Unscripted Seduction - Chapter 9
An hour later, Ama found him by following the scent.
Butter first. Then garlic softening in heat. Then something richer, deeper, touched with herbs and citrus and the sort of effortless confidence that only irritated her more because apparently Damian Sefa wasn’t content with being infuriatingly gifted in one arena.
The kitchen opened out in a sweep of dark stone and brushed steel, warm pools of light thrown over immaculate surfaces.
Rain and thunder still rolled now and then, lower than before, less violent but no less insistent. The storm had settled in for the evening.
So, apparently, had she.
Damian stood at the stove with his sleeves pushed up, one hand braced on the counter, the other finishing something in a shallow pan with the kind of focused restraint that made her absurdly aware of the strength in his wrists, the long precision of his fingers, the contained force of him.
And that was before he turned his head and looked at her, gaze moving over her once, unreadable, then back to the pan. ‘You’re still here.’
Ama folded her arms, leaning lightly against the doorway because her knees felt disconcertingly less steady than they had an hour ago. ‘The rain is still biblical. Also, you gave me two hours.’
‘I didn’t say you had to use all of it.’
‘I didn’t realise there was a penalty for diligence.’
He made a faint sound that might have been amusement strangled in infancy and plated the food without replying.
Ama watched him in silence, still too full of the script to trust herself with words yet.
Because she hadn’t expected that.
She’d expected brilliance, yes. Sharp scenes. Stylish dialogue. A son returning to Accra after his acclaimed playwright father’s death to help oversee the release of the older man’s unfinished final work, only to collide with the legal executor appointed to protect its integrity. She had expected polish, tension, the elegant sweep of diaspora identity, legacy and memory.
What she hadn’t expected was how much feeling lived beneath it.
The son who kept trying to treat his father’s unfinished work as a professional obligation instead of a living wound. The older man’s absence lingering in every margin note, every abandoned scene, every silence between what had been written and what had been left unsaid.
Damian wasn’t blocked by plot. He was blocked by the humiliation of recognising himself in the son on the page.
The ache of being too foreign in one place and too rooted in another was all over the pages. And the heroine wasn’t there to preserve a place or defend nostalgia, but to guard the integrity of the truth itself, refusing to let power, grief and masculine arrogance polish pain into something more convenient. Beneath the battle over authorship, memory and legacy, the love story was so restrained it was almost cruel in its beauty.
It wasn’t merely good.
It was moving in that dangerous, humiliatingly brilliant way that left her aware of her own pulse.
Which meant, of course, that the arrogant and hot wretch cooking in front of her had no business behaving as though the world was persecuting him by wanting more pages.
He set down two plates and finally looked at her fully.
And she saw it…that increasing tension in him. That refusal to ask the question sitting between them. He wanted her reaction. Resented wanting it. Resented that she knew.
Something in her wanted the silence stretched. To keep goading him.
Until he said sharply, ‘Well?’