“The place is pretty risqué, so I was actually thinking maybe just a bustier and a miniskirt. Or would that be too skanky?”

I pursed my lips. I wouldn’t have the balls to pull it off, but hey, if Maggie was brave enough to venture out in little more than her underwear, more power to her.

“Actually, our new Lovely Lace collection has a really pretty bustier,” I said. “That might be perfect.”

I wasn’t brave enough to wear something like that, or maybe it was just that I didn’t have a man to wear it for. And the naive hope that Smith would be the man to change all that had all but died inside me.

Chapter Ten

Mirepoix.

I stared down at the cookbook with a scowl and reached for the laptop on the counter a few feet away. It only took a second to look up the term once I got the spelling right.

Carrots, celery, and onion.

Right.

This was exactly why I didn’t cook, aside from burgers and steaks on the grill most of the time. These chefs had to use fancy words for simple things, and I was pretty sure that was by design just to make guys like me feel stupid.

I’d made the mistake of asking my sister Pam what I could make for a woman I was having over for dinner.

“Well, that depends,” Pam had said. “Do you want to impress her?”

I’d stupidly answered yes. Then I did some backpedaling, framing all of this in a hypothetical fashion, since there was no way in fuck I was going to admit to my sister that I was courting Evie fucking Reed.

Pam had laughed and said, “Well, hypothetically speaking, I would make this,” and then she shoved the French cookbook at me, the page for the recipe dog-eared.

I made my way over to the fridge and pulled out the ingredients for my mirepoix and brought it back to the cutting board. All the while, a voice in my head kept telling me I was being a chump for feeling like a teenager getting ready for the freaking prom.

This wasn’t even a date. Not really, anyway. This was me trying to be an adult about the searing-hot attraction between Evie and me. And so, yeah, we were going to stuff some food into our faces while we talked about it.

Not even a date.

But you did buy that bottle of wine. And you did vacuum the living room for the first time in like five months.

“Ah, shut up,” I muttered to the voice inside my head.

It wasn’t a date, and that was that. And under no circumstances was this night going to end with any part of me inside any part of Evie. That much I’d vowed to myself already. She and Cullen were super close. Cullen and I were almost as close as that. No way in hell was I going to become the wedge that tore us all apart. The Reed family business would suffer, and we’d all wind up losing something way more valuable than just sex . . .

No matter how hot it was.

My cock swelled at the thought and I ruthlessly shut it down, calling up an image of my ninth-grade gym teacher, Mr. Tubolowski. I’d walked in on him once when he was changing and had caught him buck naked. He was hung like a Clydesdale, his balls nearly scraping the floor, and perpetually smelled of gym shoes and hot garbage. If that mental image didn’t kill this boner, nothing would.

“Mirepoix,” I muttered under my breath, chopping carrots and trying to avoid my fingers. Apparently, they looked just like carrots, because I wound up nicking one and slicing a flap of skin off another, and had to start all over again after disinfecting and taping up.

As I finished up the slicing, dicing, and dismemberment portion of my show, I realized with a start that it had been years since I’d cooked for a woman. Sure, I’d bring along some sour cream dip or hot wings to a Sunday football viewing, but mostly, I was the guy who came in with a bucket of something fried.

In fact, I was pretty sure I hadn’t done it since Karen and I had split over four years ago. I used to cook Sunday morning breakfast for the two of us, but when things went south, that had stopped, right along with just about anything else fun. Once she realized I wasn’t going to marry her, she’d shut down completely.

Who could blame her, though? She’d put in two years of her life, and no matter how much my mind tried to convince me that it all made sense on paper, my heart wouldn’t listen. I just couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger.

Now, looking back as I anticipated this evening with Evie, I realized it had never felt . . . easy enough with Karen. I cared for her deeply and she was a good person, and the sex was frequent and solid. It was just that I never felt like I was truly myself around her.

Probably my own fault, but there it was.

I set the vegetables into a frying pan with some olive oil to sauté and then took out the roasting chicken, but my mind wasn’t on fowl. It was on Evie. Exactly where it had been since that night in Paris.

Tonight, we’d spend some time together. Simply because I wanted to, not just because I wanted to figure out what was happening between us. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing right now.

Bandages, mirepoix, blue-ball misery, and all. I wouldn’t change a thing.

The realization gave me pause, but for once, I didn’t fight it. The Reed family had been one of the only real constants in my life. Yeah, my adoptive family was amazing. And my siblings, especially Pam and my brother Dave, had filled a huge hole created by being abandoned and in foster care.

But my siblings were sort of stuck with me. I wasn’t going anywhere. The Reeds, however, had chosen me.

Cullen had wanted to be my friend even when I was the new kid at school who had just appeared one day as part of the Hamilton clan. Evie had accepted me just as quickly, treating me like an older brother through my teen years and into my early twenties.