“Not yet, anyway,” his son said, and Cole smiled. Then Wes gave him a pointed look. “One question, though.”
“Yeah?”
“If you played games so much you didn’t know how to—what was it you said?—interact with other people? Then how’d you and Sabrina get to be such good friends?”
Cole’s chest cramped. “Because she was pushy as hell,” he said, thinking that would get a laugh from his son.
Instead, Wes’s frown only deepened.
* * *
By the time Sabrina and the girls got to the church hall on Monday with their grocery-shopping loot for the Bake-a-Thon, she was both exhilarated and exhausted. And had sent up no less than a dozen prayers of gratitude to Jeanne Noble for her example in dealing with all those kids for so many years. But she was also grateful for the distraction after the way she and Cole had left things on Saturday. Honestly, her mumbled excuse for not going to dinner with him and the kids had probably sounded about as convincing as a D-list actor’s performance in some SyFy Channel monster-meets-natural-disaster mash-up.
But what she’d heard in Cole’s voice...speaking of mash-ups. Memories and longing and vulnerability, all smushed together in her brain. Loud and insistent, maybe, but far from real.
Or realistic.
The girls piled out of Pop’s car, all talking at once. Even Brooke, who she’d been grateful to see was getting on great with this mouthy, brassy, bodacious bunch. And yet, Sabrina heard—in their laughter and joking around, their unexpectedly respectful attitude toward her—old souls still harboring an innate innocence that no amount of makeup and borderline-trashy clothes and hard-assed attitudes could entirely quash.
A strength, whether the girls understood it or not, she could totally play to.
“Okay,” she said when they reached the kitchen, which wasn’t nearly as awful as her brother had led her to believe. The appliances, while not new, at least weren’t decrepit; the counters were spacious, including a huge, stainless steel–topped island in the middle of the large room. And, hey, double ovens were double ovens, yo. As her chattering charges would say. “Everybody choose a counter space and set up all your ingredients. We won’t be able to bake everything at once, but cookies don’t take long, so those can go first.”
“And then we can eat them while we’re waiting for the other stuff to bake, right?”
This from Caitlin, natch. Who clearly wasn’t going to keel over from starvation anytime soon.
“We can eat some of them,” Sabrina said, setting the ovens to 350 degrees. “Because there is nothing better than cookies still hot and gooey from the oven.” All the girls groaned. “But the whole point is sharing with the others, right?”
Brooke and one of the other girls had already started measuring out their ingredients into bowls Sabrina had lugged over from her father’s house. Along with measuring utensils, wooden spoons, cookie sheets and assorted baking pans which she’d already decided to donate to the cause, since it wasn’t as if her father was ever going to need this stuff. Or ever had. Baking was not part of his skill set.
She checked on each of the girls in turn, doling out only that advice necessary to avert disaster. Or tears. Although Brooke had called to check if her macaroon recipe was too difficult—Sabrina had assured her it wasn’t—Micaela had chosen to make some traditional Cuban sweet that involved a million ingredients and nearly as many steps. And while Sabrina admired the girl’s ambition, she didn’t hold out much hope for the recipe’s ultimate success.
“Just remember,” she said to the room at large after the first batches of cookies went in, “this is a learning process. If we mess up, we can try again. It took me I don’t know how many tries to get my brownies right. Either they came out like cement, or so soft you needed to eat them with a spoon.”
Brooke giggled. “So who taught you to cook?”
She smiled. “Jeanne Noble. The same woman who taught your dad. And my brothers—”
“Yo!” Shandra shrieked. “Get out of here!”
Sabrina spun around to see a couple of the boys standing at the kitchen door, dressed in various stages of baggy and grinning like loons as the girls all sent up an alarm like they’d been caught naked in the locker room.
“Sorry,” said a black-haired dude with an abashed expression, his ball cap clutched in his hands. “But it smells so good, we couldn’t focus on our game. Seriously, Mickie,” he said when she rolled her dark brown eyes. “You guys making cookies and sh—stuff?”
“Maybe,” she said, tilting her chin and with one hand on her hip, as another boy, then another and another crowded the doorway, noses twitching like hounds on a scent. Sabrina pressed her lips together to keep from laughing, flashing back to how the scent of her mother’s baking would lure every young male in a ten-mile radius.
“You think maybe we could have some?” another boy asked, a shaggy blond who looked like some underfed waif straight out of Oliver Twist. Of course, that impression might have been due to his shirt being four sizes too large and his jeans crumpling around his ankles like a Shar-Pei’s skin folds. His homies murmured their agreement, each one’s eyes more pleading than the next. A smaller, dark-skinned boy dug into his equally baggy jeans pocket and pulled out a wad of very beat-up one dollar bills.
“We’ll even pay,” he said, and Sabrina’s heart crumpled as badly as those pants.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “there’s plenty. And we can always make more. So put your money back. In fact...you guys want to help?” Her eyes cut to the shocked/pissed/dumbfounded looks on the girls’ faces, daring them to object, before swinging back to the boys. “I think we’ve got enough ingredients to make at least another couple batches of chocolate chip cookies.”
“But we don’t know how to do that.”
“That’s okay. We’ll show you. Won’t we, girls?”
Another laugh threatened to escape as her charges exchanged wide-eyed looks. Clearly, if any of this group had hooking up on the brain, showing a bunch of boys how to bake was not part of their plan.
And overseeing—she counted—eight boys in addition to the girls was definitely not part of hers.
As the boys ambled into the kitchen, Brooke came up beside her and whispered, “There’s only one bag of chocolate chips left. And the flour and butter are almost gone, too.”
“So, not enough stuff for eight additional people is what you’re saying.”
“Nope.”
Crud. And she couldn’t exactly leave them all unsupervised while she made a run to the store—
“You want me to call Dad?”
Oh, hell, no.
“Sure, sweetie. That would be great.”
* * *
By the time Cole got to the church after stopping at the store, the whole block smelled like a cookie factory. Beeping his car locked, he headed inside the hall, the sounds of laughter and bickering and a throbbing salsa beat drawing him across the room to the kitchen. He had been busy, actually, debugging some codes for the new game he was developing. But he wasn’t about to turn down a chance to get on Sabrina’s good side.
Or her nerves. He wasn’t picky.
Not that it would take much to accomplish that second thing, he thought when he first caught sight of her, her hair sloppily clipped on top of her head, trying to instruct three boys at once as they dumped what he assumed were chocolate chips into their bowls. What they weren’t shoving in their mouths, that is.
Grinning, Cole came up behind her to whisper, “Cavalry’s here. Also—” he unloaded two bags of flour, chips, butter and eggs on the table beside her “—supplies.”
She twisted around to look up at him, gratitude beaming in her eyes. “Where’s Wes?”
He wasn’t about to tell her his son’s reaction to the suggestion he tag along. “At home. Being
thirteen.”
Bree seemed to accept that. “Chocolate chip,” she said, pointing to a couple of empty bowls—heavy, ceramic, one yellow, one green, both bearing the scars of his and Bree’s youth. “You know what to do.”
And indeed he did, having helped Bree and Kelly make God-knew-how-many batches of the things for every school, church or Scout fund-raiser Jeanne Noble got wind of. Even if it had been a while. It all came flooding back, though, the minute he picked up a bag of chips to read the recipe.
All of it, he thought with a glance at the woman whom he was guessing was currently straddling that very fine line between having fun and frazzled. Including—he looked away to find a pair of young men frowning up at him, their tough expressions and street-cred duds at such odds with their baby faces—tattered memories of kids who looked very much like this, whose mission in life had been to make his as miserable as possible. A life that would have been far more miserable if it hadn’t been for Bree’s presence in it.
That Cole should be in a position now to save her—not from bullying, no, but from the kids’ almost suffocating enthusiasm...well. Guess irony had its humorous side, after all.
He told the boys to wash out the bowls, then bring them back over. Like males everywhere, they couldn’t perform the simple task without annoying the hell out of each other, splashing and getting in each other’s way, trading barbs at the speed of light.
As Cole watched, shaking his head, his gaze wandered to his daughter, smiling and laughing with the one with the massive hair, and his heart twisted.
Then he caught Bree watching him watching them, saw her smile in a way he hadn’t for probably twenty years. A ghost, he thought, of that I-know-what-you’re-thinking smile that’d signified a bond between them that had been real, and true, and, for a long time, indissoluble.
Except ghosts were nothing more than illusions, right? A trick of the light, perhaps. Of the imagination—
“Yo, Mr. Cole—we cleaned the bowls. So now what?”
“So now we make cookies. Only ours will be better than anybody else’s.”
“How come?”
He bent closer. “Extra chocolate chips,” he whispered, which got a pair of grins. And high fives all around.
“Dude. Righteous,” Marco, the shorter of the two, said, as Bree called out from the other side of the room, “What’s going on over there?”
“Nothing,” Cole shot back, and the boys chuckled, totally all about the subterfuge. And Cole laughed as well, totally in the moment.
Even if that’s all it was—
He looked at Bree, radiating suspicion from across the room.
Or ever could be.
* * *
An hour later, Sabrina decided that, while in theory making a dozen kids clean had been the right thing to do, reality was something else again. Hence she and Cole were still washing up bowls and spoons and cookie sheets well after the last kid had trudged off—Brooke with Caitlin, to spend the afternoon—each with a container of goodies to share with his or her family. At one point, Father Bill had stuck his head in to see what was going on, surprise quickly giving way to delight. Especially when several of the kids insisted he sample the fruits—or baked goods—of their very loud labors. He may have even lifted his eyes to heaven. Not that Sabrina would have blamed him, having done a fair amount of sampling herself, blowing her carb allowance to hell and back in the process and not feeling the least bit guilty about it.
“Cookies,” Cole said, snapping the top on to the last of the containers and tucking it into a locking cupboard. “Who knew?”
“I know, right?” She took a paper towel to a cookie sheet as Cole wiped down the stove, muscles shifting and bunching underneath a Henley shirt that could have been a size smaller, actually. “So much for makeovers and computer skills.” Cole softly laughed, and she smiled, even though she still couldn’t decide if she was glad he was here, or if she wished he would take his sexy, kind, funny, smart self away and leave her confused, frustrated, lonely self in peace.
“Thanks again for coming to the rescue. You were terrific with those boys. Showing them that real men bake cookies.”
He shrugged. “Only being me.”
“Which would be my point.” More tired than she’d realized, Sabrina propped her elbows on the island, her hands folded in front of her. Easier on her back and a much better view. Might as well enjoy it, right? “The kids are damned lucky to have you as their dad,” she said softly, and he whirled around. She expected him to argue. Instead, he smiled.
“Thank you. That means a lot, coming from you.”
She blushed. And changed the subject.
“Did you have fun?”
“I did.” He tossed her a smile. “And yourself?”
“Same here.”
“So I take it you got over your anxiety?”
“More like they knocked it out of me.”
“Truth,” he said, waving the sponge at her before crossing to the sink to rinse it out. Setting the wrung sponge by the faucet, he turned around, swiping his damp hands down the back of his jeans. Which did fit. And quite nicely, too. “Which is why I’m guessing you agreed to a repeat performance next week?”
“It was like being set upon by a bunch of puppies. How could I not?”
His eyes crinkled when he grinned. “What I’m still a little vague on is how making more cookies turned into serving an entire meal.”
“Father Bill gave me the idea, actually. When he said maybe they could sell the cookies to help with the roofing fund, it occurred to me—why not a dinner? For their parents? The congregation? Heck, the whole neighborhood? Admittance by donation, for really good spaghetti and garlic bread, salad, dessert. I’m sure enough people would pitch in to buy the food—Pop, for one. And I bet Kelly would help, too. Great way to get the kids involved, give them an opportunity to give instead of only receive all the time. A fund’s all well and good, but it’s so...impersonal. Something like this would bring everyone together, get them rallying around the cause—”
“It’s a terrific idea, Bree,” Cole said, in a way that warmed her all the way to her tootsies. “So the makeover idea...I take it that’s been put to rest?”
“At least for now.” Straightening, she walked around the island to hoist herself on to it, letting her legs swing. “Granted, a couple of them are over the top—or out of their tops—and I’m more than willing to take them shopping if their parents are on board. But, really, does it matter how they dress? They’re just being themselves, you know?”
At his flummoxed expression, she smiled. “Thirteen’s a rough age. As I’m sure you’ll agree. But it’s worse for girls, I think. You have no idea who you are, who you’re supposed to be, how you’re expected to act... I remember it well. And the fact that they’re all wearing pretty much the same stuff tells me it’s only a thing. A thing that’ll pass. Like it always does.”
“It doesn’t bother you, the message they’re sending?”
Only because she knew Cole so well—the old Cole, anyway—did she know he meant no offense. The dude didn’t have a misogynistic atom in his body. If anything, he sounded genuinely concerned. But...
“I know what Matt said,” she said quietly. “What he sees. What you obviously see, as well. But that combination of innocence and energy and street smarts...it touched something deep inside me. God knows they’re not gonna take bubkes from nobody, but at heart they’re all good girls. Pussycats, if you want to know the truth. Despite their tough-girl acts. At heart, no different than Brooke. Are some of them craving attention? Probably. Like I said, it’s a rough time. But who am I to judge them by what they’re wearing?”
Her face warmed. Like I used to do to other kids when I was their age. Shaking off the memory, she smiled. “And you know what else? Despite being outnumbered two to one by the dudes�
�some of whom were definitely making eyes at them—I didn’t sense any of the girls were even remotely interested in returning the interest. Smart cookies, those gals.”
Cole smiled. “At least smart enough to not go there with two adults in the room, maybe.”
There was something about that smile, the barely banked laughter in his eyes, that sent a shudder through her entire midsection. And lower. Dammit. He’d always been intense, for sure. But adulthood had clearly focused that intensity with laser-like precision, and the result was...
Scary? Thrilling? Potentially devastating?
“Oh, trust me,” she said, “if a girl wants to go down that road, there are ways without the grown-ups having a clue.”
He paused, then said, “Speaking from experience?”
“Sadly, yes,” she said on a sigh. With her hands braced on either side of her hips, she flexed her feet, stretching out her weary leg muscles. “Not saying I might not try to steer the girls toward clothes that are less...obvious, but I wouldn’t dream of forcing the issue—”
One of her shoes clattered on to the linoleum floor, the noise like a gunshot. Sighing, she pushed herself off the table, losing her balance when she tried to wriggle her foot back into the shoe.
God, she really was tired, she thought, grabbing the edge of the island before she toppled over. Not too tired, however, to dodge Cole when he reached for her.
“No, I’m fine. Really,” she said when his forehead crunched. Whether she was or not—at the moment, anyway—was beside the point. As was how attracted she was to him.
However.
It was well past time she stopped looking to other people—okay, men—to make her feel...whole. Because, one, hello? Illusion, much? And two, as long as she kept searching for something outside of herself to complete her, how the hell was she ever going to discover who she was? Yeah, it’d taken thirty-five years to figure this out, but figure it out, she had. Go, her—
“You really get off on kids, don’t you?” Cole quietly asked, and she smiled.
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