He began pulling ingredients from his refrigerator. Eggs, cheese, green pepper, there were even grapes and a couple of apples and ice cream for dessert. Plenty of stuff to cobble something decent together.
“You cook?”
“Don’t sound so horrified. We take turns cooking at the station all the time. I’m no gourmet, but I’m not so bad. Burning things is frowned on at a fire station.”
He turned the gas on under the cooktop’s grill. “Of course that doesn’t stop Smokey, so nicknamed because he was foolish enough to start a grease fire one night. He’ll never live that one down.”
“You don’t have to cook for me,” she managed to say.
“No, but it seems rude to cook for myself and then eat it in front of you.”
“I can’t stay here.”
He began pulling more ingredients from the refrigerator. “I don’t remember inviting you to stay. I’m just offering to cook us some dinner while we talk. Or did you eat when you changed clothing?”
“No, but…” She started coughing again and took several more sips from the water glass.
“Pull up a stool at the counter and stop trying to talk. I’ll impress you with my mastery. My stomach is making demands. And I believe that’s yours rumbling in agreement?”
She blushed again. After a moment’s hesitation she took a seat at the breakfast bar, still striving to control the urge to cough.
“Don’t fight it too much. You need to purge those lungs. Let’s see what else we have in here.”
There was only one potato so he went with the eggs, conscious of her eyes watching him with a bemused expression. “Don’t you cook?”
“Not very often,” she admitted.
“I like to cook. Mom wanted me to become a chef instead of a fireman but this way I get the best of both worlds.”
Her expression was understandably confused. He was deliberately trying to keep her off balance so she wouldn’t leave. That pleat between her eyes wasn’t new. She was a worrier and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. It only made sense. He was a big, muscular guy and she was alone in a strange house with him. She was understandably nervous. Any sane young woman would be, so he did his best to appear nonthreatening as he chopped onions and the green pepper that had passed its prime but was still usable.
“You can call me Kathleen,” she announced abruptly.
He looked up. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Why not give me your real name? Or is it something unique like Cher or Sting or—”
“That is my name.”
“Your first name?”
Her gaze dropped. “Middle,” she admitted. “My first name is Whitney.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard. Whitney Kathleen…what?” He turned to the cooktop and flipped the steak.
“Charles,” she added after a long hesitation.
“Well, Whitney Kathleen Charles is unusual, but not all that unique. Certainly better than Beulah. That was my mother’s cousin’s first name. She hated it. Everyone called her Bee and she wasn’t too fond of that, either, but she claimed her middle name was even worse. I never did learn what that was, come to think of it. I’ll have to remember to ask Mom one of these days.”
“Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
Slender shoulders rose and fell quickly. “You don’t even know me.”
“Hey, cut me some slack. I’m working on it. I’m trying to put you at ease.” He smiled at her. “Is it working?”
She didn’t smile back, but he thought some of the tension eased from her shoulders.
“How come you disappeared from the hospital this morning?”
The tension returned. A barely perceptible shudder ran through her. “I don’t like hospitals.”
“Something else we have in common. Noisy, smelly places.”
“People die there.”
He filed that away for later sensing this wasn’t a good place to probe at the moment.
“Well, you came pretty close to asphyxiating in the fire. Oxygen would have helped. And it would have been better to have told someone you were leaving.”
He had a strong urge to rub that pleat between her eyes away so he kept his fingers busy rinsing lettuce for the salad.
“The press is going to find out who you are sooner or later, you know,” he warned. “A beautiful woman in an expensive evening dress inside an abandoned house that someone set on fire? That’s a story they’re bound to keep in the headlines for a while.”
Her fingers trembled. “You’re saying the fire wasn’t an accident?”
Flynn looked to see if she was kidding. She wasn’t. The fear was right there on the surface now.
“No. It definitely wasn’t an accident. Someone poured enough accelerant over the downstairs to send that place and everything inside it to ashes in under five minutes.”
She closed her eyes. “Someone tried to kill me.”
The words were a flat, bald statement. At least she wasn’t having hysterics.
“I’d say that’s a good bet. See that blinking light on my phone? I’ll give you odds most of those calls are from reporters. The rest are probably from my family, but that’s another story. Everyone wants details. People came to the door several times while I was trying to sleep this afternoon. I was too tired to answer.”
She nodded grimly. “Channel Nine was leaving when I arrived.”
He got out silverware, napkins and placemats and set them on the counter beside her. “Who’s trying to kill you, Whitney?”
“I don’t know.”
The words were a bare whisper. She carried the items over to the table. He watched her position them with almost painful precision. Frowning, he set two small salads on the counter and walked over to the stove to finish scrambling the eggs.
“I’m not hungry,” she announced.
“Yes, you are, you just don’t realize it yet. Your mind’s so busy worrying about what happened to you that it forgot to listen to your stomach. Give the food a try. I promise you’ll feel better.”
Dividing the steak and eggs, he placed the two plates in front of her and rinsed out the pan while he waited for the toaster to pop.
“Why are you being so nice? You don’t even know me.”
“Do you have to know someone to be nice to them?” He pulled a second glass from the cupboard and got the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. “I was raised to be nice to everyone. My mother would nail my hide to the wall if I wasn’t. She’s a little thing like you, but she’s got a core of granite.”
“I’m not little.”
He measured her with his eyes as he came around the corner. “Five-three?”
“Four and a half.”
Flynn grinned. “I’m six-one