Page 60 of The Affair
“What? Are you kidding me?” I wasn’t sure if I was livid that she’d swindled yet another person into buying her crap or amazed he’d fallen for it.
“She was extremely nice, and it saves me a trip to the store.”
“Because you’re always running out of moisturizer?”
He grinned, running a hand down his stubbled jaw before giving me a quick wink. “Can’t look this good without a little maintenance.”
If my cheeks weren’t flushed before, they were now.
“Do you have the butter?” I asked, my voice slightly high and squeaky, as I tried not to imagine what other kind of maintenance went into that body of his.
Does he work out? And if so, what and where? Could I watch?
Is his chest smooth? If I ran my hands all the way down—
“Are you feeling all right?”
“What?” I stammered. “Yep, all good! Why?”
“I pointed to the butter on the counter there, and you didn’t seem to even notice,” he said, motioning to the two sticks of butter literally right next to me. “Are you sure you’re feeling up to this? We could just watch a movie, or I could even leave, so you could take a nap.”
“Fine,” I said firmly. “I’m totally fine.”
A grin crept up his mouth as his gaze settled on mine. “Okay. Why don’t you get a mixing bowl for me? I’ve managed to mix up the dry ingredients without destroying the kitchen, but I could use some assistance with the wet.”
Did he just say wet?
“Sure,” I said, feeling highly distracted.
But then again, he’d been a distraction since arriving at my store with his devastating good looks and nonstop charm. Now that he’d made himself right at home in my house, I felt like all my attention was focused on him and how not to rip off his shirt.
Because that would be bad, I reminded myself.
Very, very bad.
Reaching high into the cabinet, I managed to grab a glass mixing bowl and set it down on the counter. Taking a look at the recipe, I tried to keep myself busy, pulling out the rest of the ingredients and setting them on the table.
“What are you doing?” he asked, curiosity blazing in those green eyes of his.
“Grabbing everything we need and putting it on the table. Don’t you do that?”
He chuckled. “No, I’m more of a high-stress, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type baker. But I can see how this could reduce some of that anxiety I was having.”
“This was always my job,” I explained. “Grabbing everything from the pantry for my nana. She liked to have it all within arm’s reach. But she had more counter space than we do, so it was a little easier to bake with her.”
His gaze moved about the kitchen. “You could expand,” he said before quickly amending his words. “In the future.”
“Actually, that was one thing my mom always wanted—a bigger kitchen—but she never had the money. Everything Mom and Dad made went back to the store or to the two of us, making sure we had money for all of our extracurricular activities and college.”
“That’s what parents are supposed to do,” he said, and I couldn’t help but notice the dismal tone in his voice.
It was that missing piece of the puzzle again, the one that I couldn’t figure out, the one I was too afraid to ask.How could two brothers raised in the same house have such different upbringings?
“Tell me about the journal. I know you were dying to share when I walked in,” he said as we came together, side by side, at the small counter.
I reached for the eggs and handed them to him, keeping my promise to not actually handle any of the ingredients even though I was feeling perfectly fine. “Oh, um, I haven’t gotten that far into it.”
“Is it different?”
