She fed the pups, her mind mentally going through her to-do list for the day. She had the meeting this morning, and then two dog grooming appointments that afternoon. By the evening, she hoped to be in the kitchen with her baking supplies, making something delicious to spend her Saturday night with.
By the time she showed up at the bakery, she was ready for something with a lot of sugar in it. She went through the line first and got herself a lemon poppyseed muffin for breakfast, and a long doughnut with maple frosting for later.
She knew the moment Dave arrived, as did every available female in the shop. It was almost as if the chatter muted for a moment as he glanced around, that black leather jacket stretching across those broad shoulders so unfair.
So, so unfair.
He bypassed the line and came straight toward Brooklynn, who almost dropped her pastries. Thankfully, she wasn’t alone, and Dave didn’t lean in and embrace her the way he had at other times.
Instead, he glanced around at her, Delaney, and Michelle, and asked, “Is this where we’re sitting?”
No one said anything, but Dave went around the table and slid onto the bench.
“He is so dreamy,” Michelle whispered to Brooklynn, and she tossed her hair over her shoulder and went to sit next to Dave. Brooklynn watched in shock as Michelle started giggling and smiling at Dave, pushing against his chest and flirting like crazy.
Dave grinned at her and said something, which made Brooklynn’s blood boil right there in her veins.
And she knew—she was not leaving this bakery without a date on the horizon. A date with Dave.
She sat down across from him, leaving the last spot for Delaney. She sat and said, “Raven can’t make it this morning, so we can get started.” She tapped her papers together on the table. “We need to finalize the categories for the bake-off today. And establish the theme.” She glanced around at everyone. “So let’s hear the ideas.”
“Apples,” Michelle said, and Brooklynn used every ounce of her willpower not to roll her eyes.
“We’ve done apples too often,” Delaney said. “Let’s think outside the box.”
“What kind of themes do you normally do?” Dave asked.
Brooklynn opened her mouth to answer, but Michelle beat her to it with, “All kinds of things. We name a focus ingredient we want to see. We’ve done pumpkin, apple, pecan….” She continued rattling off the themes from the past several years, and Brooklynn thought she’d need to go see the dentist for how hard she was grinding her teeth.
Dave sat there and listened to her, nodding as if he was really listening to her. As if he cared.
Michelle finally stopped talking, and Brooklynn turned to Delaney. “What about beets?”
“Ooh, beets.” Delaney wrote the word on her notebook while Brooklynn shot Michelle a so-there look. Michelle either missed it or didn’t care, and silence descended on the table.
“Dave?” Delaney asked, and she leaned toward him. “Do you have any ideas?”
“No ideas,” he said. “I know we can’t do lavender, but other than that, I don’t know why we don’t just let people bake what they want.”
“It helps the judges choose the best one,” Delaney explained. “What about banana?”
“Then you’ll get fifty types of banana bread,” Brooklynn said.
“Well, beets will give us a zillion different types of breads,” Michelle said, and Brooklynn almost hissed at her.
She couldn’t believe the toxicity of the jealousy running through her. Taking a deep breath, she glanced at Dave. He watched her too, and that only made her squirm more.
She had to get out of there. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to run to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” She left her pastries on the table, so she’d have to go back. Otherwise, she thought she might just walk out the door after using the restroom.
And she didn’t even have to go. But she went in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She could tell she was upset, and she wished she could get the blotchiness out of her skin. She couldn’t, so she washed her hands in the coldest water possible and went back out into the bakery.
Dave pushed off the wall across from the ladies’ room. “Hey.”
“Hey.” Brooklynn glanced down the hall to the table where they’d been sitting. “What’s going on?”
“Delaney mentioned something about us bringing a baked good next week, and I freaked out and left the table.” Dave gave a chuckle made of nerves. “And I don’t bake, so….” He ducked his head and looked up at her, the most adorable move in the world.
“So…what?” she asked, clearly not getting what he was hinting at.
“I was wondering if you’d give me a lesson or two.” His hand brushed hers, and it was no accident.
She wondered if he’d even noticed Michelle’s flirting. She’d decided not to go out with him again, but her violent reaction to Michelle had her saying, “Yeah, sure. What did you have in mind?”
“What would be the easiest?”
“Chocolate chip cookies?” she guessed.
“Great, we can start there. When are you available?”
“Tonight,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “Does that work for you?”
He grinned full-force then, and it was absolutely wonderful. “Absolutely it does.”
Brooklynn didn’t want to smile too widely, but she did allow her lips to curve upward. “Great. I have a couple of appointments this afternoon, so maybe like five?”
“Sure. Do I need to bring anything?”
“Just yourself.” She tiptoed her fingers up the front of his shirt, not afraid to earn a few flirting points herself, and headed back to the table, ready to name every fruit in the book until Delaney picked one.
Brooklynn stood in the kitchen, her back to the front door though every cell in her body screamed at her to turn and go see if Dave had arrived yet. Of course he hadn’t arrived yet, or he would’ve knocked. Or rang the doorbell.
She stirred the melting peanut butter and butter on the stove, her favorite no-bake cookie recipe almost done. Dave wanted to make chocolate chip cookies, but she definitely needed something sweet to snack on while they accomplished that.
She’d been in his house on Wednesday night, and it had been nice. But her nerves were firing on all cylinders to have him here for an extended period of time. Her phone chimed and she reached for it.
Julie: Have fun tonight! Relax. Flirt. Call me if you kiss him.
Brooklynn scoffed, then terror gripped her vocal chords and made them silent. Kiss him? Was that a possibility tonight? Already?
Couldn’t be. She swallowed and threw her phone when the doorbell sounded. She spun, her heart pounding, and backed into the counter behind her. All she could think about was kissing Dave Reddington—a man she’d kissed before.
Not really, her mind said. Sure he’d kissed her a couple of times in high school. But he’d been a boy then, and he was definitely all man now.
He knocked, calling, “Brooklynn?” in the same breath.
She pushed off the counter and practically ran to the door, feeling much too old to be this jittery about a man. But as soon as she opened the door, Dave’s presence reminded her of just how wonderful he was.
“Hey, there,” he said, grinning like he showed up on her doorstep every evening. “You started without me?” He glanced over her shoulder, and she gasped.
“The no-bakes.” She ran back to the stove and quickly stirred the now melted butters together. “These are just for eating while we bake,” she said.
“Ah, so you have no confidence in me whatsoever.” He chuckled as he joined her in the kitchen. “Probably smart.”
“I have confidence in you,” she said. “I mean, you’re forty years old, so you’ve survived this long somehow.”
“Forty-one,” he said. “My birthday was in December.”
“Forty-one then,” she said. “Surely you cook for yourself.”
“Small stuff
,” he said, inching closer. “What is this.”
“No-bake cookies.” She took the pan off the burner and poured in the oats and cocoa. “See, you just melt peanut butter and butter and mix all this in. Then we’ll scoop it out and let it set up.”
“My grandmother used to make these.”
“This is Aunt Mabel’s recipe from the Mansion.” Brooklynn got everything coated and she nudged him back. “I need something out of that drawer.”
He didn’t move at all. “Do you?”
“Dave,” she said, only flirtatious undertones in her voice. “You’re going to scoop these for us.”
Instead of moving back, he swept his arm around her waist and pulled her close to his body. A sigh cascaded through her, and the scent of his cologne had her seriously thinking about kissing him.
Could she really kiss him that night?
“Mm,” he said, breathing in the scent of her hair. “I missed you this week.”
“It was a long week, wasn’t it?”
“So long.” He bent his head and traced the tip of his nose across her temple. “Brooklynn, I’m dying to know how you’ve labeled us.”
She thought of the scene in the bakery, of Michelle flirting with Dave for all she was worth, of how upset it had made her. She didn’t want him going out with anyone else. Or even thinking of going out with anyone else.
But she didn’t know how to tell him that, especially when he pressed his lips to a spot just below her jaw. “I mean, are we friends? Is this a date? Can we go out again tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” she asked, the word full of air. She realized she’d lifted both arms to hold onto his powerful shoulders, and she was sure she wouldn’t be able to stand on her own if he let her go.
He pulled away, but his arm stayed around her waist. His dark eyes held nothing but dangerous desire as he gazed down at her. “Just be honest with me. I feel like I need to know so I can…I don’t know. Move on if I need to.”
Her heart wailed, and she opened her mouth, unsure of what was about to come out. “Did you see Michelle this morning?”
“Michelle?” His eyebrows drew together. “Oh, at the meeting? Yeah…you were there.”
“You didn’t notice her flirting with you?”
Dave looked even more confused. “Was she?”
“Dave.” Brooklynn couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t stupid. “How could you not have seen that?”
“I saw you,” he said. “And you looked mad, and then you ran off, and I followed you.”
“I bet that made Michelle mad,” Brooklynn said. Now that she thought about it, the flirting had gone down several notches after she’d returned from the bathroom.
“Did it?” He slipped his hand away from her, and she mourned the loss of it. “What’s going on?”
Brooklynn drew in a deep breath, ready to confess everything. “She was flirting with you hard-core in the bakery. Hard. Core.” Her anger rose just thinking about it. “That’s why I was upset. I wasn’t mad.”
Dave blinked, blinked, and then understanding filled his eyes. Before he could say anything, she said, “So if someone asked me what you were to me, I’d say you were my boyfriend.”
He fell back a step, clearly not expecting that. Brooklynn closed the gap between them, putting both hands on his chest and sliding them up to his collar. “So while I’m nervous, and a bit unsure, I do know one thing. I don’t want you going out with Michelle or any other woman.”
A smile spread Dave’s lips. “Just you.”
“Just me,” she said. “So if you want this to be a baking lesson date, that’s fine.” She couldn’t believe how powerful and bold she felt. With a jolt, she realized she used to be confident like this all the time.
The ocean had stolen a lot from her the day it had killed Ryker.
“How do you feel about that?” she asked.
“I feel great about that,” he said quickly.
“Good.” She tipped up onto her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “Now, let’s get these scooped, and then you’re going to bake me some cookies.”
Chapter Nine
“I can’t believe this is that hard,” Dave said, peering at the recipe and then looking into the bowl where his cookie dough was. “This doesn’t look right.”
He’d followed recipes before, but something about this one eluded him.
“And you have an egg shell in there.” Brooklynn giggled, a high-pitched, girly sound that drove his hormones into overdrive. Well, everything had done that since the moment she’d uttered the word boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
He wanted to run out of her house and scream it from the rooftops. I’m Brooklynn Magleby’s boyfriend!
Instead, he said, “Laugh it up,” with a dose of frustration coursing through him.
“I’ll get it out,” she said, opening a drawer in the island and taking out a spoon. “And this is so good for me.”
“It is?”
“Yeah, seeing you not be perfect at something?” She nudged him with her hip. “Means you’re human.”
“Of course I’m human,” he said darkly, still thinking about her lips against his cheek. She’d totally missed her mark, but Dave didn’t want to press his luck. If she wanted to kiss him, she could.
“Well, you’re pretty darn perfect,” she said, fishing the egg shell out of the dough. “And this has way too much flour in it. That’s the problem. How much did you put in?”
“What it said to.” He jabbed at the recipe she’d laid on the counter before busying herself with feeding her three dogs. They all laid on the floor a few feet away, an invisible line she’d clearly drawn for them.
It bothered him that she thought he was perfect, and he wasn’t sure why. “So how do I fix this?”
“We’ll add another egg,” she said.
He turned to her fridge to get the carton out. “And why do you think I’m perfect?”
She glanced at him when he joined her at the island again. “That bothers you.” She wasn’t asking.
“Yes, it bothers me,” he admitted. “That’s a high standard for someone to live up to.” He cracked the egg and dropped it into the bowl. “No shells this time.”
Brooklynn moved back around to the other side, where she’d been directing him if he had a question. “Oh, look. You used the half-cup for the flour. That’s the problem.” She indicated the used measuring cups on the counter. There was a one-cup and a half-cup.
“It says two and a half—oh.” It was only two cups of flour. He put his frustration into mixing the egg into the dough, and it started to look more normal. He tipped the bowl toward her. “Better?”
“Definitely better.”
“So I add the chocolate chips now.”
“Yep.”
He slit the bag with a knife and poured them in. “Don’t think I didn’t notice how you didn’t answer my question.” He gave her a sharp look—one he’d give to one of his junior officers when they did something stupid on-deck—and went back to mixing in the chocolate chips.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that you’re kind to everyone. Have a job. A successful career. Heck, you get up and run every morning at five o’clock. You’re never late, your house was clean when I came over, you—”
“Okay,” he said, cutting her off. “For the record, I cleaned just so I could invite you over. I’m never late, because the military doesn’t stand for it. I run because I want to keep my job and get after my men if they don’t keep up with their workouts.”
“You love dogs—”
“You have three dogs, and a whole dog grooming business.”
“You—”
“You’re kind,” Dave said over her. “You have a job, which by the way, how does that contribute toward a person’s perfection score?”
She stared at him, clearly surprised that he had a problem with her thinking he was perfect. “I didn’t know it was su
ch a big deal.”
“It’s not,” he said, his irritation subsiding as quickly as it had reared up. “I just don’t think it’s healthy for you to view me like that.”
“Well, I was saying now I know you’re not perfect,” she said. “You just interrupted me, and you can’t make cookies.”
Dave glared for one more moment, and then he burst out laughing. The tension in the room evaporated, and he was glad when she joined her laughter to his.
“Okay, so I scoop these too?” He looked for the scooper, finding it in the sink.
“Yep. Then twelve minutes in the oven.”
“Sweet.” Dave could only think about what they might do during that twelve minutes and if there might be kissing involved.
He slid the tray into the oven and set the timer before turning back to her. She got up and moved into the living room, her three pups following her like shadows.
“So now what?” he asked.
“Now you come sit by me and tell me something about yourself that I don’t know.” She smiled at him, and he recognized this flirting when he saw it. And he liked it.
Later that night, he climbed the steps to his house, his feet floating on clouds. No, he hadn’t gotten his kiss. Brooklynn had admitted that she wasn’t ready, and he was fine with it.
He really was, because he’d held her on the couch, and talked to her, and eaten cookies, and held small dogs on his lap.
It was the single best evening of his life, hands down. Boyfriend rang through his mind, and he paused just inside his front door and texted her.
I had the best time tonight. Sorry I freaked out about not being perfect.
He deleted off the last sentence and just sent the first.
Me too, her message came back. And I’d love to see you tomorrow. What are you thinking?
What was he thinking? What a dangerous question.
He wanted to kiss her—badly—but he didn’t want to push her away. Frighten her. He wanted to show her his ship, but she hated the ocean. He’d love to walk with her down the beach, but again, water.
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