One thing he’d say about her—she blushed like no one else he’d ever met. Her gorgeous skin went from warm brown to an almost fiery pink. It didn’t help that Rico knew she was blushing with her entire body right now. He had loved to chase that blush across her skin.
From beneath her spiked fan of lashes she met his gaze.
He was about to ask if she was okay, but she caught the question before he spoke the words and it made humiliation tighten her jaw and fade the flush from her cheeks. The Raje pride was alive and well.
How embarrassed she must be about the video. The girl who loved her secrets, viral on the internet. How was she even here right now?
“You two never got a chance to be introduced the other day,” Jonah, one of the assistant producers, said, and threw a painfully obvious glance at the knife block on the red quartz countertop of their kitchen station. Everything on the set was accented in red, including the jackets all the chefs were wearing. A cruel joke, given how the color made Ashna look. But he was immune now.
He stuck out a hand. “Frederico Silva.”
She raised her chin, which made her jawbones stand out sharply against her skin. He had spent an absurd amount of time thinking about that jaw once. Now he looked past the poetically sharp curve, unaffected, and offered her a stranger’s smile.
“This is Chef Ashna Raje,” Jonah said when she didn’t introduce herself. Ashna had never been tongue-tied around him.
Her gaze traced the many cameras around the sprawling set, some hanging from the ceiling, some mounted on cranes, then found its way back to the hand Rico was holding out.
Another thing he’d never seen before was Ashna frozen. The speed with which she could block a goal had gobsmacked him every single time. The video going viral had to have shaken her, or maybe she simply hadn’t expected someone she’d tossed out like garbage to return. His best guess was a little of both.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said, and finally, she shook his hand.
Quickly. Pulling away so fast he couldn’t be sure they had touched at all; maybe that’s why his own hand hung there in her wake, his palm strangely alive when he pulled back and shoved his hand into his pocket.
With another suggestive smile—which was getting a little annoying—Jonah told them that they had the next fifteen minutes to familiarize themselves with each other before the mics went on. Then off he went with the self-congratulatory gait of someone who had just won the lottery.
The network couldn’t have asked for a better accident than Rico’s idiotic knife dive. Since it had happened on Jonah’s watch, he had to be the hero of the hour.
Thinking about the knife sent a fresh jolt of pain through his knee. Maybe the decision to tweak his meds right now hadn’t been his smartest idea. His old meds made him sluggish and the new ones did nothing.
Ashna’s eyelids fluttered down as she glanced at his knee. “How is it?” she asked.
She hadn’t bothered to come to the hospital that day. She hadn’t bothered to reach out in the weeks after to ask how he was. Given that she was the reason his almost-healed wound had ripped open, it was the least anyone with even a modicum of decency would have done. Her warm bearing and impeccable manners had always felt so soothing, so familiar to him. They had reminded him of his mother. But his mãe wasn’t just polite, she was kind. There was a difference. It was another thing he had gotten wrong about Ashna.
“It’s been two weeks. It would be fine now, wouldn’t it?” he said, proud of how bored he sounded. Fine was a broad term, after all. He’d had to have another surgery, albeit a small one this time, to sew up the opened rip. Having fluid drained from your knee was never a party for anyone.
She blinked again. Had she always used her eyes quite so much instead of words? The only times he remembered her clamming up was when it came to her parents. In contrast, he’d talked about his mãe and pai to her constantly. She’d been the only person he’d ever been able to talk to about them. That ease, that openness, it’s what had gotten him in trouble in the first place. So, this new her was going to make life so much easier for him.
Come to think of it, everything about her seemed different now. She was so altered, in fact, he barely recognized her.
“I’m glad,” she said, deep tiredness dragging at her lids.
He should ignore it, but the exhausted disinterest annoyed him more than it should.
“That’s all you have to say about me saving your toes from being severed?” It came out an angry hiss.
She threw a glance around the room to make sure no one was listening. Everyone seemed too preoccupied to pay them any attention. The crew was pretending to give the chef-celebrity pairs space to get acquainted, but of course any camera-worthy moment would be fair game for the screen.
From the way Ashna was looking at him it was clear that getting acquainted with him was akin to diving into a pit of snakes.
“You took me by surprise,” she finally answered his question. “I should have been more careful. I’m sorry about your knee.”
It wasn’t like there was no remorse in her voice. It was more like there was a determined effort to keep her apology contained. She wanted him to know that she was apologizing for his knee and nothing else.
I’m sorry. But only for this.
A direct response to what he had said to her the other day.
As though recognizing the burden of its role in this mess, his knee let loose another shot of pain. The knee that had cost him his sport. The sport that had saved him after being dumped by her.
This apology that she gave only for the ripping of stitches, only for that second tearing of skin and muscle, meant nothing.
Just like that, Rico knew why he was really here.
For years now he had burned with wanting that one word from her. Sorry.
When she’d first walked away from him he had felt nothing but panic. After that, for months, all he’d wanted was for her to change her mind. Then finally, when he’d lost hope, all he’d wanted was for her to at least be sorry. To give him some remorse, something that proved that he hadn’t been such a colossal fool in judging her.
When he didn’t acknowledge the apology, her chin lifted again. “I do appreciate you saving my toes from being severed.” Instead of remorse an icy coolness dripped from her tone, a mockery of what he’d done.
The throbbing in his knee spread all through him like rage. He stepped into her space, the memory of betrayal vibrating through him, and leaned close to her ear. “They were the first toes I sucked.” His tone was cruel, but he didn’t care. “Letting them get severed under my watch would be callous, wouldn’t it?”
She stepped away from him, face flaming, her scent flooding his brain. Her hair still smelled like it always had. As though her essence was wrapped up in it, clean and fiery like freshly bloomed roses. He hated how it reached inside him and dug up memories. But like everything else about her, even her scent had become colder. The fire almost snuffed out, even the vibrancy of roses too restrained to be real.
The full blast of her jet-black glare met his. “Since when is being callous a problem for you?”
It was Rico’s turn to stiffen, but he had spent too much time in the spotlight to let it show.
What about chasing her around like a puppy had been callous? Or about begging her not to leave him?