Rekindled Read Online Free PDF Page A

you?”
    She stopped. “These?” She looked down at the two bags. “I kind of have them already.”
     She turned away from him again and started up the steps to the front porch. He followed
     at a quick pace and beat her to the door, pushing it open for her.
    “What’s for dinner?” he asked.
    “I’m trying a roast. I went and bought vegetables. I assume one could easily find
     beef around here.”
    “Yeah. One might,” he said dryly. He had some of the most highly sought after beef
     in the country. And that wasn’t a euphemism.
    “Anyway, I thought I might make an apple pie too. I have a cookbook—how hard could
     it be?”
    “Hard,” he said. “Had you ever cooked before last week?”
    “Not once.”
    That explained the hit-or-miss nature of the food that had ended up on his plate.
     She’d more or less done a decent job, but his previous housekeeper had kept the house
     up and provided him with fresh-baked bread for every meal, homemade pies and cakes,
     real mashed potatoes with an ungodly amount of butter and meat roasted to perfection.
    Americanized tostadas, spaghetti with sauce from a jar and hot dogs weren’t quite
     in the same league, though he’d said nothing. Not even when he’d crunched his way
     through that pasta.
    He wasn’t sure why he was preserving her ego. Why he felt the importance of letting
     her have this. He really wasn’t sure at all. It would be more fun to simply ignore
     the fact that she was hurting, that she was human, and take a certain amount of petty
     glee in her circumstances.
    But he found he wasn’t as big of a bastard as he’d previously believed.
    “Well, you’re doing all right,” he said, crossing the living room and following her
     into the kitchen.
    “Effusive praise coming from one such as yourself,” she said, her tone stiff.
    “Effusive praise?”
    She set the bags on the counter. “Yeah. I feel honored that I did ‘all right’ for
     you.”
    “Fine, your cooking is the best I’ve ever had,” he said. “I can’t remember any of
     the dinners I ate before yours. All that other spaghetti meant nothing to me, baby.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Please tell me you don’t actually say that to women.”
    “Why? Something your ex might say?”
    He didn’t know what in the hell had possessed him to ask that. He was perfectly content
     to let her have her secrets. More than. He didn’t care what had happened to her, didn’t
     care what would happen to her. He was doing his slightly self-indulgent good deed
     by letting her stay here and work for him.
    She laughed, but it wasn’t a fun, light sound. It was brittle. Bitter. “Oh, no. Not
     even… no. That would require actually caring what I thought about him. It would
     require him having some idea of what I felt. Or at least wanting to preserve my feelings.
     He didn’t want to do that.”
    “He didn’t?” He was still asking. Why was he still asking?
    “No. It’s impossible to control a woman who thinks she’s important. You have to remind
     her that she isn’t, any way you can. And then she starts to believe that… that
     without you, she won’t last. She won’t have anything. So that, no matter what you
     do, she won’t leave. And those men never have to explain it when they eat other…
     spaghetti.”
    He felt like someone had reached into his chest and clenched their fist tight around
     whatever organs they could grab. “That’s not… that’s not what real men do, Lucy.”
    “It’s what plenty of them do, though. And not just men—women too. My mother is exhibit
     A. She told me to leave and not to come back without my wedding ring on. Like without
     Daniel I’m not even a whole person.” She looked down, then back up, the pain in her
     eyes raw, too real. Too hard to ignore. “I worry that they’re right sometimes. I was
     with him for so long, and I don’t really know what I’m doing on my own.”
    He looked at Lucy, really looked at her. At the lines that