Chapter Forty two: Bad Cook

Andrei should have known not to make her cook.

He’d thought that Illyra, at age twenty-eight, might have improved her skills. No. If possible, she’d grown even more hopeless in the kitchen.

The attempt had been a complete disaster, even before the raw yolks had been flung all over—perhaps a merciful end before they could be added to the burned, lumpy mess in the sauté pan.

Cleaning up, he dumped it all out and started fresh. Forty minutes later, he sat at the table on the patio and tasted his finished soufflé, and gave a satisfied sigh.

He would not ask Illyra to make food again.

Andrei knew how to cook. He just preferred not to. When he was growing up, his family had had nothing. His father tried his best to keep up the six-hundred-acre homestead, but he’d had his head in the clouds—the kind of man who would be mulling over a book of Russian philosophy and not notice that their newborn calf had just wandered away from its mother to die in a snowdrift.

Andrei's mother, a former wait