you want. And despite your doubts, there is a market here. She sold a bunch of them this morning. So, did I cook it right?”
“Perfectly.” He forgot his manners and just shoved the rest of his tortilla into his mouth.
“Do you have a favorite thing to put on it? I didn’t know about that for sure.”
“I’ll put almost anything on a tortilla.” He pulled out the chair and sat, reaching for one made of corn. Another flash of the past as the flavor hit his mouth. “Wow. Just wow.”
“Should I make more?”
“Lady, you can keep on cooking. But you might want to eat, yourself.”
She laughed. “I’ll get to it. They’re really great this fresh, but I keep wanting to add something. Beans? Meat? Peppers? I mean, I guess people around here cook with tortillas, but I’ve never had any Mexican food. We don’t have a restaurant here that serves any.”
He gobbled down the corn tortilla, then rose and headed for the pantry. “I went shopping, remember?”
“How could I have failed to notice? My pantry is bursting.”
“Well, here we go.” He pulled out a can of green chilies, remarking that he wished they were fresh, a can of pinto beans and some seasonings. “Allow me to introduce you to refried beans. The best kind.”
It apparently surprised her, but she let him take over her kitchen. Sitting at the table with coffee, she asked him questions about everything he was doing, and he was glad enough to share. “Just understand, I’m not a master chef. This came from the need to survive.”
He liked the sound of her laughter, even as concerns niggled at the back of his mind. What had made her decide to be so friendly? “We’re skipping a step here, by the way. The canned beans are already cooked, so basically I’m going to be doing only the last half of the job.”
He pulled a half onion out of her fridge where it sat wrapped in plastic, then found the bacon. “Better yet. Fatback would be the choice in Mexico, but bacon...yum.”
“Do you put the bacon in the beans?”
“Just the fat.”
After he’d cooked a couple of slices of bacon, he set them aside on a paper towel, then tipped the frying pan. “About right. You don’t need a whole lot of fat, just the flavor.”
* * *
Corey watched with amazement. He might not be a chef, but he turned into a kitchen wizard right before her eyes. He tossed tortillas into one skillet while he flavored and stirred the beans in another.
“So what brought this on?” he asked.
“What?”
“Tortillas. Cooking them for me.”
“Oh! Well, I was talking to Melinda, and I mentioned that you liked fresh tortillas and it seemed a shame that the only kind you could get around here were the packaged ones from the grocery. Next thing I knew, she was calling and telling me to pick them up. When I got home, I didn’t know whether I needed to refrigerate them or whether they needed to be cooked right away, so...” She shrugged. “It just happened.”
“Thank you both. Do you have a potato masher?”
Jumping up, she pulled it out of the drawer for him and watched him mash the beans. From time to time he added a little water.
“It was really nice of your friend to do this,” he said again. Apparently he was nearly done, because a stack of cooked tortillas made its way to the table.
“She said it was easy. Not nearly as difficult as making a loaf of bread was how she put it. And I was kind of having fun experimenting.”
“Sorry I took your experiment over.”
“I don’t mind. I’m learning.”
Surprisingly soon, they were seated at the table with all the tortillas, a heap of refried beans that made her mouth water, green chilies in a bowl with a serving spoon and a jar of salsa.
“Wow,” she said. “I never thought it could be that fast.”
“Easy meal,” he replied. “It works pretty good with eggs in the morning... Well, like I said, you can put almost anything on a tortilla. It’s basically a rolled-up sandwich.”
The fresh tortillas were so much better than any she had ever eaten. And the refried beans? She’d had them once or twice from a can, ready-made, but these beat any she had ever tasted.
“You made it look so easy,” she said. “And it’s so good!”
He smiled at her, making no apology for his large appetite. “Fresh is best,” he agreed. “It wasn’t a problem in San Antonio, or in Mexico. But I did cheat by getting canned pinto beans.”
“Small cheat. You did everything else. I don’t know where we could get you fresh green chilies, though.”
“Oh, we could probably order them in a quantity suitable for a restaurant.”
She had a mouthful of food and quickly snatched up a napkin as she tried to stifle a laugh.
“I could probably get a friend or a family member to mail some to me, but...” He let that trail off and she saw his gaze grow distant.
It was getting easier for her to be around him as time passed, and she considered that a positive sign. But there was still so much she didn’t know about him, and she wondered how much she dared ask. It was none of her business, after all.
But in the end, she asked, anyway, because it seemed so important. “You aren’t ready to make those contacts again?”
His gaze snapped back to her. “No.” The word was short, but before she could recoil, or feel firmly put in her place, he spoke quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that...” Again he hesitated and trailed off. “You know how it is with people you’ve known your whole life.”
She nodded, not sure where he was headed.
“They’d be full of questions,” he continued, reaching for another tortilla and covering it with beans, chilies and salsa. “I couldn’t answer. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing all these years. Naturally enough. I’m not ready to go home and tell the necessary lies, not to people I care about. And if they suspected any part of the truth and it started to make the rounds...well, I need to wait a while. I wouldn’t want to draw any trouble their way.”
“Could you? Really?” The thought astonished her.
“Probably not. But I want some time to pass first. I want to be long forgotten by the people who knew me when I was undercover.”
“That hardly seems fair to you.”
“Life isn’t fair. I think you know that.”
She did, intimately, but she didn’t want to think about herself right now. “So where do they think you’ve been all this time?”
“Officially I think I was assigned to a mission in Panama.”
“Circles within circles,” she remarked. “Like a maze.”
“That’s the general idea. Other agents on the ground had no idea who I was. That made for some, um, interesting experiences.”
Corey forgot all about eating, instead trying to imagine all of this. If his own side didn’t know who he was...“You could have been killed by your own people!”
“It was a possibility.” His face seemed to go blank, as if there was more that he didn’t want to reveal. She decided maybe she should just let it go. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, or remind him of bad things.
“I can hardly imagine being so alone,” she said finally. Although she could, if she let herself. Not for six