The Piano Man Project (11 page)

‘I’ll bear that in mind if you ever make me breakfast,’ he said, and images of him waking up in her bed assaulted her brain and threatened to make her burn bacon for a second time.

‘Now add the onions and garlic to the pan.’

She scraped the onions and garlic into the pan, excited by the gentle sizzle as they hit the oil.

‘Oh my God, Hal, it smells like an Italian restaurant already in here, doesn’t it?’ She grinned with delight and sniffed the air.

He shook his head, but didn’t disillusion her. ‘How are they looking?’ he asked after a few minutes. ‘Don’t let them brown or overcook.’

‘How will I know when they’re ready?’

‘Use your bloody eyes,’ Hal muttered. ‘And taste them.’

‘What are they supposed to taste like, beside onion and garlic?’

‘Fucking hell, Honey, this is painful. Here, let me taste them.’

She glanced from the pan to the man on the other side of her breakfast bar, and then tentatively forked up some onions.

‘Open your mouth,’ she said, holding the fork out across the bar.

‘You don’t need to spoon feed me,’ he muttered. ‘I can feed myself.’

‘I know that. I just thought it’d be easier from across this side of the bar, that’s all. I didn’t mean to be patronising,’ she said, aware that it probably seemed like it from his perspective. He shrugged, and then surprisingly, he opened his mouth and let her slide the fork in. Watching his mouth, Honey felt the stir of sexual awakenings in her gut that was always close by when he was around. She slid the fork slowly from between his lips and waited for the verdict.

‘They’re ready,’ he murmured.

So am I, she thought. ‘Ready for what?’ she said, flustered.

‘Turn up the heat and add the beef.’

Oh, the heat was already well and truly turned up. Honey was breaking into a sweat that had nothing to do with the onions and everything to do with the man opposite her. She was actually glad he couldn’t see the effect he was having on her right at that moment; she was like a starry-eyed teenager meeting the man who usually lived in posters on her bedroom wall. It defied all common sense – Hal was thoroughly objectionable and rude, but she couldn’t seem to control the way she reacted to him. He had her so nervous that she worried she’d slice off her shaking fingers as she chopped the carrots and celery, and when he asked to test the food for a second time she swallowed hard and had to look away as his lips closed around the fork.

‘Hot,’ he breathed, and she could only agree. He was, and she was because of him. Why the hell had she promised that she’d never mention that kiss again? Did he know what he did to her? If he could see her she’d have nowhere to hide, but was it obvious to him anyway?

Stirring in the meat, Honey watched it brown as instructed, taking the couple of minutes to pull herself together.

‘Now we need a couple of glasses of wine.’

Jeez, if she had a drink she’d probably jump his bones. ‘Hal, I don’t think that’s a very good idea right now.’

‘In the bolognese, Honey. Pour the wine into the bolognese and bring it up to boiling.’

Honey passed a hand over her hot face. ‘I knew that,’ she muttered, ignoring the half laugh from across the breakfast bar as she upended a glass of wine into the pan, refilling it as the meat sizzled violently in the alcohol. She threw the second glass of wine in after the first and screwed the lid resolutely back on the bottle.

‘Now pour out two more glasses of wine,’ Hal said.

Honey didn’t want to get caught out twice. ‘Won’t that be overpowering?’

‘They’re not for the dinner. One’s for me because it’s killing me teaching you to cook, and the other is for you to calm you the fuck down.’

‘I don’t need to calm down,’ Honey lied.

‘The hell you don’t. You’re giving me a headache with all your nervousness, and trust me, you won’t like me when I have a headache.’

‘I don’t like you very much as it is,’ she said, clinging to the safe ground offered by throwing mild insults.

‘Just pour the damn wine, will you?’

Honey deliberated between the lure of a glass of wine or staying sober, because although she did in fact need to calm the fuck down, she feared it might loosen her tongue and her hands in a way that would send him back into hiding again for weeks on end. In the end, her nerves won out and she unscrewed the wine again and poured them both a drink.

‘There,’ she said with bad grace, shoving the glass towards him until it bumped his knuckles. He picked up the glass and tasted the wine, and his lips twisted into an almost favourable expression.

‘Not bad, Honeysuckle. Not bad at all.’

She raised her own glass, sipped, and found herself glad to have paid more than she usually would for wine. It was delicious, and dangerously smooth as it slid down her throat.

‘Better?’ Hal asked, almost as if he were watching her, which of course he couldn’t have been. It was just that he seemed to know what was going on under her skin, to hear the quickened beat of her heart, the loud dash of her blood around her veins, the bloom of heat over the skin on her throat.

‘Mmm,’ she said noncommittally, unsure if she felt better or worse for the wine. ‘So, what do I do next?’

Hal instructed her through the remaining couple of steps, his fingers lingering on the base of his wine glass as if he thought she might try to take it from him. As it was, she wasn’t thinking any such thoughts. She was more pre-occupied with not burning the bolognese because she was admiring his strong, sexy hands.

‘And now you turn it down to a simmer, and we wait.’

‘Really? How long for? What’ll we do in the meantime?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not so great at cards these days, and hide and seek might take a while.’ He drank the last of the wine from his glass. ‘So I guess you should refill my glass and we’ll do that other thing you’re so good at.’

Was he talking about their kiss? Honey couldn’t help but preen at the fact he’d said she was good at it, but they probably needed to clear the air about it.

‘Look, I’m sorry I kissed you the other night.’ In truth, it was hard to be all that sorry about something so knee-tremblingly good, but she didn’t want it to make their fragile friendship awkward. ‘It was completely my fault. I promise not to do it again. I won’t even mention it, if you like.’

Hal smirked. ‘Talking, Honey. I was referring to talking. You’ve been banging on my door for days asking to talk to me, so here I am. Now talk.’

Panic set in as she finished off the last of the wine between their two glasses.

‘I was just trying to be neighbourly. Friendly. I thought we’d become friends.’

‘Did you? Do you kiss all of your friends like that?’

‘We just agreed never to talk about that again.’

‘Did we? Only I think you said it and I didn’t answer. Not that I want to talk about it, because you were spot on when you said it wasn’t going to happen again.’

‘For the record, seeing as you didn’t say we were never going to talk about it, no, I don’t kiss all of my friends like that, Hal. I’ve never kissed anyone else like that in my life. Or rather, no one else has ever kissed me like that before in my life.’

Hal put his glass against his lips and let it linger there, and then set it down slowly. ‘Well, maybe this Robin guy will. You better go easy on the garlic on Friday, just in case.’

‘Noted. Thank you,’ she said, stirring the bolognese for something to do. ‘I doubt it though. He still lives with his mother and the best thing Nell could think of to say about him was that he had good hair.’

Honey ran her eyes over Hal’s rumpled dark hair, which was probably longer than he usually wore it and all the sexier for it. It constantly looked as if he’d been pushing his hands through it, and it made Honey want to push hers through it too. She picked up her wine glass to give her fingers something else to do.

‘Will your special knickers get another outing on Friday?’

Was he flirting? It was difficult to tell with Hal, because sarcasm was his modus operandi.

‘I might wear my Saturday pants, just to confuse him,’ she shot back, and then realised that she’d basically just said she was planning to show Robin her knickers, which she categorically wasn’t.

‘Lucky Robin,’ Hal murmured, raising his glass to his lips. ‘My bolognese and your Saturday pants. The man’s in for a treat.’

Honey’s hands were still begging to reach out and touch him, so she turned back to the stove and stirred the sauce. It looked amazing, easily the best thing she’d ever made, which admittedly wasn’t difficult given her limited repertoire.

‘Robin won’t see my pants, just so we’re clear.’

Hal laughed. ‘How do you expect him to make you orgasm if you insist on keeping your pants on?’

‘Piss off, Hal. This whole stupid idea is destined to fail, because for one I don’t have sex with strangers, and for two, as everyone and his uncle seems to know, I don’t orgasm.’

‘Well, it’s not because you’re frigid. I can tell you that much and I only kissed you briefly. In fact, you wanted sex with me and I’m practically a stranger.’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t discount Robin too soon, that’s all I’m saying.’

You kissed me too briefly, she thought, taking a mouthful of wine and remembering how his kiss felt.

‘I never said I was frigid, and you’re not a stranger, Hal,’ she said softly.

‘No? What am I then?’

He was definitely flirting, and it frightened her. She’d lost him for days after the last time they’d strayed over this line, so why on earth Honey said the thing she said next was anyone’s guess.

‘You’re my neighbour. And my friend. And the only man who’s ever touched me and made me think that I might be able to orgasm after all.’

For a few moments the air between them sizzled hotter than the pan on the stove.

Honey lost her nerve and broke the silence first.

‘How long should I let this cook for?’

Hal’s breath left his body in a strangled hiss and he coughed a little to clear his throat before he spoke.

‘Low and slow is the rule with food like this. Leave it to do its magic for a good couple of hours. It’s even better if you can cook it the day before you eat it.’

The way he’d muttered ‘low and slow’ caused Honey’s stomach to perform low and slow somersaults.

‘So how come you’re such an expert on bolognese?’ she asked, aiming to lighten the conversation. His brooding silence implied that she may have got it wrong. Eventually, he shrugged.

‘I’m not an expert. Not anymore.’

She swallowed, sensing him open and then close, clam-like. ‘But you used to be?’

‘I used to be lots of things. Now I’m just your miserable neighbour who taught you to make bolognese so you don’t burn the house down on Friday.’

He’d opened up the line of conversation about his previous life, and then neatly shut it down. A win, and then a lose. Honey noticed and didn’t push him, but all the same she hoped the day would come when he let her in closer.

‘Will you ever let me live the bacon incident down?’

‘Probably not.’ He slid from the stool and stood up. ‘I should go. You’ll be alright on your own with that now.’

‘Stay and eat it with me?’

He shook his head and drained the last of the wine from his glass. ‘It needs hours. If I stay, we both know you won’t be able to avoid talking about that kiss again.’

Honey laughed softly, relieved he’d made light of it. ‘Stop bringing it up then. I can’t even remember it.’

He smiled, one of his rare, real, gorgeous smiles that melted her knees and made it hard to stay upright.

‘Good to know,’ he said. ‘Me neither.’

‘Then we’re cool,’ she said, watching him leave and wishing he’d stay. He turned back as he opened his own door.

‘Remember the rules, Honeysuckle. Low and slow.’

Honey stared at his all-too-familiar closed door after he’d closed it and shook her head. Dinner for one it was then.

Later that evening, Hal heard a tap at his door and stiffened. It could only be Honey, and he couldn’t handle any more of her today. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy her company; the opposite, in fact. Little by little he was allowing himself to rely on her, and that wasn’t fair. The more time he spent with her, the more he looked forward to the next time, and that was only ever going to lead to problems for both of them. Maybe she saw him as a challenge, or, being uncharitable, maybe she saw him as a novelty, but she certainly didn’t see the man he really was. She didn’t see the darkness in him, the anger, the abyss he teetered on the very edge of much of the time. He was using her in a way that was wholly unacceptable, she just hadn’t realised it yet. She didn’t see that he was using her as a guy rope to stop him from falling over the edge altogether.

Honey was screwing him up with her funny-girl lines, and her good intentions, and her kisses that made him forget about the bad stuff. She’d practically begged him to be the man who helped her find her orgasm, and in the heat of the moment he’d wanted to be that man too, not Deano the unchivalrous one, nor Robin who still lived with his mother, or anyone else, for that matter. Him. He’d wanted nothing other than to take her to bed, to learn her curves with his hands and his mouth, to build her up until he felt her body shudder and break underneath him. He could do that for her. He’d kissed her only once, but it had been enough for him to know that he could make that girl come, and come, and come.

But then what? He didn’t want a relationship, so he’d hurt her, and how could he live here after that? The harsh truth was that he had nowhere else to go, and nothing to offer.

He’d come here to learn how to stand on his own two feet, and he was increasingly learning how to lean on Honey’s shoulder, and it had to stop. And so he sat on the edge of his sofa and listened to her call out his name, lightly at first and then tinged with panic when he didn’t reply. He couldn’t go out there. She’d brought him dinner, she said. Too much bolognese for one, she said.

‘You’ve got a fucking freezer,’ he called out, to let her know he was still alive. ‘Use it for something other than vodka for a change.’

He could feel her confusion, and her ensuing silence told him that his harsh words had probably hurt her, which only pissed him off more. He didn’t have the energy to think of someone else’s feelings; yet another reason not to let her any deeper under his skin.