Page 7 of Tempted By the Safety

I put my eyes on the back of his head instead. His curls are still damp at the edges. That, I can look at.

“What is this?” I ask.

He turns, smiling, and a plate lands in front of the barstool at the island before I’ve pulled it out. Eggs, soft-scrambled, bacon laid across the top in a fan, browned toast cut on a diagonal.

“Good morning to you too, boss.” He sets a fork down next to the plate and steps back with the spatula still in hand. “Sit. Eat. Tell me I’m a genius.”

I look at the plate, then at him. “I didn’t hire a cook.”

“No,” he agrees, easy, no dent in the smile. “You hired a PA who can’t sleep in new places and was up at five thirty staring at your ceiling, so I figured I’d make myself useful instead of lying there doing math about how many track lights you have in the guest suite. Six, by the way. Excessive.”

I sit down without meaning to and pick up the fork.

The eggs are good, salted just right. The bacon’s got a little char on it, and the toast is buttered to the edges. I eat every bite and don’t say a word, because saying anything makes this a thing that happens again.

Milo watches me eat, leaning against the counter, arms crossed loose over that strip of bare stomach, waiting me out.

I set the fork down. “It’s good. You cook?”

“Yeah, kind of.” He tips his head. “Pastry’s the dream, though. Was the dream, but I never got to chase it. There was always rent, or my mom, or a shift somebody needed covered. So Icarried other people’s plates instead of making what goes on them.”

He keeps it light, but the grin slips on the last part.

“I see. Well, the cooking’s not necessary,” I say flatly. “I normally have breakfast out. There’s a place nearby, they know my order, it takes four minutes.”

Disappointment crosses his face, there and gone. I only see it because I’m trained to read men trying to give nothing away before the snap.

“Okay,” he says, and the smile’s already patched back over the gap. “Noted. Four-minute breakfast guy.”

I stand, and my eyes go over the counter again. “Get dressed. We’re going to be late.”

“I’ve gotta clean this first.” He gestures at the wreckage with the spatula. “I can’t just leave it like this, it looks like a crime scene.”

“I have a cleaner for that.”

He blinks. “A cleaner?”

“Comes every afternoon. Leave it.” I’m already moving toward the hall, checking my watch, running drive time against the meeting that Amanda will not let me miss for the third time. “Fifteen minutes. Go.”

He salutes me with the spatula, which I choose to ignore, and disappears toward the stairs, bare feet slapping the hardwood all the way up.

I spend the fifteen minutes checking email on my phone at the island, standing in the middle of the mess, and somewhere around minute eleven I’m glancing at the staircase more thanthe screen. I put that down to impatience about the schedule and nothing else.

When he comes back down, it’s the outfit he showed up in yesterday. Cream cropped knit, high-waisted shorts, the white socks, the beat-up sneakers he clearly loves more than is reasonable for a shoe with visible stitching coming apart at the toe. It’s marginally more coverage than the crop top and the tiny shorts, technically, if you’re grading on square inches of fabric.

I look at him for a second, remember this is the only work-appropriate outfit he owns, and decide that’s a problem for later, not this morning, not with the clock against me.

“Let’s go,” I say, and turn for the door before he can read anything else off my face.

***

The elevator doors haven’t fully opened before Milo’s already leaning to see past them.

“Cornerstone,” he reads off the wall lettering, drawing the word out like he’s tasting it. “Very serious. Very we-have-a-mission-statement.”

“We do have a mission statement.”

“Obviously.” He falls into step beside me. “Bet it’s something like ‘fueling greatness’ or ‘built different.’ Am I close?”