I’m no stranger to the kitchen. My life never afforded me the luxury of being able to eat out, so I know my way around. But I know things like how long to boil packaged noodles and how to hit a jar just right to get it to open. Granted, maybe a made-from-scratch Italian meal for my chef boyfriend—fiancé—whose specialty happens to be Italian wasn’t my smartest idea, but it is what it is. Too late to go back now.
Besides that, I wanted to do something. It’s been a month and a half since he first put this ring on my finger, and I can’t stop the worry niggling me—that I need to try and prove my worth. I haven’t said that to him, because he’d shit a brick. Still, I can’t help what I’m feeling, and right now . . . these past several weeks . . . I’ve felt inadequate, to say the least.
It’s not as if there’s been a sudden influx of insecurities. They’ve always been there, but they were far enough under the surface that I was able to ignore them. Just go about our lives as if they didn’t exist. But that all went up in smoke the day he asked to share all my days. The day he asked to be tied down to me. He’s only known me for two years, and we’ve only been officially together for a year and a half of that. How can he possibly know he wants to spend his life with me?
Our whole relationship, Cade has been the rock, so firm and steadfast in his commitment to me. He’s been the one holding us together when I thought for sure we’d fall apart. I give him my love and myself, but how can that be enough when he gives me everything?
So, yeah, a homemade dinner might seem inconsequential—like throwing a pebble into the Grand Canyon—but if I can do this . . . if I can make him a stupid meal, maybe I won’t be the horrible wife my recurring nightmares tell me I will be. And those nightmares haven’t left me alone since he placed this ring on my finger. The one I hate the most—and, naturally, the one I have the most often—is when he abandons me in the ice cream aisle of a supermarket, like my mom did. Just walks away and never looks back.
I try to shake the heaviness settling over me and glance at the clock as I stir the more-brown-than-red sauce, wrinkling my nose. It doesn’t look or smell like the amazing stuff Cade normally makes, but I only have twenty minutes before he’ll come through that door, so there’s no time to start over. I want him to walk in from his more than twelve hours at the restaurant and be able to sit down and enjoy dinner instead of hurrying to whip up something exquisite for us like he does whenever he doesn’t close at the restaurant. Just once, I want to ease the burden and do something for him.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m covered in flour, the pasta dough is an absolute fucking disaster, and then to top it all off, the fire alarm goes off . . . just as Cade walks through the door.
“Shit!” Abandoning the ruined pasta, I rush over to the oven, coughing as I wave the smoke away with a potholder and pull out the charred pieces of garlic bread. And doesn’t that black, crusty bread just about sum up this whole god-awful attempt at dinner? After carrying the pan over to the sink, I drop everything inside, the bread sliding down into the ceramic basin. I rest my hands on the counter and let out a long breath, my head dropping between my shoulders.
The fire alarm cuts off, no doubt thanks to Cade. He probably reached up and plucked it right from the ceiling. The sliding back door cracks open, and then Cade comes closer. I haven’t lifted my head, can’t stand to see pity—or worse, revulsion—on his face, but I can feel him. His presence raises the fine hairs on the back of my neck, and that feeling only amplifies as he comes up behind me, his hands resting on top of mine on either side of me. The hard planes of his body fit against my back as he presses his nose into my neck and inhales deeply.
“What’s all this?” he asks.
I’m too tired to even try to say anything but the truth. “It’s my failed attempt at the practice run for being the perfect wife.”
I expect a lot of reactions from him, but his bark of laughter isn’t one of them. He guffaws so loud and so long that my spine straightens in response. I’m rigid and unmoving in front of him, and he must finally realize it, because his laughter cuts off and he turns me around to face him. My eyes are downcast, my arms crossed against my chest, but my closed-off body language doesn’t deter him.
“Winter.” He squeezes my sides, trying to get me to look at him.
I studiously ignore him, looking off to the side instead of at him. It’s stupid and childish, but I can’t help it—not when he just laughed at me. I don’t know if he was laughing at my attempt at dinner or over the fact that I thought I could even be the perfect wife, but it doesn’t matter. It stings all the same.
“Baby . . .” This time he ducks his head until he snags my attention. “I wasn’t laughing. I’m sorry.”
“No? What was all that noise coming out of your mouth?”
“Okay, I was laughing, but not at you.”
“Seriously? You’re going with the, ‘I wasn’t laughing at you but with you’ argument?”
“No, that’s not what I’m doing. I was laughing at the fact that you thought I’d even want a perfect wife.” He must feel me stiffen even further, because he wraps his arms around me to keep me from ducking under his arm and storming into the bedroom like I want to. “Don’t get pissed off. Just hear me out.” He pulls back and looks at me, one eyebrow lifted. “You gonna listen?”
“Say what you’re going to say so I can decide if this sauce goes on your plate or in your lap.”
His smile starts out slow, just a quirk of his lips, until it sweeps over his face. “That right there is why I’d never want a perfect wife. You think a perfect wife would threaten to dump pasta sauce in my lap?”
I groan and drop my forehead to his chest. “Oh God, I’m failing before I even have the job.”
His chest rumbles with a laugh as he runs his hands up and down my back. “You’re not failing. And what the hell makes you think I’d want anything but who you are? Have I made you feel like that?”
“God no,” I say quickly, not wanting him to think any of this falls on his shoulders. It’s all me. It always is. “I was just . . .” I blow out a long breath. “I just wanted to do something nice for you. Cook for you so you could have one night off. Isn’t that what good almost-wives do?”
“I don’t know about any other almost-wives. I only know about you. And I don’t give a shit if you never cook anything for me, because that’s what I do, okay? I love feeding you.”
“But that’s my point. You do all this stuff for me. What can I do for you? Build you a website?” I scoff and roll my eyes, even though my face is still pressed to the cotton covering his chest, hidden from his view.
“What can you do for me? You think anyone else picks up my favorite candy on their way home just because? Or sends me silly texts to make my days go by faster? Or would go to a movie they hated just because they know it’s my favorite? Nobody else hangs around to clean up the mess I make after I cook or tries out weird food combinations because I had a wild idea—that’s all you. Our relationship can’t fit into a nice, neat package, baby. We don’t do things perfectly around here, remember? We’ve tried hard to figure out what works for us, and we’re there. I don’t know why you’d think I’d want to change it. Or why I’d suddenly want someone other than who you are.”
He’s right. Of course he is. We’ve gone through a lot of trial and error while we figured out what worked for us and what didn’t. Where we each fit into this relationship and the roles we took on—conventional or not. But this weight still rests on my shoulders, and I’m not sure it’ll ever leave. I’m glad I haven’t yet lifted my face from his chest, because it’s going to be a lot easier to say this without having to look at him.
“I just . . .” I swallow and press closer to his beating heart, my hands grasping fistfuls of his shirt. I let his familiar scent surround me as I take a deep breath, then whisper, “I want to be worthy of your love, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be.”
He freezes for a second, his entire body going taut, his hands pausing
in their caresses on my back. “Baby . . .” His voice is hoarse, the single word coming out like a broken plea. He wraps his arms around me and easily lifts me onto the countertop so we’re eye to eye, his hips settled between my legs. “Why would you ever worry about that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He shakes his head and brings his hand up to my neck, his thumb running along my jaw. “That’s my job. It’s what I worry about every day, what I work for.”
I’m so stunned he could possibly think that when he’s everything to me, I can only manage to repeat what he already said. “Why would you ever worry about that?”
Leaning in, he presses a kiss against one corner of my mouth, then the other. He cradles my jaw in his hands, and then his lips are against mine, soft and sweet, just the barest brush of his tongue. After a few moments, he pulls back and rests his forehead on mine, his eyes still closed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
His words settle over me, the honesty of them seeping into my soul. Never in a million years would I have thought Cade would worry about that. Worry about being worthy of me? It’s laughable.
Is that how he feels, too? When he heard that I worried about it, did he think I was crazy, the same way I thought of him? We can see it so clearly in each other, but agonize about it in ourselves. Knowing I’m not alone in this eases the pressure on my shoulders, ever so slightly.
“Know what else you do for me that no one else does?” he asks.
“What?”
The grin he shoots me is one hundred percent devil, mischief sparking in his eyes. He reaches back, shutting off the oven and the burner on the stove. Then I’m over his shoulder, one of his hands gripping my ass as he carries me into the bedroom, where he shows me exactly what I do for him that no one else does.
Twice.
May 10
cade
That place we just visited was a lot of things, but bakery sure as shit wasn’t one of them. I don’t even pause as I walk through the side door of the house and storm into the kitchen, Winter trailing behind me. My mom’s old recipe box is down from the cupboard in three seconds flat, and I’m shuffling through the contents as I look for her vanilla cake recipe.
“Are you seriously doing this?” Winter pulls out a stool at the island and takes a seat.
“Those hacks aren’t making our wedding cake. Who the fuck doesn’t use vanilla beans in vanilla bean frosting? Who? People who have no business in a kitchen, that’s who.”
“And you think you’re going to have time to whip up a cake the day before the wedding, is that it?”
“If that’s what I have to do to ensure no one else has to suffer through that dry, crumbly, flavorless disgrace of a mess, then yes.”
“You don’t bake,” Winter says. “In fact, I seem to remember you saying you ‘can’t bake worth shit’ when we first started dating.”
“For this, I’m baking, and it won’t be shit.”
I don’t have to be looking at her to know she just rewarded me with a headshake and an eye roll. The stool scrapes against the floor as she moves to stand. “While you’re in here throwing around all your vast culinary knowledge, I’m going to get some work done. Should I let Tessa know that bakery she suggested is a no, or . . . ?”
The glare I shoot her only earns a laugh as she walks out of the room and heads to her office. A few months after Tessa moved in with Jase last year, we turned her old bedroom into an office for Winter since she works from home. Well, we is a bit misleading since Winter fought me on it the entire time, even after Tessa told her she didn’t care if her childhood bedroom remained the same or not. Tessa and Haley had a home with Jase, so Tessa certainly didn’t need her room here. And we all—okay, everyone but Winter—agreed it made the most sense to keep Haley’s bedroom set up since she spent the night a fair amount, something Tessa never did.
I knew Winter would never do it for herself—would never even ask for it—so one day while she was out with the girls, Jase, Adam, and I busted our asses to get the room done for her. Black and white framed photographs of different geographical locations—some she’s been to and others we want to go to together someday—hang on soft gray walls. Her desk, a simple black piece with three drawers down one side, sits directly under the window so she can look out over the backyard when she’s on a deadline and too pressed to move from her chair.
She was shocked when she got home that night—and, yeah, a little pissed I went behind her back and did it for her even after she insisted she didn’t need it. She might not have needed it, but after the cramped apartment we shared in Chicago—not to mention the shoebox she lived in all through college—she deserved it. Something that was one hundred percent hers.
But the thing she didn’t understand—the thing I’m still trying to get her to see—is that this isn’t my home anymore. It’s ours and I want her to start treating it as such. That was one tiny step in the right direction. I have my space to do my thing—the kitchen my mom redid shortly before she got sick is any chef’s wet dream. And Winter deserved to have something she could feel creative in, especially when she puts her heart and soul into every website design . . . into making sure her business stays afloat. And not just stays afloat, but actually thrives.
Winter’s steps echo down the hallway until I can’t hear them anymore, and then music floats out of the still-open door. A song I’ve never heard comes on—she doesn’t like to listen to bands she knows while she works because she says she’ll be distracted with singing along—and I let it become the background as I finally find my mom’s recipe and grab the ingredients I need, fully prepared to make this cake my bitch.
While Winter is lost in her world, I get lost in mine, trying diligently to focus on the recipe so I can replicate it. In the culinary world, it’s kind of an unspoken rule that chefs are either fantastic with cooking or baking, but rarely with both. Cooking is where I naturally flourished because there are no rules. Sure, certain flavors marry best with others, but everything is an approximation, a splash of this, a pinch of that. Measuring cups don’t factor into my cooking, but they are a necessity in baking. One I don’t take to very well.
It’s a shitty excuse, but it’s the only one I have as Winter and I each take a bite of the vanilla cake with vanilla bean frosting. The texture of the cake is off, crumbly and dry instead of moist and flavorful. The only thing elevating it slightly over the crap we ate earlier today is the frosting I somehow managed to not completely annihilate.
“Mmmm,” Winter says, forking another bite from the slice. “This is good.”
“It’s horseshit.”
She laughs around a bite of cake. “It is not. It’s good.”
“Good is not good enough.”
Blowing out a breath, she sets the fork down on the plate, then walks around to my side of the island. Wrapping her arms around my waist from behind me, she rests her head between my shoulder blades, her palms running up and down my abs. “You don’t need to take this on, you know.”
“Yes, I do.” If I’m not here to make sure this area goes off without a hitch, who will be? Jase? He’d eat a pile of literal horseshit as long as it was covered in frosting. I certainly can’t help with dresses and I know fuck all about flowers or invitations, so this is the only place I can really contribute to our day.
“No, you don’t. Cade.” She steps back and turns me around, tucking her fingers into the waistband of my jeans. My cock stirs at her fingers’ nearness to it, but I ignore it and focus on Winter. “You don’t have to do everything. You need to let go of the reins once in a while.”
“I—” My retort is cut off by her raised eyebrow.
“It’s not just the wedding, either. You’re working yourself ragged at the restaurant. You have a sous chef for a reason. You need to let her step up and take the load off you a bit. And the wedding? You’ve already handpicked the caterer. Honestly, no one is going to notice the fact that the frosting has—gasp!—imitation vanilla extract flavoring in it instead of
vanilla beans.”
“I’ll notice,” I say like a petulant child not ready to drop an argument he knows he’s lost. And I’ve definitely lost this one, because she’s right. The letting go lesson was a hard one to learn, but it’s one I had to come to terms with when I left Tessa and Haley behind, and when Winter traveled all over the country. And it’s still one I continue to learn every day. It’s a difficult habit to break, especially after more than a decade of priding myself on being the one to step up and take responsibility where I could.
“Actually.” She stands on her tiptoes and places a kiss on my jaw. Her arms go around my neck and pull me toward her so she can whisper in my ear. “I’m hoping you’ll be too busy noticing me to pay attention to much else.”
Images flash in my mind—Winter in a long, white dress, her hair pulled away from her face, a smile tugging at her lips as she walks toward me . . . And that’s all it takes to ease the tension cloaking my shoulders. The wedding day—the one she’s only just recently been able to mention in casual conversation—is coming both faster than I thought possible and slow as fucking molasses. I want her on my arm, by my side as my wife, and I want it now. But more than that, I want her to know that I’m not thinking of anything but her when that day comes. Shitty cake included.
I expel a deep breath, then wrap my arms around her and lift her off her feet as I hug her to my chest. “You’re right.”
“What’s that?” she asks, hand cupped around her ear.
I nip the skin at the side of her palm and say, “You’re right. No one else will notice. We can go with”—I swallow down my groan and force the rest of the words out—“Cakes by Mary if that’s what you want.”
Our Love Unhinged (Reluctant Hearts Book 4) Page 3
