Page 48 of Depths of Desire
Oliver. Clean lines, navy button-up with sleeves rolled to the elbows, tucked just barely into dark jeans. Bare feet, sharp jaw, and eyes that pinned me in place like I’d just made the finals in a race I hadn’t known I’d entered.
“Hey,” he said.
Just that. But his voice had that low undertone again. The one I remembered from the cabin. The one I hadn’t stopped replaying in my head for two straight weeks.
“Hey,” I managed, already half breathless.
I thought, for one heated second, that this was a sex date. That the shirt was going to come off fast and the night was going to unravel in a mess of limbs and groans and desperation.
But then I stepped inside and smelled food.
Garlic, lemon, maybe something peppery. My stomach growled before I could stop it.
“You’re cooking?” I asked, blinking like it was the most unexpected thing in the world.
Oliver shrugged, stepping aside so I could walk in. “You promised killer breakfast sandwiches, and we never got them. Figured I should prove I can at least make dinner.”
“I do like a man who takes things into his own hands,” I said, voice dropping by an octave.
Oliver’s eyebrows danced. “Why don’t we eat first?”
My teeth sank into my lower lip in a desperate attempt to hold down a grin.
He said it like it was no big deal, like he didn’t just disarm me more with that than if he’d stripped me naked in the hallway.
I looked around. Clean kitchen and dimmed lights. Something sizzled in the pan on the stove.
It wasn’t a hookup.
It was a date.
And that made my knees weaker than anything else could have.
Oliver waved me toward the kitchen island, where two stools waited, already set with plates and real napkins, cloth, not paper. The overhead lights were dimmed low, just enough to gleam off the countertop, the rest of the apartment wrapped in that soft, golden hush that only seemed to exist in places people lived alone.
“Take a seat,” he said, turning back to the stove with a little flourish of his wrist like he was about to perform a magic trick.
I slid onto the stool and rested my elbows on the island, watching the way he moved. Precise, but not tense. Confident in his own space. His sleeves were rolled perfectly, revealing his forearms, the muscles shifting every time he stirred whatever was in the pan.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I teased.
He glanced over his shoulder, giving me a grin that knocked something loose in my chest. “Absolutely not. I can’t cook for shit. This is basically a soft con.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. You’re here now. You’re stuck with it.”
I laughed. “So what am I eating, exactly?”
“It started as lemon-garlic chicken. Now I think it’s just…chicken adjacent. With vibes.”
“Sexy vibes?”
He tilted his head like he was genuinely considering it. “Very sexy. Possibly cursed, but definitely sexy.”
I watched him a second longer, then leaned back a little, letting the counter cool beneath my arms. “Well, I’ve had worse reasons to be invited over.”
He reached for a bottle of red wine sitting on the edge of the counter. “I don’t really drink, you know,” he said, twisting the corkscrew into the cap. “But people keep sending me bottles. Sponsors, event organizers, one guy sent me three after I placed silver last summer and then followed up with a handwritten note about the tannins.”
