Page 36 of The Good Girl (Nashville Neighborhood)

It made my knees weak to see his reaction and hear his praise. And he wasn’t just saying it to be nice. This was genuine.

I used the side of my fork to cut a piece of pasta, and then swirled the bite in the sauce. The pasta was nice and tender, and while the sauce was rich, it wasn’t too heavy.

“Seriously,” he added between bites. “Any time you want to cook for me, feel free. You can be my personal chef.”

I chuckled. “You couldn’t afford me.”

His eyes gleamed. “I could pay you with sex.”

My breath caught. “You saying you’ll give me more lessons?”

For a single heartbeat, he considered it, but then a smile spread across his face, and he shook his head. “I was just kidding.” He took a sip of his wine, set the glass down, and his expression turned serious. “Also, I don’t have a clue how much a personal chef makes.”

“It depends on the job. One of the guys I worked with last summer took a job as some celebrity’s chef. He said it was like a hundred thousand a year, but it was also six days a week.”

“You ever consider doing it?”

“Yeah, I’d love to, someday. It’s kind of my dream job, but no one is going to hire me without culinary training.”

An odd, pleasant sensation flitted through me. No one outside of the restaurant ever asked me what I wanted to do. It was nice Preston seemed genuinely interested.

“Some chefs look down on it, you know,” I added. “They say private chefs can’t hack it on the line or they aren’t team players, but I don’t think that’s true at all. You’re still on a team, it’s just your coworkers are your clients instead of other chefs.”

He nodded. “I get what you mean. My events are always better when the client participates in the planning and trusts me to get it done.”

“That’s the other thing that I like about going the private route, the menu planning. The variety. I wouldn’t be cooking parts of the same twenty dishes every night.”

He took another bite of his dinner. “Again, I get it.” His tone was warm as he pointed to himself. “Big fan of planning right here.”

We were quiet for a moment, simply enjoying each other’s company.

“Can I ask you something?” A voice inside my head warned me not to do it, but I ignored it. “The girl you went on the date with. She was really pretty. How come you don’t want to see her again?”

If there’d been a whiff of jealousy in my question, he hadn’t noticed. He picked up his glass and took a sip while he considered how to answer. “I didn’t know her when I asked her out, so I didn’t realize we had nothing in common. There was no,” he searched for the word, “spark, which sounds dumb, but it was true. I figured that out too late. Colin and I had just landed Troy’s agency as a new account, and that girl? She’s the owner’s daughter.”

The sting was immediate. “You asked her out?”

He looked, of all things, embarrassed. “Okay, yeah. I told you I don’t date, but that was a while ago. Things have changed.”

Let it go, Sydney.

But I couldn’t. “How so?”

Thankfully, my tone sounded more curious than anything else, and it made Preston shrug. “Back then, I didn’t want anything serious. Now that school’s over, things are different. All my friends have already found, like, their person. Colin, and Troy, and Cassidy—”

His expression abruptly went blank.

Her name had rolled off his tongue with ease, and it seemed he’d surprised himself. It certainly surprised me that he still considered her a friend after everything.

Or maybe his stunned look was caused by something else. Was he coming to terms with the idea that Cassidy’s person . . . was his dad?

His gaze dropped to his plate, and he pushed the silverware around, straightening the place setting while trying to hide his discomfort.

“I remember what that was like.” His voice wasn’t as normal. “Having someone you want all the time.” He made a face, displeased with himself. “I don’t just mean sex, either. Someone you want to be around all the time.”

When his focus lifted back to me, everything went still.

“I miss that,” he said. “Sometimes it feels like I might not ever get to feel that way again.” He frowned, and irritation edged his brown eyes. “It doesn’t help that the girl I’ve spent the last year thinking about is off-limits.”

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