It wasn’t just a beautiful kitchen, it was a well laid-out one with all the latest amenities. She knew better than anyone how important it was to have the space designed properly to get work done with the fewest steps possible.
Amelia could cook up a storm here. She could throw some of the most amazing dinner parties ever thrown. Maybe an engagement party for Bree and Ian. They’d gotten engaged right before her reunion and had yet to have a party. Thoughts of gatherings with champagne and canapés started spinning through her head, but a glance at Tyler’s smug grin brought everything to a stop.
She’d fallen for it, she realized with a silent curse. What was better than a movie room? The kitchen of her dreams. He knew exactly what he was doing, bringing her to this house and seducing her with stainless-steel appliances. He knew better than anyone that the route to her heart went through the kitchen. She’d underestimated how easily she could be had by someone who knew her every weakness.
Amelia wasn’t ready to lose herself to the fantasy quite yet, though. Even if they did rent this place and move in, she couldn’t get attached to any of it. In four weeks, everything could be different.
Tyler was confident they could build a successful relationship, but they had a steep hill to climb. She’d take a great love in a camper over a so-so romance with a mansion.
“Well, what do you think of the place?” he asked.
“You’ve done well, Tyler,” she said with a polite smile. She ran her hand over the cool granite countertop. “I can’t believe you turned up a place like this in a day. This kitchen is amazing. It’s a shame you’re the worst cook I’ve ever met.”
He smiled and ran his hand through the messy strands of his dark blond hair. “Well, honestly, I have no intention of ever doing anything more complicated than making a bowl of cereal in here. But when I saw it, I knew how much you’d love it. This is all for you, really.”
His pale blue eyes were focused on her with unmatched intensity as he spoke. She could feel the truth of his words and the depth of what they really meant. He could’ve rented a lesser house with average amenities, but he’d wanted to find the one that would make her eyes light up and her heart flutter with excitement. The kitchen had done that, easily. And he knew it.
Looking around her, it was obvious that her life had taken a very surreal turn. Tyler would rent this house, she was certain of it, and they would be living here by the weekend.
The flowers, the dinners, the granite countertops... She’d demanded Tyler woo her, and he was doing a damn fine job. She could already feel her resolve weakening, and it was day two. What would happen over the next twenty-eight days?
The mere thought scared the hell out of her.
* * *
“I didn’t say anything because it’s a temporary arrangement.” Tyler rolled his eyes as his brother Jeremy needled him. He shouldn’t have answered the phone when he saw his brother wasn’t accepting his text at face value.
“Moving to Nashville doesn’t seem temporary.”
“I never said I was moving, just that I would be here for a while. I kept my apartment in New York,” Tyler argued. “And I’m not moving my business. I’m only telling you so someone knows where I am.” He’d chosen to text his younger brother Jeremy so someone in the family knew where he was if something happened. He had his cell phone, of course, but at least one person needed to be able to find him in an emergency. He regretted the decision now. Jeremy wouldn’t accept the fact without the justification.
“What’s going on that would make you drop everything and run to Nashville? Wait...” Jeremy hesitated. “Amelia lives in Nashville, doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” Tyler confirmed, feeling anxiety pool in his stomach. The conversation was unraveling faster than he’d like.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. She just...needs me for a little while.”
A long silence followed. “Needs you? Cut the crap, man. What’s going on? I’ll tell everyone you’ve moved to Nashville if you don’t tell me why. Your life will be hell.”
Tyler sighed. Better Jeremy know than the whole family. “Okay, but you can’t breathe a word to anyone. I mean it.”
“Of course. I’m not the blabbermouth in the family. I never even told anyone about that trip to Tijuana where you got arrested.”
Tyler frowned at the phone. “I’ve never been to Mexico, Jeremy.”
“Oh, that must’ve been Dylan,” Jeremy said. “Crap, I just told a secret. It’s normally not a problem, though. I’ve kept that secret for five years.”
That didn’t make him feel better, but he didn’t have a choice. “Okay...I’m going to stay in Nashville for a few weeks because Amelia and I got together at the reunion and we’re trying to make it work.”
“You hooked up with Amelia?” Jeremy asked with an edge of incredulity in his voice. “Finally! I thought you guys would never—”
“We’re married,” he interrupted. “And she’s pregnant.”
“Holy crap!”
“I’m telling you, Jeremy, no one can know.” That was Amelia’s first and most important rule. It couldn’t get out.
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “It’s safe with me, but when Mom finds out, she’s going to kill you.”
Tyler hung up the phone and shook his head. That hadn’t been how he’d wanted that conversation to go, but it actually felt good to get that news off his chest. At least he had one semireliable person to talk to about all this. If all went well, when the rest of his family found out, it would be good news and no blood would be shed.
His phone rang again, and this time it was the moving company. There was no time to dwell on this. The clock was ticking.
* * *
The next few days were a blur of activity that made Amelia dizzy just thinking about it. Tyler signed a short-term lease on the house, and his moving companies went to work packing up both their apartments. The real estate agent referred them to an agency that provided domestic contract work, and they hired a part-time housekeeper named Janet, much to Amelia’s relief.
After they left the agency, Tyler took Amelia to brunch, and they went furniture shopping to pick out the few things they needed in the interim, including a king-size bed and a desk where Tyler could work.
It was a good thing Tyler had the money to make all this happen, because Amelia certainly didn’t have time to do it all. She’d spent all day Thursday baking, filling and crumb-coating a five-tiered wedding cake. Although chefs tended to specialize in culinary arts or in pastry arts, Amelia had studied both. That came in handy when she and her partners had decided to open From This Moment and did pretty much everything themselves.
By Friday afternoon, the cakes were iced, covered in her famous marshmallow fondant and stacked high on the cart she would use to move the cake into the reception hall. Today’s cake was a simple design, despite being large in size. All she needed to do was load a pastry bag with buttercream and pipe alternating tiers of Swiss dots and cornelli lace. The florist was bringing fresh flowers for the cake Saturday afternoon.
Leaning back against the stainless-steel countertop to eye her accomplishment of the day, she came to the sad realization that soon she would have to let the cakes go. Cakes took hours. There were some days when Amelia was in the kitchen working on a cake until two in the morning. On more than one occasion, she’d just stayed over and slept on the chaise in the bridal suite.
Those days were coming to an end. They’d need to bring in help anyway to assist her late in the pregnancy when she couldn’t power through a sixteen-hour day on her feet in the kitchen, and to bridge the gap of her maternity leave. That would be much easier if they started contracting out the wedding cakes.
Reaching for her tablet, she brushed away a dusting of powdered sugar from the screen and made a note to talk to Natalie about that. W
hen that was done, she loaded her piping bag and started working on the final cake decorations.
“That’s a big cake.”
Amelia looked up from her work to see Tyler standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She was surprised to see he’d shed his suit today and was wearing a snug-fitting green T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans. It was a good look for him, reminding her of the boy she knew in school. “That’s an understatement. It weighs over a hundred pounds.”
He whistled, strolling into the kitchen to stand beside her and admire her handiwork. “Pretty impressive. Does it taste good?”
She frowned at him. “Of course it does. It’s my special lemon–sour cream cake with a fresh raspberry-and-white-chocolate buttercream filling.”
“No real chocolate?”
“This is the South,” she said. “Chocolate is for the groom’s cake, which, fortunately, I do not have to make. The groom’s aunt is making him one that looks like Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee.”
Tyler nodded thoughtfully and eyeballed the bowl with leftover raspberry filling. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
Amelia sighed and went to the other side of the kitchen to retrieve a plastic spoon. “Knock yourself out,” she said, holding it out to him. She waited until he’d inhaled a few spoonfuls of icing. “What brings you by today, Tyler? I really need to get this finished. I’ve got several hours of prep work ahead of me for tomorrow when I’m done with this.”
He swallowed and set the bowl aside. “By all means, continue working. Primarily, I came by because I haven’t seen you yet today.”
Amelia smiled and climbed up onto her stepladder to pipe the top tier. “Once we’re living in the same place, that won’t be a problem any longer.”
“Speaking of which, I also needed to let you know that you have a new address.” He reached into his pocket and dangled a set of keys. “These are yours. I also have a gate opener for your car.”
“Wow, your people move quickly. Is everything really out of my apartment?”
“Yep. I even had Janet go by and clean once everything was gone.”
Amelia nodded thoughtfully and went back to piping the cake. She was keeping her apartment for another month, but the odds were that she wouldn’t move back. As they’d discussed, she would either stay with Tyler, or she would get a new place big enough for her and the baby. He’d been right—her apartment was too small. It was easier to just get everything out now instead of having to go back and get the rest later.
“Janet also went to the store with the list you put together and stocked the pantry and refrigerator with food. And she got all the necessary cleaning supplies to keep the house shipshape.”
Amelia was going to like this Janet. While she loved to cook, cleaning was at the bottom of her list. The industrial washing machine in the kitchen made it easier to clean up here, but keeping up with cleaning her apartment had always been a burden. She’d developed a process of immediately cleaning up anything she did as she did it to avoid having to deal with it later. She’d never lived with anyone else, but she assumed that would make it exponentially harder to manage.
“Sounds great. Hopefully I’ll get to see what the house looks like before I collapse facedown in the mattress tonight.” She had a long list of things that had to be done before she went home today.
“Don’t you have anyone to help you in the kitchen?”
At that, Amelia chuckled. She added the last flourish to the top tier and climbed down the steps. “Not really. We bring in a crew of servers the day of the wedding, but I’m pretty much on my own until then.”
“What about the other girls? They don’t help you?”
Amelia pushed the cart with the cake over to the walk-in refrigerator. Tyler rushed ahead of her to pull the door open and she slid it inside. “It’s Friday afternoon,” she said, stepping out and shutting the door behind her. “Natalie is in headset-and-clipboard mode, counting down to the wedding. She’s probably meeting with the officiant and the musicians right now to go over the schedule. She will be coordinating the rehearsal, then the rehearsal dinner. Bree will be with her, taking pictures. Gretchen is currently in the reception hall setting up tables, laying out linens and doing all the decorating she can do in advance. When the rehearsal is over, she’ll start decorating the chapel and lobby. They would help me if they could, but we all have things to do.”
“What a circus,” Tyler observed with a shake of his head. “I don’t recall our wedding being this complicated.”
“Yeah, I know,” she replied, her tone flat. “Unfortunately, the circus is necessary for a beautiful, smoothly run wedding day. We’ve got it down to a science.”
Amelia picked up her tablet and pulled up her task list for the afternoon. At the top of the list was prepping a hundred servings each of filet mignon, chicken breast and salmon to marinate overnight. She pulled out a large plastic tote and started mixing up the steak marinade.
She kept expecting Tyler to make noises about leaving, but he continued to hover a few feet away. Whereas she normally didn’t mind company, he was a distraction. A glance at his smile, a whiff of his cologne, and she’d likely slice off her thumb. Dumping in the last ingredient in the marinade, she turned to him. “Tyler, honey, you don’t need to stand around and look at me. I’m sure you have something more important to do today.”
Tyler leaned against the counter beside her and shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’m here to help you. I’m no chef, but I’m another set of hands. Tell me what you need done.”
That was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard. She resisted the urge to throw her arms around his neck and let him take her against the industrial refrigerator. Fridays were a day for work, not play. Instead she took a deep breath and decided where they should start first.
“If you insist.” She pointed to a sink on the opposite side of the kitchen. “Scrub up in the sink and grab an apron off the shelf. When you’re ready, glove up and grab the beef tenderloins from the refrigerator so we can get them broken down into portions.”
If he was going to be a sexy distraction, he could at least be a useful one.
Six
“If I never see another potato, it will be too soon.” Tyler opened the front door of their new home and held it for Amelia to step through ahead of him.
“You were a trouper. Thank you for all your help today.” She looked down at her watch. “Home by eight. I think that might be a Friday-night record.”
He followed her into the kitchen, where she dropped her purse on the breakfast bar and slipped out of her coat. She hopped on one foot, then the other, pulling off her shoes with a happy sigh.
“All your things are in the master suite,” he said. Tyler had had to make a command decision when the movers arrived, so he’d given her the nicest room on the main floor and hoped that at some point they would share it.
Amelia followed him, shoes in hand, down the hallway to the master suite. The new bed dominated the formerly empty space, with a green-and-gold embroidered comforter in place. They continued into the master bathroom, where a door led to the walk-in closet.
“All your clothes are in here,” he said. “Everything that was in your dressers is in the built-in armoire here. All your shoes are in the cubbies there.”
Amelia slipped her sneakers into an empty slot in the shoe display and nodded. “Thank you for taking care of all of this. Since it’s all handled, I think I might take a bath in the big whirlpool tub. It might help me relax after a long day. Just not too hot, right?”
He remembered his sister saying something about that because she’d found out she was pregnant with his niece right before her fifth-anniversary cruise. No drinks, no hot tubs! What a vacation, she’d lamented. “I think so. I know hot tubs are bad, but they keep the temperature up. The bathwater, especially w
ith the jets running, will cool over time.”
“I’m more interested in the jets than the heat anyway. I’ll go online on my phone and check first. I’ve got quite a list of things to talk about with my doctor when I go to my first appointment.”
Tyler paused. “When is your first appointment?”
“Tuesday afternoon.”
“May I come?” he asked, hesitantly. He was teetering on the edge of wanting to be involved in the process and not wanting too many of the less-appetizing details.
Amelia nodded. “I don’t think the first one will be very interesting, but you’re welcome to join me and ask questions. We’re both new at this.”
“Great. Thanks. I’ll, uh...” he took a few steps toward the hallway “...let you take your bath now.”
Tyler slipped from the room and went back out into the kitchen. He had set up his temporary office in the keeping room off the kitchen. Turning on his laptop, he settled into the new office chair. He was exhausted. He really couldn’t understand how Amelia worked that hard week after week. As a steady stream of emails downloaded into his inbox, he realized he wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of it. Instead he closed his email program and started playing a game.
Even that was hard to focus on. He could hear the water running in the master bath. It seemed to take an eternity to fill the tub, but eventually the water stopped and the soft hum of the jets started. He lost multiple rounds of solitaire, his mind more interested in imagining Amelia stripping out of her clothes. Dropping them to the floor. Clipping her hair up so it didn’t get wet. Lowering her body into the warm, churning water, inch by inch. Rubbing her body with a slick bar of fragrant soap until bubbles formed across her skin.
A prickling sensation traveled down his spine, every muscle tightening with anticipation for something it wouldn’t have. He suddenly felt constricted by the clinging cotton T-shirt and jeans he’d worn today. Especially the jeans. Tyler swallowed hard and squeezed his eyes shut, but it wasn’t enough to block out his imagination. Nothing could drive the image of her wet skin and steam-flushed cheeks from his thoughts.
Thirty Days to Win His Wife Page 8
