by Cara Colter
It was probably from the Icelandic wool!
“I don’t usually recommend these for breakfast,” she said, as if she could chase away the electricity, and the helpless feeling it gave her, with stern words.
“Ah, well, its suppertime in Bali.” He popped a whole cookie in his mouth—no easy task—then closed his eyes and chewed contentedly.
“They aren’t healthy for supper, either!”
Though watching him, a memory tickled the back of her mind.
“My dad used to eat them for supper sometimes,” she said softly, then added thoughtfully, “I guess that’s the why of cookies. I got an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas when I was six, and was soon tired of the limitations of it. I graduated to the big-girl oven and started baking cookies for my dad. If there were cookies, warm out of the oven, when he got home, he’d get so excited. He’d gobble them down for supper. He’d do impressions of the Cookie Monster until my mother and I were in hysterics, rolling on the floor, begging him to stop. Of course, it just egged him on.
“The base dough for those cookies you are eating right now is the recipe I kept working on as a kid. It still changes slightly from time to time. For instance, last year, I started adding a bit of coffee to it.”
“Good business,” Brand said, opening his eyes and regarding her. “Coffee and chocolate, highly addictive.”
“I never gave that a thought.”
“You wouldn’t,” he said.
If he was going to insist on seeing her as an innocent, she was going to have to kiss him again.
No! She could never kiss him again. Because it made her long for things she could not have.
He was so far out of her league it wasn’t even funny.
“I haven’t just been making cookies. I’ve been looking for another kitchen. I can’t impose on you forever. I think I’ve got a line on one. It sounds as if it might be available for the beginning of the month. Beau can come home.”
“Sheesh, stop feeling guilty about Beau.”
“I’ve displaced him. And you, too.”
“This is pretty normal for me. To travel. To be away for long periods.”
“Do you ever stay still?” she asked quietly. “Do you ever just kick back and enjoy your beautiful home?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “I wind down here. You’ve seen the media room. It’s perfect for football and a beer.”
“That’s not actually what I meant,” she said.
“Oh? What did you mean?”
“I meant...” She tried to think of how to put it. “I meant a fire in the fireplace. And a turkey in the oven. A Christmas tree.”
“It’s May!” he said.
“I’m not explaining it very well.” She was not explaining it very well, but she also suspected he was being deliberately obtuse.
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s not about Christmas. It’s about a feeling. Of being home.”
“Cue the Little House on the Prairie music,” he said sarcastically.
But, in actual fact, she already knew this about him: his space lacked a sense of being a home. It was as if the house had spoken to her while he’d been away, divulged some of his secrets.
It was a beautiful house, like the houses you saw in magazines. She had taken advantage of his invitation and in his absence she had napped in one of the gorgeous upstairs bedrooms. She had found excuses to inspect all the powder rooms.
Everything was perfect, as perfect and as high-end as the kitchen would have you predict it would be. There were beautiful original art pieces, priceless hand-knotted rugs, painted silk wallpapers, incredible one-of-a-kind light fixtures and the aforementioned hand-knitted Icelandic throws. There were collectibles from many different countries, artfully worked into the décor. The furniture was all stunning. There were gorgeous scenes all over the house, as if they were waiting for a photographer. A desk with a leather-bound journal open and a pen beside it in an alcove under an upstairs window. A fireplace in the formal living room with the fire laid, as if all you had to do was strike a match. There were two vases of spring fresh tulips on a long dining room table that looked as if it had never been eaten at. There were fresh rosebuds in all the guest bedrooms, and a bucket full of delicately blushing pink peonies in the landing of the grand staircase.
And yet, as almost overwhelmingly beautiful as everything was, and despite how busy and how exhausted Bree was, she thought that his house felt empty. Staff came in, to clean and change flowers, but that just made it feel even more like a house that was being beautifully staged to sell, rather than a house anyone lived in.
There was no sign of his entertaining female guests, either. There was no second toothbrush, no tubes of mascara left out, no feminine shoes in the front coat closet, no chick flicks in his enormous collection of movies, no yogurt or diet soda in his fridge.
She felt as if the house cried for the feminine touches that would have made it a home and for children screaming and running up and down the halls and leaving messes everywhere. It felt as if the house longed for laughter, love, energy. It felt as if the house wanted to be filled up with the smells of people living in it: roast beef in the oven, crisp Yorkshire puddings erupting out of baking tins.
It was the saddest thing she could think of: a house that had never had cookies baked in it, or at least not while he had lived here. She could tell none of the three ovens had ever been used. The state-of-the-art appliances all sparkled prettily, but, like the stoves, she would put money on whether or not they had ever been turned on until she came along.
And even now, it was the scent of cookie production, not cookies, that had welcomed him back from his trip.
That is what she was very aware of. It was a house. Not a home. A place to crash and watch a football game and drink a beer.
Instead of making her feel awed by his success, the house had made her feel the acute loneliness of it. She understood perfectly why he would not spend a great deal of time here, or be eager to come “home” to it.
The only room she truly liked was the media room, with its deep, ugly chairs, and its stinky dog bed, and its gaudy Elvis posters and its faint smell of old popcorn.
Underneath Brand’s sarcastic tone—“cue the Little House on the Prairie music”—Bree heard the faintest thing: a longing, a wistfulness.
All of a sudden she knew she wasn’t leaving right away, even though that would be the smartest thing to do, even though her cat had suffered enough neglect this week.
If she wanted to protect her poor heart, and she did, she should already be halfway out that door.
But suddenly, it was not all about her. Suddenly, she was aware that was not how she had been raised. She was almost ashamed of the self-centeredness that wanted her to protect herself when she had the most precious gift to give this man who had done so much for her.
She had discovered what she could give him. This man who had saved her business, casually, as if it meant nothing, as if life was a game of Monopoly and he had a pocket full of save-a-business-for-free cards.
She wanted to repay him. But how did you repay a man who had everything? You gave him the one thing he had never had.
She could give him something he had missed. She knew from the small snippets of his childhood that he had confided in her about—living in a car for three days, for goodness sake—that it was unlikely his home had held normal activities, like baking cookies.
Giving him cookies for life was not enough. Besides, they were material. He could buy warehouses full of cookies. Her cookies, or someone else’s. She’d been in this business long enough to know competition was stiff and rapidly growing. Hers was not the only company that produced a delicious, meticulously made product.
So, she could give Brand the experience of making cookies. A piece of a missing childhood. A magic piece. A sense of what that place called h
ome could feel like.
“Have you ever made cookies?” she asked him.
“No, never.” He confirmed what she had already guessed, but he looked wary.
“Let’s change that. Right now.”
“No, you’re tired. Go home.”
But she wasn’t going to go home. Now that she had figured out the gift she could give him, it felt imperative to do it now. Maybe because he was tired, his defenses were down a little bit.
Because really? Under normal circumstances what billionaire was going to spend a morning baking cookies?
But he cocked his head at her, reluctantly interested. He lifted a shoulder in assent.
“Do I need one of those?” he asked, gesturing at her chef’s jacket.
“Only if you’re worried about your shirt.” She shrugged out of her own. “We’re not baking commercially right now. We’re making a single batch of my original-recipe chocolate-chip cookies. For you.”
“Do they have magic in them?” he asked softly.
“Oh, I hope so,” she responded, just as softly. And then, she moved away from the intensity building between them. She moved, instead, over to her iPod station.
“Want some music?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She found an Elvis Presley hits playlist and started it, then glanced back at him. “What?”
“Maybe not Elvis this morning.”
There was something in his face, guarded and yet vulnerable. There was some secret about him and Elvis he was not yet willing to divulge.
Yet. The word suggested her subconscious was already looking to a future her rational mind knew was not possible.
She changed the setting to random. She supposed, if he listened, her music selection was going to say as much about her as his house did about him.
Romantic. Hope-filled. Longing for love.
“Okay,” she said brightly, hoping to distract him from the telling messages of her music choices. “Let’s start. Cookies 101.”
“Do I have to touch HAL? I don’t think I can touch HAL.”
She giggled at his pretended fear of the mixer. “I was thinking something a little more old-fashioned. A big bowl. A wooden spoon, some basic ingredients. And my secrets.”
“I want to know your secrets,” he said huskily, “especially if they involve a wooden spoon.”
He was tired. She was tired. They had to tread very carefully here, so she ignored his playful, suggestive innuendo, even as she filed it away. He’s seeing me as a grown-up. You don’t say things like that to someone you think of as a kid.
“Secret number one, coming right up.” She went to the fridge, reached in and held the tinfoil packet out to him with showmanship.
“Butter,” he said. He lifted his eyebrows at her. How could a man say so much without saying a single word?
“Stop it!”
“I never said anything.”
“I know. That’s a special talent, being so bad without saying a word.”
One eyebrow stayed up as the other went down. It was a very sexy look.
“You’re being very wicked,” she said sternly.
“Yes, I am,” he said, not a bit contrite. “I think people usually use oil, but butter might—”
“You need to stop it.” The protest was token. Again, she felt a little tingle. He was definitely seeing her as a woman! That decision to show him some magic was having consequences much more dangerous than she could have imagined. She didn’t feel anything like a Girl Guide doing a good deed!
She wondered exactly what she had let herself in for.
And the truth was she couldn’t wait to find out!
“There is no wickedness in cookie making,” she told him sternly.
“Yes, ma’am, no wickedness in cookie making.” He repeated it dutifully. The way he said wickedness, with so much heat, could melt an iceberg!
“Butter, real butter, no imitations, is the number-one secret to making good cookies,” she said primly, as if his teasing was not making her feel alive and happy. She could feel the laughter bubbling up inside of her. Of course, if she laughed, there would be no stopping him. She had not anticipated this particular problem when she had thought of giving the gift of some childhood magic to a fully grown man.
She had to ignore his sexiness. If she didn’t, she would teach him nothing about home, and underscore his ability to distract. She had wanted it to be fun, yes, but she could not succumb to his charm, or fun was going to take an unexpected turn that had nothing to do with her original motivation in extending this invitation.
“You need to pay attention.” She said it out loud to herself, a reminder to stay focused on cookies and not the dark tangle of his lashes, the sensual curve of his bottom lip, the way his light pants clung to the large muscles of his thighs.
“Will there be a test?” he asked solemnly.
Focusing hard, she unwrapped the butter from its tinfoil and put it in a small bowl. Her fingers felt clumsy under his gaze, as if she had dipped them in glue that had hardened. She turned from him and softened the butter in the microwave. “Thirty seconds,” she told him, “just enough for it to slide out.”
“Slide out,” he repeated as if he was being an obedient student, which he was not! He made the words sound like something out of the Kama Sutra!
She shoved the two-cup measure at him. “One of white sugar, two of brown.”
She cast a glance at him a minute later after the room had descended into total silence. His tongue was caught between his teeth. His focus was intense.
“You’re not measuring gunpowder.”
“You’re the one who stripped all the fun out of it already.”
“I did not.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t tell me I can’t use the word stripped. As well as not speaking of anything wicked.”
“For heaven’s sake, I am not a complete stick-in-the-mud!”
“Okay. When’s the last time you had fun, since you brought it up?”
“This is fun for me.”
“But you are not a complete stick-in-the-mud,” he said sadly. “An example of fun that has nothing to do with cookies. Tell me the last thing that made you laugh.”
The last things that had made her laugh all involved him. Nearly. “I bought a laser pointer. My cat chases the red dot.”
He was silent.
“Obsessively.”
He remained silent.
“It’s much funnier than you think.”
“You need to get out more.”
Her sense of deep gratitude to him, and of wanting to give him a gift, was dissipating quite rapidly.
“We can’t all spend our lives frolicking on beaches, turning that lovely shade of gold that you are right now.”
“You do look a little pale,” he said, regarding her solemnly. “Jailhouse pallor. Chained to the kitchen too long. You need to get outside.”
“Thank you. If you could measure the brown—”
“If you did frolic on a beach, would it be in a bikini or a one-piece?”
CHAPTER NINE
SHOOT, BRAND THOUGHT. There it was, out of his mouth. The whole time he’d been in Bali he’d wondered that. Bikini or one-piece? Bali had not been quite the escape that he had hoped for. Now, here he was in the kitchen with Bree, being as wicked as baking cookies allowed, and somehow the question had just popped out of his mouth.
Bree’s mouth fell open. She looked flustered.
Well, who could blame her? He was tired. He should have never agreed to the cookie-making session.
He knew what it was really about. She had seen something in him, sensed something in this house. A longing. A vulnerability. He was going to distract her from her quest.
Which was what? To know the real him?
That, yes, b
ut more. She was determined to show him something he had missed.
Her motivations, he was one-hundred-percent positive, were nothing but altruistic. He should have never let it slip about living in the car, about his childhood being less than ideal, because she was busy filling in the gaps now. The problem was, once you had been shown something like that, didn’t you then ache for it forever?
He did not want to be thinking of the word forever anywhere in the vicinity of her.
“Why don’t you guess?” she suggested, her cheeks pink.
His distractions, he was pleased to see, were working. He had entirely removed the focus from himself.
“I’m going to guess a one-piece—”
“That’s correct.”
“When it should be a bikini.”
“Four eggs,” she said, a little too loudly. She held up a device in her hand. “This is a handheld electric mixer. Think of it as HAL’s little sister. We’re going to whip the butter.”
“Look, if you don’t want any wickedness you can’t talk about whips.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I hope you aren’t that kind of guy, Brand Wallace.” Sternly, she handed him the electric beaters. “Put them in the butter and sugar and turn them on. That should drown out the sound of your voice.”
“I’m offended,” he said, though he was not. In the least.
“Aside from butter, this is the secret to making really, really good cookies.”
“Good whipping?” he said innocently.
She pinched her lips together. It didn’t help one little bit. The laughter gurgled out past her closed lips.
He’d totally succeeded in distracting her from the topic of himself.
And he had totally failed to protect himself.
Because her laughter was a balm to a life that suddenly came face-to-face with the emptiness of all his accomplishments and all his stuff. He had somehow missed the most important thing of all.
Connection.
She laughed until she doubled over, until tears ran down her face.
It made him realize he knew secrets about her, too, that she probably did not want him to know.
