Page 16 of The Billionaire's Bad News Baby

Elio stopped rubbing his head at that and nodded once. “You’re welcome. Though I am expecting a killer breakfast. No pressure or anything.”

Kayla grinned, glad that the game of teasing each other that they’d fallen into last night hadn’t disappeared. At least being stuck here wasn’t going to be unbearable. Heaven forbid, it might actually be a little fun.

“I was thinking an omelet?” she said, still aware that this wasn’t her kitchen and prodding for approval before she started messing around under Elio’s supervision.

“Sure,” he said. “If you’re that excited about cooking.”

“You don’t like it, I assume? But then what’s the point in doing all the cooking when you can pay someone to do it for you.”

“It’s not that. I’m just not very good at it.”

“Dinner was really nice,” Kayla insisted, not sure why she was so persistent in giving the guy a pep talk.

Elio shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can make halfway decent.”

“Well, it was definitely halfway decent.”

Despite himself, Elio grinned, and darn it, he really was more handsome with his hair all disheveled and his eyes still sleepy. Kayla turned her attention back to the ingredients she had at hand. Even the egg yolks were a more vivid shade of yellow than the ones she got back home. Kayla cut into the tomatoes, and the fresh smell erupted from them, the same as the onions.

“I’ve never seen someone so happy to cut up vegetables,” Elio said dryly, and Kayla turned to see him watching her with a raised eyebrow and an amused expression. She flushed, smothering the stupidly wide grin that had crept onto her face.

“It’s really good produce,” she said, embarrassed.

“I mean, it’s an onion?”

“Yeah, but it's a really, really nice onion.”

“You haven’t even eaten it yet.”

“No, but I can smell it, see it, and touch it. And it’s all better than anything I can get back home, even if I buy the fancy organic stuff.”

She lifted her chin in defiance of Elio’s teasing, but that seemed to only amuse him more.

“So I gather that you really like food, then?”

Kayla, her face growing hotter by the minute under his scrutiny, convinced herself that it was from the heat of the frying pan. She focused on her omelet rather than Elio, willing her skin to cool to a more respectable temperature.

“Who doesn’t like food?”

“Plenty of people I know don’t rave about the qualities of an onion. Even my chef, she just usually complains about how the vendors ripped her off at the markets.”

“Well, I like the produce here. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, for God’s sake.”

She peeked back over her shoulder at him. “So the love of your life is cooking?” he continued. “There are worse things you could be obsessed with.”

Kayla had to pause to think about that for a minute. She wasn’t that passionate about cooking to call it the love of her life. She… well, she did look forward to making dinner every day. Grocery shopping had always been the best way for her to unwind as she took an unreasonably long time perusing the aisles. And here she was oohing and ahhing over vegetables and their quality. She’d been so lost lately, afraid to leave the job she hated simply because she had no idea where to go afterwards. Being someone’s personal chef was a job, wasn’t it? Elio had just said so. Being a chef in general, even, that was a whole industry. That was certainly a direction she could head in…

“You’ve gone quiet,” Elio said, breaking Kayla out of her existential crisis.

“And?”

“And I’m usually the one that’s quiet.”

“I was too busy thinking about food to keep talking.”

He laughed even though it was the truth.

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