“Hey,” Dan said, tilting her chin up. “You still here?”
“Barely.” She was tired, sure, but the possibility that she might be able to actually sleep tonight had her too wired to sleep. Stupid irony, she thought.
“You must be exhausted.”
“You have no idea.”
He stroked his fingers over her forehead, down her cheeks. “You want to go inside and lie down?”
Yeah, right, lie down. But the thought of lying down with Dan got her excited too, and she watched the dream of even a bad night’s sleep fly away on the summer breeze.
Then Dan leaned down and kissed her, and suddenly she didn’t give a shit about sleep.
She felt him part her robe, and his hands were warm against her skin. She wrapped her arms around his neck and let him lay her down on the grass. The moon shone bright through his hair, and she held on while he unwrapped her, and then he was all around her, and inside her, and the wind carried her gasps and her sighs up to the moon.
Eleven
Dan was dimly aware of Mona running her fingers up and down his side. She couldn’t seem to stop moving. After they made love, he collapsed on top of her robe, and she collapsed on top of him. But as soon as he settled her next to him, her head on his chest, her arms around his waist, she started moving. Not that he minded. Her hands felt good. The gentle tickle of her fingers combined with the summer breeze blowing through the orchard, the crickets, the owls, it was all putting him to sleep.
He didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to look at Mona and watch her work and help her out if she needed it. She didn’t need it, and even if she did, she probably wouldn’t accept it. She was stubborn and prickly. But she was also passionate and generous and warm and loving and, honestly, the most amazing baker. But just sometimes, because she was also cursed. Life with Mona would not be easy.
But it would be so worth it.
The thought startled him, but not enough to let go of Mona. He had always gathered the evidence and made the sensible decision. Planning a life together when their first meaningful conversation had happened less than twenty-four hours ago was not, on the surface, a sensible decision. But it was like her curse—it didn’t make any sense at all, but at the same time there was no other possible explanation. She had opened that up in him—the possibility of . . . possibilities. Of seeing beyond what he expected to see, and really looking to see what there could be. And there could be Mona and Dan. He was sure of it.
He turned and shifted so he was facing her on the grass, his arms going around her waist just as hers did the same. Her head still rested on his chest and her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. Her fingers were running up and down his back, making him shiver. She couldn’t make him shiver like that if she was asleep.
So he knew she heard him when he whispered, “I love you, Mona.”
Outside of the kitchen, Mona was not known for her speed or coordination, but as soon as she heard Dan whisper to her, she was up like her house was on fire.
He loved her? Was he crazy?
Because she was crazy. She was moody and prickly and cursed. Cursed! There was no way that a man so straitlaced could love someone like her. She worked once a month; he worked nine to five, Monday through Friday. He ate the same thing for lunch every day; she ate whatever was in front of her. He wore khakis; she wore pink tank tops. He drove a sensible sedan; she drove a pink food truck. Well, she had a car, but for the purposes of this freak-out, she drove a pink food truck. He was sensible; she was full of nonsense. He probably wore a pocket protector!
OK, maybe not the pocket protector. But in another life, he probably would have worn a pocket protector.
Who was she kidding? He was so sensible, he probably didn’t even have a past life. He just came whole into this one fully formed and making perfect sense.
He made so much sense that he made no sense at all.
Before she was fully aware of it, she was in the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind her, leaving Dan outside in the wet grass.
She should go back out and talk to him. A man doesn’t like to declare his feelings and have the screen door slam in his face. At least, she assumed that. Men didn’t declare their feelings to her very often.
Further evidence that there was something wrong with Dan.
She should go out there. They had shared some really special moments. Who was she kidding? she thought. They were friggin’ magical. Khaki Dan was a Secret Love God.
So why did the thought that he loved her fill her with gut-churning panic?
The screen door opened and Dan walked in, carrying her robe. She looked down. Yup, she was naked. He had put his clothes back on, like a normal, practical person. She just paraded around the kitchen, where she was preparing food, completely naked.
“Thanks,” she muttered when he handed her the robe. She slipped it on, the silky fabric cold against her skin.
“So . . .” Dan started, then stopped. He stood there, in her kitchen, and stared at her. Those blue eyes, those damn eyes, they always gave him away. In them, she could see his earnestness and his desire, but also his uncertainty. They were too expressive for his own good.
She looked down at her toes.
“So,” she muttered. She couldn’t even bring herself to use her whole voice. She was ashamed of her reaction. But what was she supposed to do? Panic this strong—that had to be her gut telling her something, right? Surely, if she wasn’t naturally and giddily falling into his arms, that was it, right? Not meant to be at all. Right?
“I love you, Mona.”
Oh, no. Not again. Her stomach flipped and her hands started to sweat. This was panic, right?
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I know it’s fast.”
She heard his feet shuffling, but she was too cowardly to look up and watch him come toward her.
“Believe me, I never would have expected something like this to happen. I thought that if I ever fell in love, it would be after dating for a while, getting to know each other slowly, finding out if we were compatible.”
She saw his feet now, right in front of hers.
“I thought it would follow a predictable pattern, like everything in my life. I never even imagined it would be like this, that I would know you for so long, but not know you at all. Then when I get to know you—”
“Stop.” Without looking up, she put a hand on his chest. She felt his heart beating, hard, under her palm. He was giving her that heart. It was hers for the taking. And she wanted it. She wanted it so badly, but then her gut and the panic got into the act and she couldn’t.
He put his hand over hers, and she closed her eyes. Tears dripped down, right to her feet, bypassing her cheeks entirely.
“Look at me,” he said. She wouldn’t. But then he tilted her chin up and she kept her eyes closed, the tears running down her cheeks now.
“Please don’t be sad,” he whispered, wiping her tears with his thumb.
“I’m not sad.”
“You’re not?” She heard the hint of laughter in his voice, and she laughed too, a sad, wet sound from the back of her throat. Sort of like a sob.
“I’m . . . I don’t know what I am.” She opened her eyes now and looked at him. “Dan, how can that be? How can you love me?”
“I don’t know. I know that I like you, a lot, because we’ve spent this time together, and you’re clever and smart and even though you snapped at me a few times, I like that too, because you’re not afraid to be yourself around me. I don’t know how I know it’s love. I just know what I feel.” He pressed her hand closer to his heart. “And when I say I love you, it feels right. Doesn’t it feel right to you?”
It felt right. It felt so right she didn’t trust it. Nothing was ever this good for her without being too good to be true. Her gift for baking? It was a curse. It came with conditions that made her life, not unbearable, but it made her life necessarily separate. Because how could she share
the kind of life she had to lead with someone else? Only working sometimes, and when she did, being so completely consumed that she had to ignore everyone around her? It had never worked before; now Dan was telling her it could work with him?
She couldn’t. The look in those eyes was too raw, too real to be real. She had her life. She would bake, and when she couldn’t bake she would do what she always did, whatever she wanted. And she would have fond memories of a perfect night under the moonlight with an anally retentive, pushy, perfect man.
She couldn’t afford to believe in happily ever after. Nothing good ever came to her without a price.
“You should go.” She couldn’t look at him when she said it, so she looked over his shoulder at the open curtains above the sink where the moon shone and laughed at her.
She felt him tense, as if she had struck him, and then she felt him go. She didn’t watch him leave, but she heard the door close behind him. Then, as she stood there staring at that vicious moon, she heard his car start, saw his headlights make a wave over her windows, and he was gone.
She took a shaky breath. She had work to do.
Twelve
“You’re wearing jeans,” Mrs. Harris said to Dan as he entered the office, her eyes flitting between his wardrobe and the clock. He was late. He was never late.
“Yes.”
“And a T-shirt.”
“I’m depressed.”
“Oh, honey,” she clucked, coming over to take his briefcase. She never took his briefcase. “Bad date?”
“It was amazing,” he said as he followed her into his office. When she pointed to his chair, he sat.
“But you’re depressed?”
“I don’t understand. We had such a—” He waved his hands in front of his face helplessly. Connection didn’t feel like the right word. What they had went much deeper than that. But obviously he had been imagining it. “And then, boom, she kicks me out.”
“A love ’em and leave ’em kind of girl, huh? I wouldn’t have pegged Mona for the type.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” he said, standing up. Was she calling Mona a slut? Sure, she’d trampled on his heart, but that was taking it a little far. Mrs. Harris had never been so . . . priggish before.
She always left that crap up to him.
“Calm down, cowboy,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and sitting him back in his chair. “I just mean maybe there wasn’t as much between you as you thought there was. Maybe she wants to keep it casual. Maybe she wants to get to know you a little. You haven’t exactly been rolling out the welcome wagon for her.”
Dan dropped his head onto his desk. He was an idiot. He had been a total asshole to her before yesterday; hell, he had been an asshole for a lot of yesterday, too. Why should she believe in his change of heart?
He believed in her curse, dammit. Why couldn’t she believe that crazy things were possible with him, too?
“I told her I loved her,” he told his desk.
“What? Oh, Dan.” Mrs. Harris patted his back, then reached over and turned on his computer. “Oh, Dan, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I loved her!”
Mrs. Harris leaned on the corner of his desk, smoothing back his ruffled hair. “Well, sweetheart, sometimes . . . sometimes people don’t do what we want them to. You can’t control everything, you know.”
“I know! I don’t try to control—”
He stopped as soon as she raised her eyebrow.
“Fine, I try to control a lot of things. But not this. I mean, I wasn’t expecting her to say anything back. I just had this feeling, and it was so strong. I’ve never felt anything like it before. It was so clear, right here—” He pointed to his chest. “How could it be anything but love?”
“Maybe it was the sex.”
He sighed. “Yeah, the sex was . . . never mind.”
“Dan,” Mrs. Harris said, helpfully ignoring his comment about sex, “you can’t control what other people do, or how they feel. You are a nice guy, and people like you.”
“She doesn’t.”
“Most people like you. You don’t have a lot of practice with rejection. But in time, this will pass.”
“So I need to just forget about her?”
“This is a small town, so that’s probably not going to work. But when she shows up today, just talk to her. Don’t interrogate her. Just say hello, and if she wants to talk about feelings, she’ll talk about feelings.”
“Fine. But I’m not buying anything. That apple cake is what started all of this.”
“OK, you don’t have to buy anything. Now quit pouting and get to work. She’ll be here soon.” She looked over at the clock. “She should have been here by now, actually.”
Dan had been really, really late. But Mrs. Harris was right, as usual. He would lose himself in his work and then, when he was feeling calm and in control of himself, he would go say hello.
But he still wasn’t buying anything.
Even if his mouth was already watering thinking about apple cake. His stupid, traitorous mouth.
And that made him think of Mona’s mouth, and how soft and sweet she was, and how she had arched and gasped underneath him, and how the moon had made her skin glow.
He put his head back on the desk.
“You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”
He nodded, but he didn’t lift his head. He was never going to lift his head.
“I have to say, I’m surprised. I thought once you two finally stopped dancing around each other, you would really hit it off. You really seemed like you would balance each other out. Two sides of a coin.” She shook her head and headed toward the window. “Well, I guess I was wrong.”
Mrs. Harris was never wrong.
“She really should be here by now,” she muttered. “I wonder if something’s happened?”
Something was happening.
Mona pulled another tray of tarts out of the oven. She fanned her cow-shaped oven mitt over them, as if that would really cool them off faster. But she had to taste them.
The last batch had tasted like liver and raspberries.
They were supposed to taste like peaches and ginger.
She hadn’t tasted the crust before she baked that first batch. It was barely sunrise, and she was exhausted and she had made this crust millions of times before. And she wasn’t really thinking—not about run-of-the-mill pie crusts, anyway.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Dan out of her head. He’d just . . . left. She’d told him to go, and he’d gone, because, even though he was not always smooth or subtle about it, in the end he had always respected her wishes. He’d stopped talking about work when she’d asked him to, he’d left her alone in the kitchen when she’d needed it. He got her, and he respected her.
And now he was gone, and it was all her fault. The squeeze of panic that took up residence in her innards when he’d said that he loved her had not eased at all. In fact since he had gone, it had gotten worse.
What had she done?
But she had a business to run. Dan, if anyone, would understand that. She had decided she would track him down after work—there was no way he was going to approach her—and . . . well, she wasn’t sure what, yet. But the idea that she would see him in a little over twelve hours made her feel better.
And then the tarts happened.
She didn’t think she had ever cooked liver in this kitchen, so there was no chance of a postcoital haze mix-up. And yet, somehow, the ginger peach tart tasted like liver.
The real tell, though, was the aftertaste. The stuff she baked when her curse was off-duty always tasted really terrible, but the aftertaste was even worse. It was usually just sort of a general disgustingness, like the taste of bad breath. This, though, was stronger. It was an aggressive aftertaste that got up in her business and told her she was a coward.
Fear, with notes of liver.
That was hours ago. She had tasted the raw crust and it didn’t taste
like anything, which was not right, either. It should have been buttery, even before she baked it. But it tasted like . . . nothing. So she whipped up a new batch and let it rest in the refrigerator while she tasted all the other stuff she had made. It was an explosion of new flavor profiles, each one more disgusting than the last. Garlic and blueberry. Burnt popcorn. Briny marshmallows.
Horrible. Ruined. She looked at the clock. She should be out there by now. People would be waiting for their morning coffee-break treat. Darla James always stopped by before she opened the salon. Dylan Gunderson always sent someone to get a box of whatever was good for the guys. Mrs. Harris would pick a treat, then stick around to speculate about what her boss would choose if he wasn’t such a stick in the mud.
Mrs. Harris’s boss. Dan.
This had to be all Dan’s fault. The moon was completely full last night. It was a blue moon, the fourth full moon in three months. It didn’t happen often, but it happened every few years, and Mona knew what to expect—her curse lasted a little longer, and it was so powerful on the night of the blue moon, she barely had to do the baking. Pies and tarts and coffee cakes seemed to bake themselves.
That was the constant. Dan was the variable. Dan came over, made amazing sweet love to her, then told her he loved her and threw off her game. It had to be him. His love was somehow poisonous to her culinary arts. She was right to reject him, then. Imagine if she had given in to the instinct to fall into his arms, to say, yes, yes, this is crazy but I feel it, too.
Did she feel it? She knew she felt anxiety and dread, and now her pie fillings tasted like anchovies.
She pulled open the fridge and took out the oversized mixing bowl that held her pie crust. She steeled herself against Dan’s love. She rejected him over again in her head. She didn’t feel the kind of relief she had imagined she would feel, but she was sure her crust would taste right and would roll out into perfectly even, perfectly sellable pies. She took a deep breath and held it. No, she told the Dan in her head. Go away, I don’t need you. She peeled back the plastic wrap from the bowl and pinched off a small bite. She rested the bowl on her hip and brought the crust to her mouth, open and ready for whatever flavor came her way.
Delicious Page 23