Brody stopped and turned around when her hesitation pulled her hand from his. “Is something wrong?”
Sam immediately felt guilty for thinking he lived in some kind of dark cave. “No, I just…it wasn’t what I was expecting. It’s very different from your office, I mean.”
He nodded, helped her out of her coat and hung it on a brass hook inside the entryway. “Come with me to the kitchen. Dinner is about ready,” he said. “I feel a little more comfortable out here than I do in town. There’s no one that can see in.”
“No one can get into your office, either. You could paint it purple with pink polka dots and no one would see it. I mean, who even cleans it?”
“I do. I don’t trust anyone else to go in there and for good reason. The security measures and tinted windows are there because more than a few journalists have tried to hitch their careers to exposing me. My security team caught one posing as a window washer not long ago. Another tried to apply to housekeeping thinking they could get to me. Keeping my office dark and locked up is the only thing that keeps me from being exposed.”
“What about here?”
“No one knows about this place. My home is owned by a shadow holding company with no public tie to me or ESS. I, of course, own the company, but no one knows that. And no one but my immediate family and a few people on my payroll has ever stepped foot on the property, so there’s no chance of a leak.”
Sam swallowed hard. Somehow she’d managed to not only make it into the beast’s secret lair, she’d gotten into his private retreat. And this time by invitation. She didn’t know if she should be flattered or terrified. “I’m honored, I think, that you trust me enough to invite me over. I’d never reveal that information, of course.”
“You’ve got five million good reasons not to.” He smiled.
Sam shrugged. “I wouldn’t tell anyway.”
“I know. I wouldn’t have asked you on a date and brought you here if I thought otherwise. Come on, dinner should be done any second now.”
Sam followed Brody down the hallway, noticing as he walked ahead of her that he was wearing nicely snug jeans and a blue plaid button-down shirt that was left untucked. He was also barefoot. It was the first time she’d seen him in something other than a power suit and she liked it. It was a very sexy look for him. He appeared relaxed and comfortable in a way he never seemed to be at the office.
She rounded a corner and walked into a large, spacious kitchen with cream-colored cabinets and butcher block countertops. It was a chef’s dream, or so she imagined. Sam wasn’t much of a cook, but she got by. A place this luxurious would be wasted on her limited culinary abilities.
Dinner was in progress with several pots on the six-burner gas stove and bowls scattered around the counters. For some reason, she hadn’t expected him to actually cook, even though he’d invited her over for dinner. Given his affection for takeout, she didn’t picture him as the kind of man who was very comfortable in the kitchen.
Brody poured a glass of white wine for each of them and held one out for her. She accepted it gratefully. “You’re cooking,” she said with surprise lacing her words. Sam sniffed delicately at the air. “What are we having? It smells like cheese and…charcoal.”
Brody’s eyes widened for a moment. He quickly spun on his heel, turned to the set of double ovens mounted in the wall and frowned. A cloud of black smoke rolled out of the top oven as he quickly snatched out a charred cookie sheet with a dark crusty bundle in the center. He dropped the contents into the trash and tossed the pan into the sink to cool. “Well, it was supposed to be a chicken roulade with goat cheese, sundried tomatoes and spinach.”
Sam switched on an overhead fan to disperse the smoke so the smoke detectors didn’t go off. “Sounds good.”
“Yeah,” he said with dismay as he examined the controls and the recipe on the counter beside it. “If I had put the oven on three-fifty instead of four-fifty, it would’ve been.”
Sam drowned her giggles in a sip of wine. “A computer genius that can’t set the temperature on a digital stove?”
“Give me some credit,” he said with a laugh. “As a kid, I was the only one in the house that could program the VCR.” Brody rested his hands on his hips and looked around the kitchen with a frustrated pinch to his brow. Sam could see the CEO in him wanting to start firing off orders to deal with the situation. Unfortunately, tonight he was a corporation of one.