Read Online Something Has to Give by Maren Smith - Free Book Online Page B

every deeply indrawn breath. His mouth was watering, his stomach was rumbling, and against his better judgment, his hopes were rising. Yet, in the back of his mind he knew the second he stepped through the kitchen archway, she was going to dash those hopes with little more than a crusty look and maybe—maybe, if he was lucky—an unspit-upon peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
    He braced himself—for combat, he firmly told himself, but his heart was racing and his body humming in the way it did only when beautiful women were involved—and rounded the corner.
    Elsie was standing at the stove, alternately shaking and stirring a sizzling pan of steaming potatoes, green beans and corned beef. The sight of that simple homemade hash was enough to cramp his empty stomach. A bowl of grated cheddar cheese rested on the stove within easy arm’s reach. Next to it was another bowl stacked with a handful of clean, white eggs.
    There was definitely enough food in that pan to serve two, three, maybe even four people.
    Elsie stubbornly kept stirring, turning the browning potatoes over and over and shooting him nervous sidelong looks out of the corner of her eye. She said nothing, but he could already see her back stiffening and her defensive hackles rising.
    “Looks good,” he said , fully expecting her to lash back, verbally at the very least.
    She didn’t. She shot him another side ways look, one that didn’t quite rise far enough to meet his eyes, and then flipped the potatoes again. “Thanks.”
    Well…hell. She was actually going to feed him.
    “Anything I can do to help?” he asked, painstakingly neutral.
    Another sidelong look. She started to say no, but then he saw her pause. “You can put the glasses and water on the table.”
    “Do you want a beer?”
    “No,” she said shortly. “But I don’t care if you do.”
    “All right.” He went to the fridge and got a beer, then made a brief search of the cabinets until he found a pitcher. He filled it partway with ice and then water from the tap. As he waited for the pitcher to fill, he kept glancing back at her, watching surreptitiously while she added first the eggs and then the cheese to the hash, covered the pan and let it cook. She didn’t look at him. She made a point of not looking. That she wasn’t comfortable with what she was doing was plain, and that began to make him think.
    When the pitcher was half full, he shut of f the water and took both it and his beer out to the table. He set the ice water beside one setting and sat down to wait at the other. Hands resting on his thighs, he watched the condensation building on the side of his beer and thought until she emerged from the kitchen with the pan in one hand and a plastic spatula in the other. She came to his chair, already cutting out a square of cheesy hash.
    “I’m still evicting you,” he said, wanting there to be absolutely no mistake in where he stood.
    For the first time, she looked at him, her eyes flashing, the spatula trembling ever so slightly. She spooned a square of hash onto his plate. “More?” she asked, flatly.
    “Yes, please.” Snapping out his napkin, he laid it across his lap and leaned back to watch as she added to what was already on his plate, then spooned up a helping for herself. The hash was thick and heavy, bending the flimsy plastic spatula and leaving multiple strands of yellow cheese trailing from pan to plate. “You should have used a wooden spoon. They’re sturdier…as you probably remember well.”
    Winding the cheese around the spatula until the strands broke, she avoided meeting his eyes. “I burned them.”
    He paused in the midst of taking his first bite. “Did you really?”
    She took the pan back to the kitchen.
    “Well, that’s all right,” he called after her. “I can make more. My woodworking tools are all stacked up neatly in the tool shed.”
    “Used to be, you mean,” she said , coming back to the table and sitting down.
    He stopped with his second