keep stirrin’. You don’t want it to stick.”
“If you don’t want to discuss your harem of church-lady caterers, can we talk about your tendency to strip in front of me?” I called after him. I dumped the congealed dumplings into a pot as he jogged up the stairs.
“Don’t pretend you’re not lookin’!” he called back.
I rolled my eyes but stirred as instructed. The food smelled delicious, particularly after I warmed up the loaf of crusty bread in the oven. Standing at the stove gave me time to look around Jed’s side of the house, which was considerably more comfortable than my own. He’d painted the walls a light, creamy beige, making the rooms airy and bright. It was a vast improvement over the dark, cavelike spaces on my side. The polished living-room floor was covered with an extra-large blue rag rug. He’d added a few sturdy, no-nonsense pieces of furniture in each room, but there were few personal touches. No pictures, no knickknacks. Several large bookshelves flanked his windows. When I got closer, I could see that they were full of language guides. Moon Phases, A Chinese to English Dictionary, Hieroglyphics, Translating Gaelic, The Dummy’s Guide to Understanding Ancient Sanskrit. The rooms told me very little about Jed as a person, other than that he had good color sense and hated reading subtitles in foreign-language movies. Or he’d bought a bunch of coffee-table books at a garage sale.
By the time Jed trotted down the steps, smelling pleasantly of Dial soap, I had the table set and the dumplings dished. I was bending over the oven to retrieve the bread when I heard, “This is why men like to watch women cook. It has nothin’ to do with bein’ sexist. It’s the bendin’ and liftin’.”
“Which is also sexist.” I turned to offer a rude response, only to find him wearing another pair of arse-cupping jeans and a T-shirt that showcased his indecently large biceps. I was standing in the presence of living, breathing arm porn.
“Oh, come on!” I cried, throwing up my hands and nearly flinging the bread across the room.
“What?” he asked, crossing to the window and closing the curtains.
“You know what,” I shot back. “When you go out and buy a shirt like that, do you actually calculate the number of bicep curls you’ll have to perform in order to do it justice?”
“I don’t work out that much,” he said as he held my chair away from the table.
I sat down, glaring up at him. “Well, then clearly, you have discovered some sort of magic testosterone tree in the back garden.”
“I can take it off if it bothers you,” he offered, peeling the hem away from a tanned expanse of stomach.
Please, I prayed, don’t let there be such a thing as a magic testosterone tree.
“Stop that!” I yelped, a laugh bursting from my chest as he dropped his shirt back into place. “Why do you think all situations can be improved by the removal of clothing?”
He snickered, taking his own seat and offering me a slice of bread. “Well, first—nah, that’s too easy. Anyway, I do it because it freaks you out, and that’s pretty damned adorable.”
“You are an altogether bizarre personality.”
“Right back atcha, honey.”
I giggled. I couldn’t help it. This strange, thrown-together meal was the first opportunity I’d had to relax since I’d arrived in the States. And here was a beautiful, peculiar man sitting in front of me, who didn’t know anything about me or my family or what we could do. I could be normal with him, or what seemed to pass for normal between the two of us. It was lovely.
“So, I noticed the quote-unquote ‘car’ in the driveway.”
“Hey, it’s transportation,” I protested. “And when I find a job, it will get me there, so I will eventually be able to pay for an upgrade.”
“What brings you down to the Hollow, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“I just needed a change of scenery. Too many northern winters,” I lied smoothly. “What about you? How long have you lived here?”
“A couple of months,” Jed said, taking a large bite of dumplings. “I’m from a little town in Tennessee, just a few hours’ drive from here. I do carpentry work and general construction, especially in older buildings where the restoration work can be delicate. Jobs in my area were dryin’ up. A contractor from the Hollow put an ad in the paper, lookin’ for people who could handle that sort of work, so I moved. My boss,