She pulled herself up, despite his attempts to keep her on top of him.
“I’ll make us pasta.”
He got up, too, and followed her to the kitchen.
“You don’t have to do that, we can order something.”
She was already filling a pot with water.
“I know, but in the time it’ll take for it to get here, I could make us pasta twice over.”
Well, he wasn’t going to complain if a hot, naked woman he’d just had excellent sex with wanted to make him dinner. She bustled around, taking eggs and cheese out of the fridge, and garlic out of the pantry.
“What can I do?”
She smiled at him.
“You can pour us some wine. There’s a bottle open in the fridge.”
He found the bottle, and then dodged around her to reach the wineglasses.
“What else?” he asked as he set her glass on the counter at her right hand.
She looked at him for a second.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you can sit at the counter there and talk to me, and—”
“And get out of your way?” he finished, moving out of the kitchen to sit at the counter.
She laughed.
“Yes, thank you. This kitchen is too small to have more than one person in it at a time.”
He looked at her, standing next to the stove, a glass of wine in one hand, a knife in the other, as she sliced garlic, and bacon sizzled next to her.
“Um. Can I also do one more thing?” He went back in the living room and picked up the silky, clingy, incredibly sexy robe she’d been wearing when he came to her door. “Not that I want you to put clothes on right now,” he said, when he came back into the kitchen, “but I’ve quickly become very attached to those breasts of yours. I don’t want them to get burned.”
She grinned at him and slid the robe on.
“Better?” she asked as she took a sip of her wine and stirred the bacon in the pan.
He shook his head.
“I mean, yes and no. That seems a lot safer, but I miss the view.” He bit his lip. “Though . . . you look pretty fantastic in that robe, I’m not going to lie.”
She’d tied it very loosely. He liked it that way.
“See, if we’d gone somewhere, or ordered food, at least one of us would have had to put actual clothes on, and that would have been terrible.” She giggled again. “I just imagined the look on Sydney’s face if I’d walked into the Barrel to pick up takeout in this robe.”
He looked up from her cleavage.
“Did she tell you that I went there, looking for you?”
Why had he just blurted that out? If Sydney had told her, which was likely, there was no need to talk about it right now.
She put down her wooden spoon and looked at him.
“No. When did you go to the Barrel looking for me?”
Oh.
“I assumed she told you. It was after that time in your office. Later that night.” She lowered her glass to the counter. “I walked over there, thinking maybe you might be there. I wanted to . . . I don’t know, see you, talk to you, apologize, something. And then I stood outside for a while and decided that if you were there, you wouldn’t welcome me coming to find you. So I turned away. Sydney saw me. I think she approved.”
Margot had an expression on her face he couldn’t decipher.
“Yeah, she would approve,” she said finally. A tiny smile came to her lips. “So do I.”
The water boiled over and hissed on the stove. Margot grabbed a big handful of pasta and dropped it in the pot and gave it a big stir.
“I think Sydney feels . . . responsible,” she said. “For what happened that first night.”
He laughed.
“Responsible? Why?”
She looked up at him from under her lashes.
“She kind of . . . dared me to hit on you that night. She was very proud of herself when we left together.” She made a face. “That was, until I talked to her on Monday.”
Luke laughed.
“Ah, that’s why you said ‘responsible’ like that. I was going to say, ‘responsible’ means it was something bad, and that night certainly wasn’t.”
Margot laughed, and then sighed.
“No, but I felt pretty guilty, and Sydney knew it. I didn’t even tell her about that kiss in my office, you know. But she knew I was . . . having trouble not thinking about you. That’s probably why she reacted the way she did to you when you went to the Barrel. She even—”
Margot stopped, and turned the temperature down under the bacon. It wasn’t until she reached for the tongs that he realized she wasn’t going to finish.