Something in the rough sandpaper of his voice made her look at him as they walked through the arched entry into her kitchen with the bright canary-yellow walls she hated, and her breath caught. He was close—so close—but not touching her even though he was big enough that it had to have been an effort not to in the confined space. The fact that he had pulled back was somehow almost hotter than if he actually was touching her.

Oh my God, Chelle. You’ve been alone so long that you’re broken.

Hustling across the room, she got a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with ice from the fridge dispenser, fastidiously avoiding looking at him again, because that’s how the bad thoughts happened. “It’s the you-don’t-have-to-run-everyone’s-life business.”

Nash stayed in the archway, leaning one shoulder against it, watching her, his gaze intense and his grip tight on the food bags. “You seem tense. Anything I can help with?”

She froze. Was that flirting? Was her fake husband flirting with her? He couldn’t be. There was just no way a hot billionaire like Nash Beckett would flirt with a woman eight years older than him, with enough gray in her hair that her stylist had gone from calling it nature’s glitter to saying Chelle had earned her stripes.

She was so discombobulated—again—by the possibility that her husband just maybe thought about her naked that she blurted out a truth, if not the truth. “It’s the color of the kitchen that makes me tense. I hate it, but when my aunt left me the apartment, her will stipulated I couldn’t repaint the kitchen.”

“Your family has a tradition of weirdly controlling wills,” Nash said.

“Yeah,” she said with a chuckle that was about 75 percent awkward nerves. “It’s definitely a quirk.”

“Well, does the paint color mean you don’t want lunch in here?”

“Depends,” she said, sounding way more calm than she felt at the moment. “What is it?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a smirk that promised he’d already won. “The best cheeseburger you’ve ever tasted in your life.”

Ugh. That wasn’t fair. Considering her totally crappy work progress for the day, it was definitely a cheeseburger day and ketchup delivered via crinkle-cut fries kind of day. “Are there fries?”

He opened one of the brown paper bags, this one with grease stains on the bottom corner—always a good sign—and revealed a large red-striped paper cup overflowing with golden-brown deep-fried potatoes begging to be dragged through a vast sea of ketchup.

She inhaled, and all of her happy responses kicked into gear. Oh, she knew that seasoning mix. There was only one place in Harbor City that got the ratio right. “From Vito’s Diner?”

Nash shrugged his broad shoulders. “It is the best in Harbor City.”