Chapter 1

Akira

The risotto needs one more thing. It always does — that’s the secret nobody tells you about cooking for people who’ve never had to cook for themselves. Give a man like Quinn Thatcher a perfectly balanced dish and he’ll eat it without noticing a single thing about it. Give him something with one deliberate flourish, one note that catches, and maybe — maybe — he looks up from whatever spreadsheet is running behind his eyes.

I strip the leaves off a sprig of thyme between my fingers and scatter them over the butternut squash risotto. The smell that rises up is warm and a little smug, if a smell can be smug — roasted squash, sage butter, the faint sharpness of good parmesan. Good. This kitchen, this whole cavernous, polished house, could use a little smugness. It hasn’t had any since I got here. Everything in this estate has a hush to it, like the walls themselves are worried about disturbing somebody.

I’m not worried about disturbing anybody. That’s not really in my nature.

I reach over and nudge the volume on my portable speaker up a notch. Calypso, low and unbothered, steel drum and brass drifting out over marble counters that have probably never heard anything livelier than a string quartet playing at half volume during a dinner party. It doesn’t belong here, this music. That’s exactly why I keep playing it. A kitchen is supposed to have a pulse. If Quinn Thatcher’s house won’t give me one, I’ll bring my own.

I’m humming along, sliding the pan off the heat, when the temperature in the room drops by about ten degrees.

“Ms. Nwosu.”

I don’t turn around right away. I never do. Quinn Thatcher has a voice built for boardrooms — all edges and efficiency, no wasted syllables — and if I spin around every time he uses it like that, he’ll think it works on me. It doesn’t. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself while I finish plating.

“Mr. Thatcher.” I turn, towel over my shoulder, and there he is, filling the doorway like he’s not entirely sure the room will let him in. Custom suit, dove grey, not a single wrinkle daring to exist on it. I’ve got flour dusted across my apron and probably a streak of it on my cheek. Somehow he’s the one who looks out of place, standing there in that armor while Calypso rattles the air around him.

“The gala committee needs a final canapé count by Thursday.” He speaks the way other men might say pass the salt — flat, unbothered, a line item and nothing more. “Over two hundred guests, plus staff allowance. I’d like a number I can give them that won’t require revising.”

“You’ll get your number.” I set the towel down. “You always do.”

“I’m aware.” His eyes flick, just briefly, to the pan behind me, to the steam still curling off it, before they come back to my face like he caught himself doing something he hadn’t authorized. “That smells like squash.”

“It is squash. Butternut, roasted, with brown butter and sage.” I fold my arms. “You’re welcome to try it instead of just diagnosing it from four feet away.”

“I have a call in ten minutes.”

“Of course you do.” I say it lightly, but there’s an edge under it, because there’s always a call, always a number, always some invisible ledger he’s balancing against the very real, very present fact of a woman standing in his kitchen offering him food. “One bite won’t cost you the company, Mr. Thatcher.”

Something almost happens at the corner of his mouth. Almost. Then it’s gone, filed away with everything else he doesn’t let out into the room.

“Thursday,” he says again, like repetition will make it true faster.

“Thursday,” I echo, and let him have the last word, because I’ve learned in three days that giving him the last word costs me nothing and seems to matter to him more than it should.

He turns to go. It’s only because I’m watching him go — because some traitorous, curious part of me tracks him the way I’d track a knife left too close to the edge of a counter — that I catch it. The color under his eyes, a faint bruised gray that no amount of good tailoring disguises. The set of his shoulders, an inch higher than they need to be, like he’s braced for a hit that isn’t coming, or one that’s coming from somewhere I can’t see. It’s the first real crack I’ve noticed in three days of watching this man perform composure like it’s a full-time job on top of his actual full-time job.

“Long night?” I ask, before I can decide whether it’s my business.

He pauses. Doesn’t turn around all the way — just enough that I can see the angle of his jaw in profile. “Long month,” he says, and it comes out clipped, like the question caught him somewhere he hadn’t braced for and he doesn’t love that it did.

“They tend to add up like that,” I say. “Months.”

“They do.” That’s it. That’s all I get. He’s already moving again, already three steps down the hall, the sound of his footsteps on the stone floor traveling twice as far as it should. This house has a way of doing that — taking a small sound and making it echo, like it wants you to remember exactly how alone you are in it, whether you asked for the reminder or not.

I watch until he turns the corner and disappears toward whatever wing holds his study, his calls, his ten-minute increments of a life. Then I glance down at the pan, still half full.

“Note to self,” I mutter, pulling a second bowl down from the cabinet, “feed the man before he collapses into a wind tunnel.”

I plate a portion I know he didn’t ask for and probably won’t touch, and I set it under a cover on the counter closest to the hallway, right where he’ll find it if he wanders back through tonight, restless the way men like him always are once the house goes quiet. Whether he eats it or lets it go cold on the marble is his business. I’m not here to save Quinn Thatcher from himself. I’m here to run a gala, collect a very generous check, and go home to my own kitchen, my own music, my own life, at the end of two weeks.

I didn’t move to Napa Valley and build a career out of nothing, out of grit, referrals and a stubborn refusal to be underestimated, just to watch a man run himself into the ground three feet from where I’m cooking. Even if he is, technically, my employer. Even if the sight of him — rattled, tired, trying so hard to hold his edges in place — does something low and unwelcome in my chest that I have no intention of examining tonight.

Thursday, he said. Like I hadn’t already memorized the number in my head the moment the guest list landed in my inbox.

I turn the music up one more notch, wipe down the counter, and get back to work. The kitchen is mine tonight. Whatever the rest of this house wants to be, it can be that on its own time.