Page 16 of Kai (Alpha Heroes #13)

I took the chair. I was starving, and the aromas drifting from the table made me dizzy with hunger. Perusing the spread before me, I pointed at a platter. “What’s that?”

“I caught a nicely sized opakapaka this morning.” He sat on the bench across from me.

“Fish?” My face didn’t hide my secrets well. I couldn’t prevent myself from wrinkling my nose.

“Don’t tell me.” He let out a resigned sigh. “You don’t eat fish?”

“Not really,” I said, blunt as always.

“Well, perhaps you’d like my fish,” he suggested. “It’s my grandma’s recipe, and it comes with a pineapple, coconut, and mango chutney.”

I tried not to grimace again. By the way his mouth straightened, I could tell I’d failed.

“Can I ask?” he said. “Why don’t you like fish?”

“Oh, you know.” I didn’t want to tell the pathetic story. “Picky eater, flawed tastebuds.”

“Picky, maybe, but there’s nothing flawed about you, Cece. I have a feeling you have a reason for everything you do.”

It was true, and even though my impulse was never to explain myself, this time, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I did.

“If you have to know, after my mother died, my father made an art of punishing me every time I came home from boarding school whenever I refused to eat the salmon he imported from his Scottish estate.”

“You didn’t like salmon?” he asked while tossing the salad.

“It wasn’t about the salmon.” How could I explain? “It was my way of protesting Father’s exploitation of people.”

“How so?”

“He’d bought a title and a Scottish estate for next to nothing from some poor, desperate laird who didn’t have the means to feed his family or preserve his legacy. Father never played fair, and the Scottish man was only one of my father’s victims. It’s no secret that he and I used to butt heads.”

“Your sisters told me about that,” Kai said, transferring the salad onto the plates.

“He enjoyed pounding me into submission. If I didn’t eat the salmon at dinner, I had to go to bed with an empty stomach and eat the fish for breakfast, cold and straight from the fridge.

If I failed to eat it for breakfast, then I had to have it at lunch.

The game went on. In the end, he always won, and I had to force down the slimy salmon.

By then, it tasted downright disgusting. ”

“Sounds awful,” he said. “Well, guess what?”

“What?”

“You don’t have to eat this fish.” He got up. “I can defrost a steak and throw it on the grill.”

“Wait,” I said.

He eased back on the bench.

I looked from the platter to the man. Kai had gone to all this trouble to serve this beautiful meal that came with steamed rice and a salad fresher than anything I’d eaten in the past three years.

I hadn’t shared a table with someone else in a long time, and this guy intrigued me.

Plus, I’d made a resolution to be nice to him.

I could act civilized. On occasion. Okay, on special occasions only. Like today.

“You don’t need to fix me a steak.” I sighed. “I’ll try your fish.”

It sounded all wrong. Like a come-on. My uppity tone transformed the words into a nearly sexual proposition. I was shit at being nice. The day’s heat burned in my cheeks.

“Let’s do it.” The wicked tilt of his voice mimicked mine. He sounded as if he’d heard the lust singing in my veins and didn’t mind it. “We’ll start with a sample, then perhaps you’ll want more of my fish.”

I thought of a few good comebacks for that one, but I kept them to myself. I might try his fish, but I wasn’t going to like it. Or flirt with a man who had the capacity—and the dimples—to wipe all reason from my brain. But I could at least stay on this side of rude.

He served me a small piece of fillet, garnished it with his whatever chutney, and added some rice to my plate before he set it before me.

“Do you like to cook?” I asked, digging into the rice and stuffing a forkful in my mouth.

“I love to cook.” He loaded his plate. “You?”

“Oh, God, no,” I scoffed even as I enjoyed the rice’s buttery flavors brightening my mouth. “You don’t want to eat anything I cook. Hell, I don’t want to eat anything I cook, either.”

His masculine chortles turned up my lips and did something weird to my chest. “Then it’s a good thing I can cook for both of us.”

I glanced at him. Did his eyes always sparkle with mischief like that? Were we talking in some sort of sexy code language I’d never spoken before?

He held my stare like a champ, enthralling me with the depth of his gaze.

Sitting across from him, I spotted the amber speckles that illuminated his honey-brown irises.

The warmth that gleamed in his eyes reminded me of hugs and melted caramel; of the deepest colors of a Wyoming fall and the quiet loam that dampened my steps in the deep forest. I recognized the golden glow subtly hidden in the pool of his eyes, the same hue that brightened his aura.

When he blinked, a frisson of heat raced over my skin.

Fixing my stare on my plate, I took another bite.

While I chewed, my lips, my entire body remembered that I’d kissed him, and how he’d kissed me back.

My pussy squeezed. I gave myself a mental slap for being so off around this man.

Or perhaps it was the opposite. He turned me on without even trying.

At least give him some time to fall into one of your categories before you jump him.

He was a man. It was only a matter of time before he shed his kindness and revealed his true self.

I intended to find out who he was right now.

I prepared to examine this new specimen under my mind’s microscope.

Would he end up being an asshole, a gold digger, an idiot?

Or would he turn out to be all of the above?