by Sara Whitney
“Mmmpf.” The woman in question stirred and stretched, then blinked up at him sleepily. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” he replied, sliding a hand down her exposed shoulder. She wiggled closer and folded her hands on his chest, propping up her chin to look past him to the rest of the room.
“So you moved.”
“Yep.”
“I love it.”
He followed her gaze around the sunlit bedroom and answered honestly. “Me too.”
“Uncle Al left all this?”
“He did.” During the last of the cleanup, he and Gina had uncovered an old maple wardrobe along with a small chest of drawers, a sturdy wooden armchair and table, and a few framed black-and-white photos of the Chicago skyline from what looked like the sixties. They’d arranged it in a corner of the open space to make a bedroom, and it had instantly felt more like home to him than any other place since the farm.
“Work downstairs, life upstairs. That seems ideal for you.”
“Yep.”
Josie rolled to her back with a giggle. “So other than wow them with your conversational skills, what do you usually do with your women the morning after?”
He was finally free to give in to the temptation of her hair, and he twirled one red lock around his fingers. Not hot to the touch after all, but so soft he never wanted to let go. “The parade of women? I usually make them cinnamon rolls and then kick them out.”
He could see on her face just how badly she wanted to know more; the strain of playing it cool showed in the studied casualness of the hand she used to push her tousled hair back from her face, pulling it out of his grasp.
“Parade?” Her tone was breezy, but the insecurity underneath came through loud and clear.
So he set her straight. “Hookups mostly. Not many, and none recently.” He hesitated, then added, “None of them ever got this many words out of me.”
A smile bloomed across her face. “And the cinnamon rolls?”
“Coming right up.” He placed a kiss on the underside of her jaw and moved to slide out of bed, but she stopped him with a hand on his wrist.
“No. Stay.” Pink stained her cheeks, turning her into a riot of color against his white sheets. “I already know you can bake. You don’t have to impress me.”
He’d been planning to do it as a nice gesture and nothing more, but far be it from him to leave his bed when Josie Ryan was naked and asking for his company. So he stayed. And he kissed. And he touched. And he forgot his own name a few moments later when she returned the favor.
In the end, he did make her cinnamon rolls. And not the no-yeast kind he could simply mix together and slide into the oven. No, he made the kind that had to rise twice. The kind you made when you wanted to extend your lazy Sunday as much as possible because a bright, beautiful woman was chattering away next to you as you whisked icing ingredients.
“Best morning after ever,” Josie declared around a mouthful of warm cinnamon roll two hours later.
He leaned against the kitchen counter opposite her and looked his fill over the rim of his coffee mug. It was cliché as hell, but he wanted a mental snapshot of her exactly like this: in his kitchen, wearing his too-big T-shirt, chasing a stray bit of icing with her tongue.
“So I’ve been thinking,” she said once she’s licked her lower lip clean. At his silence, she rolled her eyes and stretched to nudge his foot with hers. “Since you asked, it occurs to me that I owe you a couch.”
He raised his mug in a salute. “Worth it.”
She leaned forward to clink hers against his, and he basked in the glow of their shared joke. “So worth it.”
“I hated that couch.”
She nodded sagely. “Honestly, its destruction was a blessing. Where was it from?”
“It belonged to Pops. I brought it with me from the farm.”
For a moment he was lost to the past, remembering the couch’s place of pride in Pops’s front living room, the one they’d reserved for company. The one he’d perched on uncomfortably as his mother begged Pops to just take her son for a few months so she could see about getting that job on a cruise ship. Thank God he’d agreed and that he’d insisted Erik remain with him when Suzanne turned up a few weeks later to take Erik with her to Austin, the location of her next big dream.
When he looked up, he found Josie watching him worriedly, and he offered her a reassuring smile. “No. It’s good. Change is good.” And to his surprise, the words were true. The changes he’d embraced recently made him happy. Happier than he’d ever been maybe.
“In that case, I have a suggestion.” She grinned and drained her mug. “You’re gonna hate it.”
Erik stepped back to survey his handiwork. Well, if he was being honest, to survey the woman who was surveying his handiwork. Said handiwork involved selecting, transporting, and successfully assembling the most basic black couch they could find at IKEA.
“I feel like we’ve passed an important test in our r-relationship.” She gestured broadly at their work, but her cheerful theatrics didn’t keep Erik from noticing her tiny hesitation over the last word. In response, he dropped to the couch and tugged her down onto his lap, kissing her until the worried crinkle between her eyes fell away. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but if they could survive both IKEA on a weekend and the mostly useless sheet of assembly instructions, he was pretty sure they could survive anything.
“Seems sturdy,” he said when they came up for air.
She laughed and gave a little bounce that traveled straight from his groin to somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. “Yeah, but we’d better do a few tests to be sure.”
He wanted nothing more, although for the moment he was content to just hold her close and enjoy the way strands of her hair got hung up on his scruff when she ducked her head to kiss his neck. He’d spent a Sunday furniture shopping with Josie Ryan. None of that sentence computed for him. Not the furniture-shopping part—his new suit notwithstanding, he wasn’t a go-out-and-buy-new-things kind of guy—and not the part where he succumbed to laughter in the middle of the IKEA kitchen accessories department when the flirtiest, fanciest woman he’d ever spent time with had tried to provoke him into a spatula duel. Now, in the middle of this new life she’d helped him create, a sense of wonder propelled him to squeeze her tighter and nudge her chin upward for a kiss. He didn’t understand how someone so drawn to designer labels and white-collar success could be content snuggling with him in his worn-in jeans on a cheap assembly couch, but he planned to enjoy it while he could.
As if she’d read his thoughts, she shifted her head up to kiss him, but as their tongues met, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
“Woo!” She wriggled off his lap. “As much as I appreciate the vibration, do you need to grab that?”
“Nope,” he said, reaching for her softness again.
But she pointed to his pocket. “It could be a new customer. Grow your business!”
It was, in fact, a new customer, the third one that day. Richard and Byron’s wedding had been excellent advertising. He moved to the kitchen table to set up a meeting for an October event while Josie fanned herself and pantomimed overheating, presumably because of his business-phone voice.
He rejoined her on the sofa at the conclusion of the call, and she extended her hand in a fist bump. “Kicking ass! Taking names! I told you I’d make you big!”
He gently knocked his knuckles into hers. “I’m just taking it one cake at a time.”
“No! Keep dreaming,” she commanded. “We’ve turned the downstairs into a functional kitchen and customer area, and we’ve made the upstairs your home. What do we need to do next?”
We. Over and over and over again. He grasped that little word and shoved it into the center of his chest, using it to stoke the fire that she’d kicked to life that first night on the train. What he’d initially seen as volatile and bossy was actually passionate and, well, bossy. And while he hungered for the color she injected into his life, he al
so feared that she was getting the short end of that bargain. He might crave her, but she craved noise, excitement, drama, all things he wasn’t equipped to provide. Once she’d built up his business, she’d move on to her next project, and he needed to prepare himself for that.
But that didn’t mean they couldn’t satisfy a mutual craving right now.
“Next? We break in the couch properly,” he told her. “Strip.”
Turned out, she followed orders just as well as she gave them.
Twenty-Four
“Success!” Josie clicked the Update button and punched her fists into the air in triumph, then looked guiltily over her shoulder at Finn’s closed bedroom door.
She and Erik had spent the night at her apartment, and she didn’t want to disturb her roommate any more than she already had the night before. Even in her tamest sexual encounters with Erik, she tended to get a little… vocal.
“Check it out,” she said more softly, shifting her cross-legged position to face him on the couch. “Your website is officially finished.”
He took the laptop from her, a tiny spark of excitement flashing in his blue eyes. Josie of three months ago would never have recognized it, but at this point she could see how jazzed he was to check out the finished product. She’d launched a bare-bones site during the dark period when she thought he was engaged, and since the wedding, she’d spent all her free time perfecting it.
She held her breath as his gaze flicked across the screen. The homepage slider offered shot after shot of his creations, looking pristine and elegant against the backdrop she’d set up in his old apartment. “Not too shabby, right?”
She drank in the sight of him smiling softly over her work. The past two weeks had been a challenge. Her schedule of evening events hadn’t meshed well with his client meetings and the time he’d been spending with Gina on some tech upgrades for the bakery. The two of them always seemed to be on opposite ends of the city, and when they’d managed to get together, it had always been too rushed.
Not only did she miss him, but they’d left their relationship maddeningly undefined, and the limbo was seriously messing with her. Now that they were finally enjoying a leisurely morning together, she wanted to use the opportunity to suss out how he was feeling about the you, me, we of it all. Was she just a hookup with an expiration date, or were they something more? What could she possibly expect from a guy who’d invented a fiancée a month ago to keep her at a distance? Why wasn’t he dropping any hints, dammit?
“This looks great, babe,” he said.
Babe. It was the second time he’d called her that, and although it wasn’t terribly creative as far as nicknames went, a non-nickname guy calling her a term of endearment had to mean something, right?
She was distracted from the implication of “babe” by the memory of how he’d made his no-nickname policy clear. Heat rolled through her body in a slow wave, but before she could wrench the computer from his hands to demand another demonstration, he clicked on the About section and grimaced.
“Stop it,” she ordered before he could say a word. “You look magnificent in that picture.”
“I look like a smug asshole.”
She nudged his shoulder with her own. “You look like the talented artist that you are. And that mysterious little smile you’ve got going on will be the thing that pays off your mortgage in a few years.”
It was true; her light kit and the crumbling plaster in his old apartment had done wonders, but mostly she’d allowed his stark beauty to take center stage. He looked steady and competent, warm and thoughtful.
He looked like a man she could love.
The thought popped unbidden into her brain, stealing her breath. This was new emotional terrain; her previous relationships had been too brief and too shallow to fill the great chasm of need inside her. But here she was wondering if this reserved man could give her what she’d spent a lifetime chasing.
Her jokes, her clever words. All of it crumbled as she turned to study his face. When she first met him, she’d considered him as inscrutable as granite, but she could read him now. The lip twitch. The shift in the muscle near his eye. He was pleased. Hell, he was downright ecstatic. But was it the website or was it her?
His gaze flicked to her, and his mouth curled into that private smile that was hers alone. It made her bold. Maybe he’d welcome her feelings. Maybe he’d even return them someday. She opened her mouth to tell him everything, all her fears and her hopes, all the soft yearnings blossoming in her heart.
And then her phone rang and ruined everything.
“Fuck.” The word was short but heartfelt, and Erik’s soft expression shifted to concern.
“What’s up?”
She scrambled to her feet, phone clutched to her chest. “Fuck!”
“Jos? You okay?” The question came from Finn, who’d emerged from her bedroom with a sleepy Tom in tow.
She waved her phone at Finn. “It’s Pam.”
Finn winced as she gathered her long dark hair into a tail at the nape of her neck. “I should’ve recognized that ‘my mom’s in town’ panic.” She moved to the kitchen and the coffeepot while Tom slumped into a kitchen chair.
Josie’s phone buzzed again, and her stomach dropped. “Oh God, she’s summoned me. I’ve got ninety minutes to get cleaned up and present myself at Monteverde for brunch.” She paced a circle around the living room, her brain clicking through possible responses.
She should tell Pam to go to hell. That it was a Saturday and she already had plans. That she wasn’t a puppet on a maternal string.
But she wouldn’t. Her mother snapped her fingers and Josie jumped. That’s how it worked.
Erik closed her laptop and set it on the coffee table, his steady eyes tracking her movements. “Do you want me to—?” he started to ask at the same time she turned to him and said, “Would you mind if I—?”
She laughed weakly. “Would you mind if I cut this short? Maybe we can catch up after, either here or at the bakery?” Dammit, she hadn’t gotten a fraction of the time she’d been wanting with him.
“Sure,” he said. “Text me.”
Tom looked up from where he’d propped his head on his hand at the table. “In the meantime, feel free to keep your kitchen skills sharp by making us pancakes.”
Josie paused on her way out of the room. “Don’t you dare let those jackals take advantage of your good nature,” she ordered Erik before diving into the bathroom and resigning herself to a long session with her hair straightener.
After she’d wrestled her naturally bouncy curls into submission, sleek and straight the way her mother preferred it, she rummaged through her closet for her most sedate baby-pink sheath dress and pair of nude sling-backs. Nothing said “relaxed Saturday with Mom” like cosplaying Joan from Mad Men.
She emerged from her room as she was securing a pair of pearl studs in her ears, and surprise surprise, there was Erik at the stove with a spatula in his hand.
“Shame on you two!” she chided Finn and Tom, who both grinned back at her, unrepentant.
“I volunteered,” Erik said as he flipped a pancake.
She nevertheless hit the freeloaders with a glare. “You did nothing to deserve this generosity.”
“Which makes us all the more grateful for it,” Tom said after a slurp of coffee.
Josie just shook her head and grabbed her purse, pausing awkwardly at the door. Were she and Erik at the goodbye-kiss stage? And was it weird to leave her business partner/hookup alone with her friends? Another glance at her phone chased every other thought out of her head as her anxiety soared.
“Gotta run. Finn and Tom, if I come home and find out that you made this man bake you anything else, you’re both officially cut off.”
She had her hand on the doorknob when Erik surprised her by abandoning his pancakes to give her arm a quick squeeze just above the elbow.
“Don’t let her push your buttons, okay?”
His brow creased in concern, and the u
nexpected emotions that had overwhelmed her on the couch came flooding back. God, she just wanted to stay here with him.
“I’ll try. But you have no idea what she’s capable of.” She pushed up on her toes to give him a quick kiss for luck and left to meet her fate.
Successful women never slouched.
Pamela Ryan hadn’t taught her only daughter a damn thing about unconditional love or placing value on her own self-worth, but she had ensured that Josie could make it through a hellish meal without her spine once touching the back of the chair. Ordinarily Josie lived for seeing and being seen at a posh lunch spot in the Loop, but the ice queen seated across from her in austere black turned every bite into sawdust and every interaction into a verbal land mine.
“How’s work? Are you still an intern?”
Josie’s knuckles tightened around the heavy fork in her hand.
“I was never an intern there, Mother.” She struggled to keep her voice steady. “It’s been six years. I have my own accounts that I manage.”
“Hmm.” Pam gave a noncommittal noise as she lifted her water goblet, and even the click of her fingernails against the glass sounded disapproving.
There it was. Like clockwork, a low buzz had kicked up in her brain, the way it always did after any amount of time with her mother. Would it kill the woman to offer even a shred of support?
“I like my job,” Josie said. “It’s something different every day.”
Pam waved a hand through the air as if she could bat away her daughter’s words. “Anybody can order hors d’oeuvres for parties. But you could’ve had a different career if you’d just let me—”
“If I’d let you bully the Art Institute of Chicago into accepting me?” It was an old fight that neither one of them got tired of having.
“Bully is a strong word.” Her mother’s flat eyes tracked Josie’s movements as she reached for a roll in the bread basket. Maybe the carbs would help her channel Erik’s eternal chill.
“It’s exactly what you would’ve done.” She forced the truth past tight lips. “My photos weren’t good enough to get me in on my own.”