If he was offended, he didn’t show it as he asked, “Me reading them or me giving my thoughts?”

“Both,” she said after a few seconds of thought. “Definitely both.”

“Who has read them?”

She shrank back her chair. “Me.”

He nodded and waved his hand in the air as if to urge her on. “And?”

She shot him her best shut-up glare—fine, it wasn’t the greatest one, but she was still working her way up to it. Still, it didn’t have any impact at all.

“Are you serious?” His you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me laugh filled the room and got the dogs all excited and yappy. “Please, let me read them.” He took her hands in his and brushed his thumb across the tops of her knuckles. “I won’t say anything about them. No advice. No feedback. No critique. Nothing. I just want to read them.”

Maybe it was because his touch scattered her sense of self-preservation to the wind, but she believed him. He hadn’t said a single word about last night and he’d had every opportunity. Hell, she was ready to break her own rule banning talking about last night when he started making her breakfast. If he stuck to his word about that, then he could stick to it when it came to her book, right? She could just pretend he wasn’t reading it.

“No talking?” she asked, a jittery sense of excitement mixed with dread making her skin prickly.

He gave her hands a reassuring squeeze. “Not a single word.”

Oh God, she was going to regret this.

“Fine.” She slipped her hands free of his, picked up her phone from the table, and AirDropped the file of her first book to Nash’s phone. “But I’m holding you to your word. We never mention this book again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he stood up and gathered the dishes before carrying them to the sink where he started the water.

Shock at having someone help with a domestic chore had her glued to her chair with her mouth open for a second before she came to her senses. “I can do that.”

“I don’t mind.” Nash snagged the dishcloth hanging from the oven handle and handed it to her. “How about I wash and you dry? You know where all the dishes go anyway. It’ll be relaxing.”

“Dishes are relaxing?” Yeah, that word didn’t mean what he seemed to think it meant.

“Yeah.” He flashed a grin at her, but unlike the usual one—or even the double dimpler—it didn’t reach his eyes. “You clean it up and everything stays how it is supposed to be, then you can relax.”

He cut off whatever she may have asked after that by turning up his playlist and dancing in front of the sink as he scrubbed the dishes clean.