Eclipse Bay

realized that she still looked a little too pink. Probably because of the shower, she decided. All that heat and steam. The effect would surely fade quickly.
    She squared her shoulders, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out into the hall.
    By the time she got downstairs her mouth was watering. She saw Winston sitting just inside the kitchen doorway. He rose to greet her with his customary gallantry, but it was clear that he was distracted by what was going on in the vicinity of the stove.
    Rafe looked just as she had known he would look in the morning. Incredibly sexy, right down to and including the shadow of a beard that gave the hard planes of his face an even more dangerous cast than usual.
    It really was not fair. A gentleman would have been gone by dawn. But, then, no one had ever called Rafe Madison a gentleman.
    “Right on time.” Rafe’s eyes gleamed as he surveyed her with one swift, all-encompassing look. He picked up an oven mitt. “You can pour the coffee.”
    She watched as he removed a pan from the oven. The faint scent of vanilla teased her. “What is it?”
    “French toast.” He put the pan on the stove and tossed the mitt onto the counter. “Baked instead of fried. Sort of a cross between a bread pudding and a soufflé.”
    She gazed at it longingly. “It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”
    He grinned. “Thanks.”
    So the man could cook. She already knew that. It was not a sufficient reason to fall in love. Lust, maybe, but not love.
    She dragged her gaze away from the golden-brown French toast and saw that Rafe was watching her with an odd expression.
    “I’ll get the coffee.” She whirled around and seized the pot.
    Rafe arranged the French toast on two heated plates and carried the food to the table. Hannah studied the casually elegant fashion in which the puffy, golden-brown triangles had been positioned. There were little sprigs of fresh mint on top of the toast. The syrup in the small pot in front of her was warm.
    She picked up her fork. “You know, there’s a theory in some quarters that you turned to a life of crime in order to support yourself after you left Eclipse Bay.”
    He nodded. “I’ve heard that theory.”
    “But after dinner the other night and breakfast this morning, I think the evidence is clear that you went to a blue-ribbon culinary academy instead of jail.”
    He looked up very quickly.
    She paused with a bite of French toast poised in midair. “Good heavens, I was joking. Did you really take cooking classes?”
    He hesitated. Then shrugged. “Yes.”
    She was fascinated. “When?”
    “After I got married. In the back of my mind, I think I always had this idea that when you were happily married, you ate at home most of the time. But Meredith wasn’t big on cooking, so I took over the job. The better I got at it, the more restless and unhappy Meredith became.” Rafe made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “After a while I realized that she wasn’t real big on staying at home, either.”
    She gazed at him in disbelief. “Meredith left you because you’re a fantastic cook and because you like to eat at home?”
    “Well, those weren’t the only reasons,” Rafe admitted. “She might have been willing to tolerate my cooking if I had agreed to go to work at Madison Commercial. But I refused, so in the end she gave up on my future prospects and left.”
    Hannah savored another bite of French toast while she thought about that. “I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.”
    “You should be. I figure it’s your fault that it bombed.”
    She nearly dropped her fork. “ My fault. How in the world can you blame me?”
    He met her eyes across the short expanse of the table. His mouth curved slightly. “That night on the beach you told me I didn’t have to follow in my father’s and my grandfather’s footsteps when it came to marriage, remember? So a couple of years later, I figured I’d give it a try. I mean, after all, it was advice from Miss Overachiever herself. How could it be wrong?”
    “Now, hold on one dang minute here.” She aimed the fork at him. “You can’t blame me just because you chose to follow my perfectly good advice and then messed it up by picking the wrong woman.”
    “I’m a Madison. I was bound to pick the wrong woman.”
    “That’s a cop-out excuse if I ever heard one and you know it. You will not use it again, do you hear me?”
    He halfway lowered his lashes. “Yes, ma’am.”
    She subsided