny blade. He wasn’t kidding about temptation!
She was baffled by his good humour. ‘I don’t want you in my kitchen,’ she said truculently. That he liked to cook was already evident from the amount of time he had spent there during his visit. If he had got his way, he would have cooked for them every night.
He found her sullenness amusing. ‘You’d rather have me in your bedroom, I know, but I did tell you that you’d have to beg me first.’ He swung around to the bench and began to rinse the scallops, expertly separating the coral from the beard.
‘I usually just crumb and fry them when they’re this fresh,’ she criticised.
‘Then it will be a special treat for you to have them done differently for a change,’ he said, deftly cutting a lemon and squeezing out the juice. ‘We all have to adapt to changes in our lives, Nina. As difficult as it may be to accept sometimes, change is good. Birth, life and death is a natural progression—’
‘I thought you were supposed to be cooking, not offering a lesson in pop psychology,’ she said sharply.
‘I can do both,’ he said modestly. ‘And since you seem to have avoided anyone with the medical expertise to help you assess your amnesia, I’ve elected myself the self-educated expert. Ray said you’ve never even consulted an M.D.’
‘I didn’t need to. I was fit and healthy and perfectly normal in every other way—’
‘You mean you didn’t want anyone to deny you your regression to childhood.’
‘How can I have matured as an artist if I’ve been regressing to childhood?’ she snapped.
The smooth rhythm of the knife paused. ‘Because you put all your passion into your paintings and none into your life.’
‘That’s not true!’
He shook the knife at her. ‘Be honest. You feel more emotionally stirred up at this moment, more alive, yelling at me, than you’ve felt since you arrived here.’
‘I am not yelling!’
‘Zorro thinks you are.’
Nina looked at the dog lying guard in front of the fridge, his nose on the cold floor, his ears folded closed.
Traitor!
‘What are you making anyway?’ she asked with exaggerated softness.
‘Coquilles Saint-Jacques—’
‘That’s just a fancy name for scallops,’ she scoffed.
‘—à la Flint. My variation provides an exquisite touch of something unique in the sauce.’ He tipped her a sly, sexy wink. ‘You’ll recall I’m very good at exquisite variations, Nina. I have great endurance and I always like to be inventive.’
She glowered at him, folding her arms over her tautening breasts. ‘Really? Well, I have better things to do than stand around watching you play chef.’
As an exit line, it was a dismayingly limp white flag, and she fled to her studio to simmer and stew over the coruscating riposte she should have uttered.
In order to take her mind off the emotional turmoil generated by the stunning revelations from her past, she buried herself in the pleasantly mindless task of stretching the paper that she would be using the next day, and when she finally heard a deep voice calling, she reluctantly emerged to find a mouth-watering aroma permeating the kitchen and Ryan removing the bubbling ramekins from under the oven grill and setting them on the hob.
He had showered and changed out of his work clothes into his black trousers and white linen shirt, and Nina immediately wished she had done a bit more than merely wash her hands and brush her hair and swap her ribbed sweater for a loose blouse.
‘I’ve set the table, but if you wouldn’t mind pouring the rest of the wine, I’ll just carry this one over to Ray—’
Nina snatched up an oven mitt and tea-towel and reached for the third ramekin before he could pick it up. ‘I’ll take it!’