Page 9 of Beautifully Broken (The Montebellos 6)

There was no sight, nor sound of her. Good.

But as he pushed into the kitchen, his luck ran out in spectacular fashion.

Not only was the intruder ensconced here, she had completely taken over the space. Neatly – and orderly – but nonetheless, almost every surface was covered. Bowls, pots, pans, chopping boards, and various food items, were scattered over the counter. And it smelled…wonderful.

His stomach gave a low grumble of recognition, but he refused to be mollified by the fact she had clearly concocted something delicious, when he hadn’t eaten all day. He wanted a damned coffee and she was standing between him and his machine. In an apron, no less. Damn it, where had she even found such a thing in his home?

“What the hell are you doing?”

She startled out of the note she was making, lifting a hand and self-consciously pushing her hair back from her cheek, unwittingly smudging polenta there.

She’d wondered if she should ask him to use the kitchen, but he’d been quite emphatic about not disturbing him, and it wasn’t as though she was depleting his resources. A quick investigation of the larder attached to the kitchen showed that he was well-stocked enough to last out a decades-long blizzard. Bags of polenta, flour, pasta, rice and legumes stood beside wicker baskets overflowing with produce – onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, apples, pumpkins. There were cartons of long life milk, cream, milk solids, spices galore. It was a cook’s dream come true, and yet she suspected this man rarely made use of the stock.

“Cooking,” she responded simply, wondering if that would annoy him further or placate him.

“I can see that,” he clamped his lips together, crossing his arms over his chest as he had the night before. He was mercifully dressed now, wearing a grey sweater with a pair of dark jeans. “Why?”

“Well, what else was I supposed to do?”

He frowned as though that hadn’t occurred to him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally, moving his coffee cup from one hand to the other.

Realising it was empty, and guessing at his reason for coming into the kitchen, she extended her hand for it. “Top up?”

He stared at her as though she’d started speaking Swahili.

“Coffee. Would you like one?”

If anything, his scowl grew deeper. “That was my intention.”

“Then let me make it. How do you take it?”

More confusion. He looked at her with a beetled brow before extending the mug as if for lack of other options.

“Black? White? Sugar?”

“Black.”

“Of course, like a proud Italian male,” she couldn’t help teasing. He was, clearly, not receptive to the comment. Her smile dropped a little but she did her best not to show how unnerving she found him.

“I was just about to make one for myself,” she said after a charged silence. “This is a beautiful machine.”

Rather than an ordinary domestic coffee maker, he had a café style cappuccino machine installed, and it had been left on when she’d come in that morning. Pulling a milk from the fridge and pouring it into a small stainless-steel jug, she set about grinding the beans before gently tamping down on the coffee.

“You have worked as a barista.” The statement was a completely toneless observation – his voice not showing interest, nor speculation, nor anything so ordinary as a conversational cue.

Nonetheless, it was a step up from, don’t bother me, stay out of my way, so she smiled and nodded. “When I was at uni, yeah. It’s kind of a great Aussie tradition – most of us have worked in a café at some point or another.” She locked the coffee bar into place and lined up a cup beneath, pressing the red switch and observing as the machine hummed to life, and after a tiny delay, a rich golden brown liquid began to pour from the basket, two dark streams of coffee joining together and pooling in one cup. She waited about twenty seconds then flicked the switch off, breathing in the delicious aroma before removing the cup and handing it to him.

He nodded by way of acknowledgement – she wondered if ‘thanks’ or ‘grazie’ were even in his vocabulary. Somehow, she doubted it.

Emptying the coffee grinds, she went through the motions again, aware of his eyes on her back the whole time, and wishing he’d go away while somehow hoping he’d remain. She refilled the basket with care, tamped down on it then slid it into place.

“I miss this, you know,” she said, conversationally, as the coffee began to stream into her own cup. She simultaneously lifted the jug towards the steam nozzle and tilted it at an angle as she rotated the switch, so that for a moment, conversation was made difficult by the noise of the milk’s heating. It swirled around and around in the jug and when the side felt too hot to hold, Isabella released the pressure, turning the nozzle off and banging the jug on the countertop.

“Miss what?”

The question seemed to be drawn from him against his will. She angled her face in his direction a little, but promptly looked away again at his expression. It was forbidding, to say the least. He had said he wasn’t nice, or kind – though the two were not mutually exclusive and of course had very different meanings. Well, she didn’t know if that was an accurate observation but she did know he wasn’t particularly friendly or polite, and she couldn’t quite fathom how to deal with such unashamed animosity.

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