Page 18 of Now That It's You
Kyle laughed. “Yeah, I probably should have listened. Would have spent a lot less time eating Ramen noodles and sleeping on friends’ couches.”
“But look at you now.” She looked up and smiled, curls falling around her face. “You have your own gallery and sculptures in rich people’s houses all over the world.”
“You’ve been reading too many art magazines.” He felt oddly self-conscious, so he slid the tart plate in front of her. “Does this look okay?”
Meg nodded. “Could you stick it in the oven and set the timer for ten minutes?”
“Yep.” Kyle turned to the stainless-steel monstrosity on the other side of the kitchen and opened the door to slide the crust into the pre-heated depths. Something caught his eye on the bookshelf overhead, and he pushed the oven door shut so he could take a closer look.
“Is this your aphrodisiac cookbook?”
Meg turned and glanced at the glossy book he’d pulled off the shelf lined with all her other cookbooks. Her cheeks went a little pinker as she nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”
She sounded a little shy about it, but Kyle flipped the cover open anyway and began to skim. Food descriptions and photos lined each glossy page, with a beaming picture of Meg chopping parsley catching Kyle’s attention more than it ought to. “This is amazing.”
“Yeah. I know sports photography was his thing, but Matt used to take pretty great food photos.”
“I meant all these recipes. ‘Blood orange-roasted asparagus with blackened Anaheim peppers and pine nuts?’ That sounds incredible.”
Meg smiled. “The capsaicin in the peppers gets the blood flowing and stimulates nerve endings, and the vitamin E in asparagus can help boost testosterone, while?—”
“You came up with all of these recipes?”
She nodded, using a spatula to point to a page he’d just flipped to. “That section with the lavender is my favorite.”
“Can we make some of these?”
Meg raised an eyebrow. “Right now?”
“Sure, why not?”
There were a million reasons why not, and Kyle damn well knew it. But he waited anyway, hoping maybe she didn’t see it the same way he did. Or maybe that she did.
“You want to make dinner together from my aphrodisiac cookbook?”
“Sure.” He closed the book, and set it on the counter. “Whenever you have time, I mean.”
“Now’s good.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It can be like our own memorial to Matt or something.”
“Absolutely,” Kyle said, though that wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind. He picked up the book again, turning more slowly past the photos. They really were beautiful. His brother had been a damn fine photographer, though it was Meg’s words that grabbed him. Her descriptions of succulent lamb and avocado drizzled with honey were making his mouth water, or maybe that wasn’t the food at all.
He looked up at Meg and knew damn sure it wasn’t the food. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 4
Meg couldn’t believe she was standing shoulder to shoulder with her former-future-brother-in-law in her kitchen, the two of them making dinner together like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It used to be. How the hell had two years gone by?
“Does this look right for the mango?”
Meg turned to see Kyle with a smear of something orange on his sleeve. She peered around his shoulder, flummoxed by the size of him. It had been a long time since a man—any man—stood at her counter chopping tropical fruit.
“Maybe a little smaller,” she said. “We want to be able to tell it apart from the papaya.”
