The Millionaire's Homecoming

by Cara Colter

  He looked around her kitchen. He had spent a lot of his growing-up years in this room and this room was as unchanged as his own house was changed.

  A large French-paned window faced the backyard. It was already a bright room, but Mrs. Jaffrey had painted the walls sunshine-yellow, and though the yellow had faded, the effect was still one of cheer.

  The cabinets were old and had seen better days, and nobody had that kind of countertop anymore. The table had been painted dozens of times and every one of the color choices showed through the blemishes in the paint. It was leaning unsteadily, one of the legs shorter than the others. The appliances were old porcelain models, black showing through the chipped white enamel.

  The kitchen was unchanged, but still he felt something catch in his throat. Because although the room was the same, wasn’t this just more of the same of what was going on next door?

  He could practically see Kevin sitting at that table, gulping down milk and gobbling down still-warm cookies, leaving dribbles of chocolate on his lips.

  He could see Kevin’s devil-may-care smile, almost hear his shout of laughter.

  David realized he had lied to Kayla when she had asked him why he had never chosen marriage and a family.

  And when she had asked him if he ever missed this, for this kitchen was really the heart and soul of what growing up in Blossom Valley had been.

  Right now, particularly vulnerable because of what had just happened with his mother, he missed how everything used to be so much that he felt like he could lay his head on that table and cry like a wounded animal.

  Kevin was dead, but even before his death, had been the death of their friendship, which had been just as painful. Now, the Jaffreys had moved. It seemed shocking that Kayla was Mrs. Jaffrey now.

  Really, with the death of his father, David felt as if he had begun to learn a lesson that had not really stopped since: love was leaving yourself open to a series of breathtaking losses.

  And still, this kitchen softened something in him that did not want to be softened.

  The kitchen was a mess of the nicest kind: recipe books open, mixing bowls out, blobs of yellowy batter—lemon chiffon cake, at this time of the day?—spattering the counter. David was painfully aware that there was a feeling of homecoming here that he no longer had at home.

  He realized some of it was scent: Kayla’s scent, lemony and sweet, that clung to her, and the sweater he was holding. There was the fresh smell of the toast she’d had for breakfast, but underneath that he remembered more good things. He swore he could smell all the cookies that had ever been baked in that archaic oven, and Thanksgiving dinner, and golden-crusted pies that lined the countertops after the original Mrs. Jaffrey had availed herself of Blossom Valley’s apple harvest.

  He compared that to the hospital smells of his mother’s house—disinfectants and unappetizing food heated in the microwave and smells he did not even want to think about—and he felt like he never wanted to leave this kitchen again.

  “Mom asked me to return your sweater,” he said past the lump in his throat. “She remembered your name.”

  Kayla scanned his face and took the sweater wordlessly from his hands, hanging it on the back of one of the chairs.

  There. He’d done what he came to do. He needed to be in the water, to swim until his muscles hurt and until his mind could not think a single thought. Instead, he found himself reluctant to leave this kitchen that said home to him in a way his mother’s home would never do again.

  Instead, he found himself wishing Kayla would press her hand over his heart again.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  No. “Yes.”

  But she seemed to hear the no as if he had spoken it.

  She regarded him thoughtfully. It was as if she could see every sorrow that he carried within him.

  “I’m trying out recipes in an effort to keep busy and keep my mind off Bastigal. Would you like to try some homemade ice cream?”

  He thought of the congealed porridge at his house. He thought he had to say no to this. He was in a weakened state. This could not go anywhere good.

  But suddenly none of that mattered. He had carried his burdens in solitude for so long and it felt, ridiculously, as if they could be eased by this kitchen, by her, by the appeal of homemade ice cream.

  He could not have said no to her invitation if he wanted to.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TO ADMIT KAYLA’S KITCHEN, and her invitation, and Kayla herself, were proving impossible to say no to felt as if it would be some kind of defeat, so instead of saying yes, David just lifted a shoulder as if he could care less whether he ate her ice cream or not.

  Kayla did not seem to be fooled, and her eyes were gentle as they lingered on his face. Then she acted just as if she had heard the yes that he had not spoken.

  “It’s not quite ready. Give me a second.”

  “I hope it’s not rose petal,” he said, needing her to know he had not surrendered to her charms or the charms of her kitchen completely.

  “Oh, way better than that.”

  “But what could be?” he said drily.

  “I bought this at a yard sale,” she said, turning away from him and back to her crowded countertop. She lifted off her counter a bowl big enough to bathe a baby in.

  At first he thought she meant she had purchased the bowl at a yard sale but then she trundled over to a stainless-steel apparatus that squatted on her floor with a certain inexplicable air of malevolence. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed it before since it took up a whole corner of the kitchen.

  “What is it?” he asked warily, and gratefully, as something in him shifted away from that awful picture of porridge dripping down the wall in his house next door.

  “It’s called a batch freezer!” Kayla said triumphantly. “What are the chances I would find one just as I’m contemplating buying an ice cream store?”

  “Cosmically ordained,” he said.

  She either missed his sarcasm or refused to acknowledge it. “Exactly.”

  “It reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

  “That’s ridiculous. If I remember correctly, HAL was not nice.”

  “You slept through ninety percent of that movie. And you were the one who insisted we rent it.”

  “I was in my all-things-space stage.” She sniffed. “It disappointed.”

  But what David remembered was not disappointment, but that there had been a bunch of them in somebody’s basement rec room gamely watching the vintage sixties movie Kayla had rented.

  Somehow she’d ended up crammed next to him on a crowded couch. And partway through—after gobbling down buttered popcorn and licking the extra butter off her fingers—he realized she had gone to sleep and her head was lolling against his shoulder, and the cutest little pool of drool was making a warm puddle on his shirt.

  And that he hadn’t embarrassed her by mentioning it when she woke up.

  “How much did you pay for this contraption?” he asked gruffly, moving over to inspect it.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said happily. “That’s a steal. New ones, of commercial grade, start at ten grand. This size of machine is eighteen thousand dollars.”

  He realized, uncomfortably—and yet still grateful to have his focus shifting—that Kayla was way more invested in the idea of owning the ice cream parlor than she had originally let on.

  “Presumably,” he said carefully, “More-moo already has one.”

  “They don’t,” she crowed triumphantly. “They buy their ice cream from Rolling Hills Dairy, the same as you can buy for yourself at the grocery store. There is nothing special about that. Why go out for ice cream when you can have the same thing at home for a fraction of the price?”

  “Exactly. Why?”
r />   “That’s how I plan to be different. Homemade ice cream, in exotic flavors that people have never had before.”

  She frowned at his silence, glanced back at him. “And, of course, I’ll offer the old standbys for boring people. Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. But still homemade.”

  “So what flavor is this that you’re experimenting with?” he asked, curious despite himself.

  “Dandelion!”

  “And that’s better than rose petal?” he asked doubtfully.

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  “Have you done any kind of market research at all?”

  “Don’t take the fun out of it,” she warned him.

  “Look, fun is playing volleyball on the beach, or riding a motorcycle flat out, or skinny-dipping under a full moon.”

  Something darkened in her eyes when he said that, and he wished he hadn’t because a strange, heated tension leaped in the air between them.

  “Fun is fun, and business is business,” he said sternly.

  And he was here on business. To return a sweater. But ever since he had walked in the door and felt almost swamped with a sensation of homecoming, his mission had felt blurry.

  “That’s not what you said in the article for Lakeside Life,” she told him stubbornly. “You said if a man does what he loves he will never work a day in his life.”

  What did it mean that she had read that so closely? Nothing, he told himself.

  “I’d play with the name,” she said, ignoring his stern note altogether. “That’s part of the reason I like it better than rose petal, well, that and the fact it would be cheaper to produce. I’d call this flavor Dandy Lion.”

  His look must have been blank, because she spelled it out for him. “D-A-N-D-Y L-I-O-N.”

  “Oh.”

  “Cute, huh?”

  “Not to be a wet blanket but in my experience, cute is rarely a moneymaker. Look, Kayla, if ever there was a time to worry, this would be it. I don’t think people are going to line up to eat dandelion ice cream, no matter how you spell it.”

  “Oh, what do you know?” she said, and her chin had a stubborn tilt to it. “They drink dandelion wine.”

  “They do? I can’t imagine why.”

  “Well, maybe not the people you hang out with.”

  “I haven’t seen any of the good wineries with dandelion wine,” he said, keeping his tone calm, trying to reason with her. “And you can bet they do their homework. In fact, Blaze Enterprises is invested in Painted Pony Wineries and—”

  But she turned her back to him, and turned on the machine and it drowned out his advice. He was pretty sure it was deliberate. She freed one arm to open a lid on the top of the stainless-steel machine, then tried to heft the huge bowl up high enough to pour the contents in a spout at the top.

  At her grunt of exertion, he stepped up behind her and took the bowl. He gazed down into the bright yellow contents.

  “Hell, Kayla, it looks like pee,” he said over the loudness of the machine.

  Her face scrunched up in the cutest expression of disapproval. “It doesn’t! It looks bright and lemony.”

  “Which, if you think about it, is what—”

  She held up her hand, not wanting to hear it. He shrugged. “Whatever. In here?”

  She nodded and he dumped the contents of the bowl in the machine through an opening she would have had to stand on a chair to reach.

  Unlocked doors. Precarious balancing on chairs. And no phone to call anyone if she found herself in an emergency. Plus, spending fifteen hundred dollars on an idea that seemed hare-brained, and that should still be in the research stages, not the investing-in stages.

  Why did he feel so protective of her? Why did he feel like she needed him? She had made it this far without his help, after all.

  Though good choices were obviously not her forte.

  It occurred to David that he felt helpless to do anything for his mother. And he hated that out-of-control feeling.

  Not that Kayla would appreciate his trying to control her. But if he could help her a little bit—find her dog, pour her recipe for her so she didn’t risk life and limb climbing on one of her rickety chairs with this huge bowl, save her from throwing away any more money on ice-cream-themed machinery—those could only be good things.

  Right?

  The machine gobbled up the contents of the bowl with a huge sucking sound. David had to stand on his tiptoes to look inside. The mustard-yellow cream was being vigorously swished and swirled, and the machine was growling like a vintage motorcycle that he owned.

  “How long?” he called over the deafening rumble.

  “It’s going to come out here!” She showed him a wide stainless-steel spigot and handle. “It will be six to twelve minutes, depending on how hard I want the ice cream. We’ll try a sample after six.”

  He peered back in the hole where he had dumped the cream. “Is this thing supposed to close?”

  “I’m not sure all the parts were there. I need to look up the manual online. It didn’t come with the manual. I saved over sixteen thousand dollars—I can live with that.”

  The stickler in him felt like now might be a really good time to point out to her that she hadn’t actually saved sixteen thousand dollars. She had spent fifteen hundred dollars.

  He had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the half-empty perspective.

  That was one of the glaring differences between them. That and the fact he would have looked up the manual before pouring several gallons of pricey cream into the vat.

  “You can turn up the beater speed here,” she said proudly, and touched a button.

  The growl turned into a banshee wail and then the yellow mixture was vomited out of the top of the machine through the same opening he had put it in. It came out in an explosive gush.

  He yanked back his head from the opening just in time to avoid having his eyes taken out. A fountain of yellow slush sprayed out with the velocity of Old Faithful erupting. It hit the ceiling and rained down on them and every other surface in the kitchen.

  He scrambled for the off switch on the ice cream maker and hit it hard.

  The room was cast into silence.

  Kayla stood there wide-eyed, covered from head to toe in yellow splotches. One dripped down from the roof and landed on David’s cheek.

  She began to giggle. He was enchanted by her laughter, and it made him realize there was something somber in her and that she had not been like that before. Not just somber. And not quite hard.

  Serious and studious, but not so...well, worried, weighed down by life. As if she had built a wall around herself to protect herself from life.

  Suddenly, her laughter felt like a wave that was lifting him and carrying him away from his own troubles. He found himself laughing with her. It felt so good to stand there in the middle of her kitchen and see the hilarity in the situation, to let go of all the dark worry that had plagued him since he arrived home.

  Then the laughter died between them.

  And then she stepped up to him, and ran her finger across his cheek. She held the yellow smudge up for his inspection, and then, still smiling, she touched it to his lips.

  The substance on her finger was already surprisingly chilled, and not quite liquid anymore, but like a frothy, cold mousse.

  He hesitated, and then touched his tongue to the yellow glob. In an act of startling intimacy, he licked the substance off the tip of her offered finger.

  Was it possible he had wanted to taste her finger ever since she had licked the butter off it all those years ago?

  No. That was not even remotely possible.

  Still, he was aware that the mess all around him had evaporated. It didn’t matter that he was covered in pee-colored mousse, or that it dripped from the ceili
ng, and spotted the walls and the countertops. It didn’t matter that it was splashed all across Kayla’s apron and clinging in clumps to her hair.

  The flavor on his tongue made him feel as if he was about to die of sheer delight.

  Or was the delight because his tongue had touched her finger?

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he confessed, “but Kayla, I think you may be onto something. Don’t call it Dandelion. Or Dandy Lion. Call it Ambrosia.”

  Her smile put the very sun to shame.

  So he didn’t bother to tell her that her finger was probably a very important ingredient in the ambrosia he had just experienced.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HIS LIPS WERE still way too close to her finger! Kayla wondered whatever had possessed her to touch his cheek, to hold her finger out to him, to invite his tongue to touch her. Something shivered along her spine—an electric awareness of him that was like nothing she had ever felt before.

  She could feel her smile dissolving, her pleasure at his approval giving way to something else altogether.

  She wasn’t an innocent young girl anymore, but the power of her hunger astounded her. She wanted him.

  It felt like a kind of crime to want someone who had hurt her husband so badly. But had he really? Or had Kevin hurt himself over and over again, and then blamed the whole world in general and David in particular?

  She shivered at the thought, and then thankfully, any kind of decision—to lean toward him, to touch his lips with her lips instead of her finger—was taken from her.

  He, too, sensed the sudden sizzle of chemistry between them, but he had the good sense to back abruptly away from it.

  He turned from her quickly, grabbed a dishcloth from the sink and began to clean up the mess.

  That was David. All the time she had known him he had always stepped up to the plate, done what needed to be done.

  Especially after the danger of having her finger nibbled, Kayla knew she needed to send him on his way, even if he hadn’t received any of the promised ice cream—unless you counted that one taste.