Page 38 of Nothing More

So far, it wasn’t panning out.

“I’m not a little kid, you know,” Cassandra sulked. She backed up to the back of the couch, perched her skinny arse on it, and then flopped backward so she was upside down, head on the seat cushions, legs dangling over the back of it. “You don’t have to make me go to my room and pretend everything’s fine.”

“Everything is fine,” Toly said, in a non-reassuring monotone.

Raven snorted into her drink.

“Liar,” Cass accused. “You wouldn’t be here if it was. You hate being around my sister.”

“Hey, now,” Raven said. “Rude. I’m not that much of a harpy.”

In the same monotone, Toly said, “I don’t hate being around your sister.”

Maybe it was the G&T, but the words struck Raven as downright warm. Fond. Left her pleasantly warm inside.

Bennet returned. He was a loud man, breathing noisily through his mouth and clomping along with his thick-soled boots. He possessed nothing of Toly’s practiced stealth.

“Alright, she’s off,” he announced, joining them in the kitchen. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Raven and Toly said together.

“No,” Cass said. “They think I’m a baby.”

Bennet chuckled. “I should introduce you to my Natalie – she says the same thing.” He chafed his hands together, backs red from the cold of the parking garage. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m starving.”

Before Raven could reach for the takeout menus, Toly said, “I’ll cook.”

She gave him a raised-brow look. “You’llcook?”

His expression went surly…and two spots of color bloomed in his cheeks. He wasbashful, she realized. How precious. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No. By all means.” She gestured extravagantly to the kitchen behind her. “Just…let me get the Clorox, first, to wipe the ear juice off the counter.”

Cassandra scrambled upright, eyes huge. “Ear juice?!”

“Oh, bollocks.”

~*~

“Shit, you really mean to cook,” Raven observed, fifteen minutes later.

Toly paused, knife poised over the pancetta he was about to chop, and shot her a look through his lashes thatmighthave been incredulous. It would have been quite a lot of nothing on someone else.

She spread her hands. “I’ve never seen a Lean Dog cook – actually cook. Mercy Lécuyer doesn’t count: he’s French.”

Seemingly mollified, he dropped his gaze back to his work, and ran the knife through the stacked pancetta, first one direction, and then the next, cutting it into tidy cubes.

Cassandra had badgered them for nearly fifteen minutes about “ear juice,” had sulked and even whined, until Raven finally snapped her fingers and brought out her I’m-Not-Your-Mum-But-I-Can-Be voice – an old reliable between them – and then she’d sulkily gone to tend to her homework.

After a perimeter check, Bennet had ensconced himself on the sofa in front of some sort of American football analysis program, the volume up loud enough that it created a kind of privacy in the adjoining kitchen.

Raven had gone to change out of her dress and into a tracksuit – one from her own line, this time, of softest velour, with wide-leg trousers and a zippered jacket with darts, and tucks, tailored so that, tracksuit or not, it still fit in a flattering, feminine way. She’d considered her laptop a moment, thought of calling Michelle, to…to what? Burden her with more problems? Some aunt she was. There was a book sitting on the edge of her nightstand, only four pages read, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick she’d intended to read for party small talk purposes, and to which she could have applied herself for an hour or two in an attempt to forget what had happened earlier.

But the chiming of her seldom-used pots and pans together had drawn her back to the kitchen, and there she’d discovered that she wasn’t the only one who’d thought to change.

Toly must have asked to borrow some clothes from Miles. He’d traded his trousers and crisp white shirt for a pair of sweatpants that rode low on his hips, half of his underpants waistband showing, along with a sliver of flat, pale stomach not covered by what was clearly one of Miles’s oldest, rarely-worn shirts: a faded black long-sleeve he’d probably had since he was a teenager, so tight on Toly that its AC/DC logo was stretched to distortion across his chest. He’d dunked his head under the sink, too, because it gleamed wet and fell loose to his shoulders, save where he’d tucked it behind his ears. Sleeves pushed up, barefoot, he moved around her kitchen not only as if he knew where everything was – and how had he learned that so quickly? – but also like he knew what he was doing in a culinary sense.

Raven decided that, after the past two days’ shocks, she’d earned the right to enjoy the view.