Page 11 of Italian’s Christmas Acquisition

She suddenly looked alarmed, then moved away from him, the tray of cookies and the oven, and sneezed again.

“I do not wish for you to prepare the food anyway. I will make some eggs.”

“Do you know how to do that?”

“How hard can it be?”

“You don’t know how to cook eggs?”

“I haven’t done it before, that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how.”

She sneezed again.

“You are unwell. I do not wish to have you sporing around my food.”

She sputtered. “I am not...sporing.”

“You are,” he said. “Sadly. For both of us.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Out,” he said.

She obeyed him but not before grabbing a pot and two cups. But her general obedience was surprising, because she had been nothing but curmudgeonly from the moment they had encountered one another this morning.

She was quite ungrateful for what he was attempting to do.

Most people were happy to take the check. Living in places like this was not easy. There were few rewards for working as hard as people like her were working. There were few rewards for living such a hardscrabble life. In truth, as he expanded his resort empire, resistance was so unusual that he didn’t even have an inbuilt method for dealing with dissenters. Usually, all he had to do was make it clear that he was sincere in the money that he was offering, and people took the check, and gave him the land.

This sort of thing was... Unwell. Mentally unstable behavior, in his opinion. People who were so attached to a specific place or thing that they couldn’t bear to get rid of it... There was something wrong with them.

He looked around the kitchen, uncertain about where he might find a pan. He opened the drawers until he noticed one under the stovetop, and inside found a skillet. He was resourceful. It galled him to have to look up a recipe for eggs.

Surely it waseggs. What else could it entail?

But he did search for a recipe, because if nothing else, he was a perfectionist. And he found there was slightly more to it than he had imagined.

But there was a level of control with food that he required, and at least this would allow him to have that.

He spent longer than he would like to admit looking for a mixing bowl, and a whisk, but then he followed the instructions on the website that he had found on his phone, and set about to the task of scrambling the eggs.

He grimaced as he did so, but before he knew it, he had a dozen eggs scrambled. He portioned them out so that he had the lion’s share, and she had a bit, and then he added a cookie to her plate. Clearly she had been happy enough to eat the cookies.

He walked out of the kitchen, and did not see her. He moved down the hall, both plates in his hands, and finally saw a dining room, where she was sitting at the end of an ornate dining table with a lace tablecloth. Tablecloths made no sense to him. Better to wipe the hard surface of the table than add cloth to the top of it that you would have to launder after.

“Here,” he said, putting a plate in front of her.

“Scrambled eggs and a cookie,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, there’s coffee in this carafe.”

He was reasonably comfortable with that. He liked his coffee black and strong, and this would suffice.

“Why don’t you eat leftovers? Are you too fancy?”

“I am not... Fancy.”

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