Page 15 of Accidental Mate

“I can explain, but you must be hungry.”

“If anything, I’m hangry—you know that icky combination of hungry and angry?” When he looked at her blankly, she stomped her foot, making her breasts bounce and catching his attention. She grabbed the heavy, V-neck sweater he’d had on earlier, pulling it over her head and allowing it to fall to mid-thigh. “Pay attention, you sonofabitch. You bit me.”

“I know, but I can explain it, although in the mood you’re in, I’m not sure you’ll care.”

“Probably not, but I am hungry. Do you cook?”

“Yes. There’s not a lot to do in Reykjavik, so I took classes.”

“Iceland? You live in Iceland? This weather must seem downright temperate to you.”

“Not a chance. Iceland really isn’t all that cold. I mean it gets colder in the winter than some places, but it’s the tropics compared to Alaska. So why don’t we head over to the kitchen? You can sit at the island, and I’ll make you a cup of coffee or tea. How hungry are you? Like do you need a snack while I make something more substantive?”

“I’m ravenous, but I can wait.”

“Nonsense. I picked up some cured meats, cheese and crackers in Otter Cove. I’ll put something together you can nibble on. The venison and vegetables are pretty much done. I just need to cook and smash the potatoes…”

“Shepherd’s pie? Made with venison? I hope you’re a really good cook because that sounds amazing.”

He grinned at her. She realized that when he smiled, it softened the sharp, angular features of his face, and there were crinkles around the corners of his ice-blue eyes, making them appear merry and bright.

“Next time, I’ll put you to work helping me peel and chop the veggies.”

“Uh, you might want to rethink that. If you give me a vegetable peeler, I can clean and peel vegetables. However, giving me a knife in a kitchen tends to produce rather unexpected and bloody results.”

Carson laughed. “Good to know.” He came around the end of the bed and reached for her. Amelia pulled back. “Seriously? If I was going to hurt you, wouldn’t it have been easier to just let you go down with your plane or let the fever or pneumonia take you?”

He had a point. “Yes, but then you couldn’t have enjoyed sex with me.” She couldn’t believe she’d just said that and been joking.

“True enough,” he chuckled. “And there is little I wouldn’t endure to have experienced that.”

This time when he reached out to stroke his finger down her jawline, not only didn’t she flinch, but she leaned her cheek into his hand.

“It’ll be all right, Amelia. Let me get us fed, and we can talk about it over dinner. I want to show you something as soon as I get the potatoes cut up and in boiling water.”

“I can peel them for you.”

“What? And throw away all the nutritional value in the skins? No way.”

Carson made her a small plate of cured and smoked meats, cheeses, dried fruit and vegetables, crackers and complementary condiments – honey, jams, chutney, and a couple of mustards.

“Yum,” she said as he set it down. “You must have had a lot of time on your hands in Iceland.”

He shrugged. “There are only so many girls you can fuck that you don’t work with. After a while, meaningless relationships and recreational sex can get old.”

“So should I worry that we had unprotected sex?”

His knife stopped mid-chop. “No. I am absolutely clean, and I doubt you’d get pregnant so close to having been so sick, but if you do, the child will be ours. I won’t run out on you, Amelia. You are neither meaningless nor recreational to me. What happened over there,” he pointed to the bed with his knife, “was important to me. I hope when you hear me out, it’ll be important to you, as well.”

Amelia was a little stunned by his declaration. He’d gone from Charming Guy to Serious Guy in the blink of an eye.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m clean, too, and I’m on birth control.”

He nodded and placed the cut-up potatoes into a pot of boiling water, wiped the knife blade down and put it in the sink. “Come on; I want to show you something.”

Amelia hopped off the counter stool and followed him to the pantry. “Okay, you have a pantry.”

“Technically, my brother Mason has a pantry. It’s his cabin, but it’s not the pantry, per se, that I wanted to show you.” He walked to the side pantry at the back and dislodged part of the cabinetry to form a lever, which he tripped and then pulled the shelf away from the wall to reveal a hole in the floor. “There’s a ladder which leads to a tunnel which takes you away from the cabin and lets you come up several miles away. If anything happens and I tell you to run, you get to this pantry, close the door behind you, go down the ladder, and when you get to the bottom, you pull the lever that moves it back into place.”

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