Page 55 of Fake Fae-Ancée

"You alright?" I asked. She flashed me another one of her angry glares. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing away, I realized how close up I was, boxing her in with my body against the cupboard door. Her glaring turned into flustered confusion.

I cleared my throat.

"Looking for something?"

"Food," Kai said bashfully, eyes averted. Her stomach growled. Yeah, right. She had stomped off to her room earlier, skipping dinner.

"There’s none in your faux kitchen," she muttered. "Only coffee and stuff. And this box." She pointed to the cardboard box that had almost fallen on her head.

"And you thought it a good idea to climb on a cupboard?" I cocked a brow, my hand resting on the cupboard door, my arm boxing Kai in as if I was hitting on her in a nightclub or something. On an impulse I wanted to withdraw and back away, but Bear growled. Insisted I stayed where I was.

Close.

Kai shrugged, eyes cast down. Typical of her to not ask for help. She must have been snooping around in this storage room for a while — also sans real food, it was all being kept in the actual kitchen downstairs. And then, when she found the box with the imprint "Canned goods" she had to go and get it.

"What’s in it anyway?" she asked, looking up and tilting her head, her new hair cascading down her shoulders. Crazy how a little change in look could make a difference…

"Emergency rations," I answered after some hesitation.

"Okay, now you have to tell me."

"You wouldn’t like it anyway."

"Let me be the judge of that, okay?"

I sighed, shoving her gently aside — also hesitating, because Bear didn’t agree at all with changing locations; he wanted to stay close — and heaved the cardboard box from the cupboard. I put it down, opening the flaps and pulling out a can of salmon.

"Oh." Kai snorted and then giggled.

Damn, I liked the sound of her giggling. It had been too long since I had heard her laugh like that.

"Like some?" I nudged the can at her.

"Eww. No fish for me, thanks." She sighed, crossed her arms in front of her chest. "Never mind. I’ll go back to bed."

"You could ring Bates." I got up, putting my emergency salmon back on top of the cupboard.

She tilted her head again. "Unlike some prince I know, I don’t ring up hard working people in the middle of the night just to have them make me a sandwich."

I winced. But she did have a point. I shook my head, keeping the chuckle inside that was bubbling inside my throat.

"You know what? You are right," I said. "We leave Bates alone. Come."

The kitchen downstairslooked more like a kitchen than that shiny chrome thing at the other end of my living room that I only used to make my morning coffee, and far more professional. Kai watched with wide eyes as I pulled the ingredients I needed out of the pantry and set a stainless steel pan down on the stove.

"You’re making French toast?“ Kai blinked at me in surprise. For some reason, the way she asked it sent a pleasant trickle down my spine.

"It’s one of the few things I can cook," I said, trying to focus on breaking eggs.

"I’m horrified that you can cook at all." Kai leaned next to me against the kitchen island, watching me whisking eggs in a bowl and cutting up bread.

"There’s lots of stuff you don’t know about me."

"Yeah, I bet."

I let that slide for now and concentrated on cooking.

Yeah, I did cook, now and then. Or baked. Nothing fancy. It was a welcome distraction when I couldn’t sleep at night, and really more about not thinking about stuff than actually producing anything worthwhile. And whatever I cooked was simple. French toast. Muffins. Pancakes — stuff that that conceited Half-Daemon friend of hers, who was supposedly some kind of culinary genius, would sneer upon.

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