Carolina Dreaming: A Dare Island Novel

by Virginia Kantra

  But when he was with Jane, when he kissed her, he lost his head. He just . . . wanted. She looked up at him with those big gray eyes and that full, sensitive mouth, and he forgot everything else he was supposed to be doing and thought about doing her instead. Spread out on a counter. Up against the wall.

  That kind of desire was dangerous. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull. He couldn’t afford that loss of control.

  The best thing he could do for both of them was to keep his distance.

  * * *

  THE SOUNDS OF Gabe working pierced Jane’s kitchen, the whine of the saw and the whir of a drill gradually replaced by the rasp of a compound knife.

  By seven o’clock, she was a mass of nerves, anticipation swarming over her skin like mosquitoes on a hot summer night, making her jump. Itch.

  She opened the bottle of wine to breathe. It was a good Italian red, with nice undernotes of smoke and spicy rosemary to cut through the richness of the meat, but what if Gabe didn’t like wine? Most of the men she knew were beer drinkers. Travis used to drink a six-pack every night. More on the weekends.

  She set the bottle on the stainless steel counter with a little clink. She was not thinking about her ex-husband tonight.

  If Gabe wanted beer, she could offer him a beer. She wanted wine. In fact, she could use a glass right now. Or two. Because if she drank enough, she could probably find the courage to go through with what she was planning. Alcohol lowered inhibitions, didn’t it? I was drunk, she could tell herself in the morning. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  Except she did. After days (years?) of denying her feelings, she knew exactly what she wanted. And she’d made a plan to get it, too.

  She eyed the wine again. Nope. If she started drinking now, she’d burn the steaks. Then they’d never get to dessert, and all her hopes and efforts would be wasted.

  The oven timer buzzed. She pulled out the Gruyère potato casserole and reset the temperature to three hundred fifty degrees. The steaks, stuffed with oysters, were ready for the pan. She’d reduced the amount of garlic in the compound butter and replaced the sautéed tatsoi greens she’d originally planned to serve with crisp haricots verts. A manly, meat-and-potatoes meal with enough fancy touches that she’d put something of herself in every bite.

  Nothing subtle about this menu.

  Or about her intentions, either.

  She sucked in her breath, picked up the tray loaded with plates and flatware, and pushed through the swinging door.

  Gabe was cleaning his tools, scraping the wide blade of the drywall knife against the rim of the bucket. His hair was tied back in a stubby ponytail. A few shaggy strands escaped, softening his strong profile against the stark white of the newly plastered wall.

  Perfect timing. She exhaled, trying to ignore the jumping of her stomach. “It looks good.” Her voice sounded almost normal. “Are you all finished?”

  “For tonight. It needs another coat.” He straightened (So tall. Her heart gave a little bump.) and wiped his hands on his thighs, leaving white streaks against the denim.

  Outside, the rain ran down the double glass doors in streaks and spatters of light, casting a sparkling veil of privacy against the dusk.

  Jane swallowed. In her fantasies, she said something witty and sophisticated now, something that would make her plotting unnecessary.

  But faced with the solid reality of Gabe standing, waiting, watching her with dark, hooded eyes, she was struck dumb, dry-mouthed with nerves and desire. She gripped her tray tighter.

  “Something smells good,” he said.

  His voice released her from her unwelcome paralysis.

  “Dinner.” The single word made her feel better. She might not remember her lines, but she could cook.

  He looked down at the two place settings on her tray and then back at her face, his expression almost grim. Not the reaction she was going for.

  She set down the tray and planted her hands on her hips. “You won’t let me pay you any other way. So you’ll eat my food and like it.”

  His face relaxed, a smile starting deep in his eyes. “Yes, ma’am. Can I clean up first?”

  Relief weakened her knees. “Is fifteen minutes enough?”

  He nodded.

  She beamed back at him and then whisked herself back into the kitchen before she could lose her confidence. Before he could change his mind.

  What do you want? Lauren’s words replayed in Jane’s head as the steaks sizzled in the hot iron skillet. What’s the behavior that will get you what you want?

  Of course, Lauren probably hadn’t been talking about seduction. Because that’s what this meal was—an invitation to indulgence, a campaign against the senses. Jane might not be successful like Meg or smart like Lauren or confidently sexy like Cynthie.

  But in her kitchen, she had power.

  She slid the steaks into the oven to finish while she tossed the green beans in lemon butter. Grabbing the wine and two glasses, she returned to the dining room.

  Gabe was standing by the table. He had washed his hands and arms and probably his face as well. Water slicked his shaggy hair, deepening its caramel color. His lashes were dark and spiky against his lean face as he studied the fat white pillar candle between the two place settings.

  At her entrance, he looked up, his eyes intent. The wariness was back. “Worried the power will go out?”

  Her cheeks heated. She stuck out her chin. “I like to be prepared.”

  His gaze went to the wine in her hand. “So I see.” Was there a trace of amusement in his voice? “You want me to pour that?”

  “Unless you want a beer.”

  “No, this is fine. Good.” Their fingers brushed as he took the bottle. Her heart did a little jig in her chest. “You shouldn’t have gone to this much trouble.”

  “I wanted to.”

  Another long, assessing look while the rain drummed on the tin roof and her blood pounded in her ears. Okay, so he wasn’t falling on her like Lucky on a bone. But he hadn’t run away yet, either.

  She held his gaze, everything zinging and tingling and trembling inside her. She could do this. She wanted to do this. She just needed to feed him first.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, and escaped back into the kitchen to check on the steaks.

  The steaks were perfect, charred outside, pink inside, the melting compound butter mingling with the briny flavor of the oysters. The potatoes were creamy and fragrant, the edges crispy and golden.

  Gabe ate a third of his steak and dug a sizable dent in the potatoes before coming up for air. “You cook like this every night?”

  She gulped her wine. “Pretty much,” she lied.

  “So what made you decide to be a baker?”

  “I love baking.”

  “Yeah, but this . . . this is amazing. You said you learned to cook because you wanted to make dinner. You could be a chef someplace.”

  He actually listened when she talked. He remembered what she told him. A warm, golden glow settled inside her. Or maybe that was the wine.

  She took another sip. “I don’t have the temperament to be a line cook.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I worked for a little while at the Brunswick. Dinner shift in a restaurant kitchen . . . It’s chaos. Everybody’s yelling, rushing, trying to do three or five things at once. Cooks love that. They like working like crazy until midnight or two in the morning and then partying until four and then crashing and sleeping late and going into work to do it all again. They love the heat. The sweat.”

  “The adrenaline rush.”

  She blinked at him, surprised by his understanding. “Yes.”

  “You get that on a mission,” he said. “It’s hard to come down from.”

  “Do you miss it? Being a Marine.”

  “I miss being part of something bigger than me.” His eyes were dark. “Having what I do matter. When I got out, I should have—” He broke off. “Water under the bridge.”

  She
reached across the table to touch his arm. “What you’re doing now, building things, that’s important, too.”

  He shifted in his chair, uncomfortable or impatient with the turn of the conversation.

  She tried again. “This addition is important to me.”

  He raised his gaze from her hand on his arm to meet her eyes. “Happy to help out. But let’s not kid ourselves, cupcake. Construction isn’t exactly life-or-death stuff.”

  “Providing shelter? That’s satisfying a basic human need.”

  His lips curved. “Like feeding people.”

  She flushed and pulled her hand back, grabbing her wineglass. “I make cupcakes.”

  “You make people happy,” he corrected softly. “I’ve been watching you boxing up birthday cakes, giving cookies to the kids, slipping extras to those old geezers in the corner.”

  “A lot of the island seniors live on fixed incomes,” she explained.

  “Whatever. You get off on helping people.”

  “You make me sound unselfish. I’m not. I opened the bakery for me. Because it suits me.”

  He watched her with flattering intensity. “Because of your son.”

  “Because of Aidan and because . . .” She took a breath, her chest expanding, opening under his regard. His attention coaxed things from her, words, thoughts, feelings. “I like the quiet. In the morning, when I’m the only one here, and everything is under my control . . . I love that. I like knowing exactly what has to be done for things to turn out just right. I like the weighing and the measuring, the predictability of it all.” She broke off to take another sip of wine. “Well, you know.”

  “Not really.”

  She leaned across the table, resting her weight on her elbows. “But you need the same precision, don’t you? In building and in baking. ‘Measure twice, cut once,’ isn’t that what you say?”

  “My Uncle Chuck said it all the time.” Gabe’s smile took a wry twist. “Especially when I screwed up.”

  She grinned back at him, pleased to have found a point of common ground. “When you screw up on the line, you can usually adjust. Cooks can always tweak a recipe. It’s harder to recover from a mistake in baking. Well, unless you cover everything in fondant,” she added. “But the good thing about baking is you can always start again. There’s no rush the way there is in a restaurant kitchen.”

  “Isn’t that the problem? No rush,” he explained in response to her questioning look. “No risk. No fun.”

  His gaze caught hers, snaring her like a fly in honey. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

  “I have fun,” she protested. “Cooks dismiss bakers because we’re not ‘spontaneous.’” Her fingers made air quotes around the word. “But there’s an art to baking. You can take the same basic recipes, the same few ingredients—flour, sugar, butter, eggs—and transform them. It’s like magic.”

  He leaned back and picked up his fork, releasing her. “If you say so.”

  “I can do more than just say so.” She moistened her lips, dry-mouthed with longing, trembling with daring and indignation. No risk? No fun? She’d show him. She pushed back her chair. “I’ll prove it to you. Wait here.”

  Twelve

  JANE STUDIED HER naked body in the door of the big walk-in refrigerator, her reflection distorted by the stainless steel. Probably a good thing. Otherwise she might chicken out. Her breasts, freed from support, looked awfully large, the nipples pink and prominent.

  Like a cow, Travis had told her once, back when she was nursing Aidan.

  She shivered despite the heat of the kitchen and the residual glow of the wine. Well, that’s what happened when you took off all your clothes. There was probably a draft somewhere. After a moment’s thought, she undid her braid, combing her hair forward with her fingers to fall over her shoulders. That was better, but she was still all bare below, her pale, soft tummy and the springy patch of hair between her thighs. She squeezed her legs together, as if that would make them look thinner or stop her knees from shaking. She hadn’t had sex in years. What if she was no good at it?

  Her pretty dessert sat plated and ready on the counter, its three-layered glossy perfection mocking her silly hopes and fears.

  Jane took a deep breath. Just do it. Before the chocolate shavings wilt, before you lose your nerve, before Gabe gets tired of waiting and goes home.

  She picked up the plate. And then put it down at the last minute to tug on her white chef’s apron, pulling her hair free of the bib, wrapping the ties around her waist. That was better. There was still a considerable draft around her backside, but at least her front was covered.

  Positioning the plate at chest level, she turned to face the door. It was highly unlikely that any islanders were standing outside in the dark and the rain, peering through the bakery windows. But she was taking a big enough gamble here without risking flashing her neighbors.

  “Gabe?” His name squeaked out like air escaping a balloon. She cleared her throat. “Could you give me a hand in here?”

  His chair scraped back. She caught a blur of movement through the portal before the door swung open.

  “Sure. What do you—”

  He stopped dead on the threshold, his eyes widening to take her in, traveling from her face to the dessert in her hands to her bare feet and back again, slowly. “What’s this?”

  She blushed all over. Wasn’t it obvious?

  “Chocolate mousse cake,” she said, her cheeks burning. “With chocolate ganache, raspberry sauce, and whipped cream.”

  His lids lowered as he regarded the plate. All the necessary components were there: the main, the sauces, the fresh berry garnish. And one more.

  Gabe plucked the wrapped condom from the chocolate icing with two fingers and held it up. “Never saw this in a dessert before.”

  This was torture. She wanted to hit him with the cake. Or run and hide in the walk-in until her full-body flush faded. In, say, a week or so.

  She stood her ground. “I told you, I like to be prepared.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Jane . . .”

  He was going to say no. “Don’t say no.”

  “Looking at you right now, like this, ‘no’ is not the word that springs to mind. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Jane exhaled. “Well, I thought I was seducing you. But if you have to ask, I’m obviously not doing a very good job.”

  He took a step toward her. “The apron’s a nice touch,” he said, an undernote of laughter in his voice.

  She closed her eyes in humiliation. “I wasn’t going to wear it. Or anything. Bring food and show up naked, that was the plan. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard.”

  “Oh, it’s hard,” Gabe said wryly, so close she jumped.

  She opened her eyes.

  He was standing right in front of her. She could reach out and touch him, except she was still clutching the stupid plate, holding out the slice of cake she’d labored over like a piece of her heart.

  He was smiling a little, but his eyes were dark and serious. “This is a really bad idea. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Tenderness welled inside her.

  “It’s okay,” she reassured him. “It’s only . . .”

  Sex.

  But the lie stuck in her throat.

  “It is what it is,” she said. “This is what I want. I don’t need anything else.”

  Liar, whispered a small voice in her head. She used to dream of so much more, simple, girlish dreams of a man to love her and share his life with her and build the family she longed for together.

  But in this moment, shivering with heat and anticipation, Gabe almost in her grasp, this would do. This was enough. She would make it be enough.

  His smile deepened at the corners. “Then I better make it good. Your cake”—he grasped the plate—“looks great.”

  “Thank you,” she said breathlessly.

  “But right now . . .” He took the dessert, setting it on the counter beside her. “It’s i
n the way.”

  Her heart moved into her throat. She swallowed. “Okay.”

  He braced his hands on either side of her hips, trapping her against the counter, within the circle of his arms. Attraction prickled along her skin, rained down inside her like a shower of sparks. Without the plate to anchor them, her hands wavered and then fell. He captured them, pressing them to his chest. His shirt was still damp. She flexed her fingers against resilient muscle. His heart thumped under her palm, hard and strong.

  “So, this plan of yours . . .” He stroked her hair away from her face and over her shoulders, dropping soft, tantalizing kisses on her cheekbone, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. “How does it go?”

  She parted her lips, seeking the pressure of his. “What?”

  His breath of amusement against her skin raised tiny goose bumps up and down her arms. “Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”

  His mouth caught at her upper lip, stroked at the bottom one, easing her open, sinking inside. She absorbed the warm, delicious friction of his tongue, the taste of him rich and heady as wine. His clothed body brushed hers, all that heat and weight and hardness leashed. Contained. Pleasure sank into her, rich and dark. Under the stiff fabric of her apron, her nipples puckered.

  “So pretty,” he whispered against her mouth. He circled the point of one breast delicately through her apron before he lifted his hand away. “In your plan, did I do this?”

  Something cool dabbed the side of her breast. Jolted, she looked down. Whipped cream. He spread a dollop through the open side of her apron before tugging the bib down and away, bending his head, licking her clean with one warm, lazy stroke of his tongue. Oh, my.

  With his eyes on hers, he reached for the plate. He fed her cake with his bare hands, trading bites for kisses.

  “Wait.” She grabbed his thick wrist. “I can’t eat all your cake.”

  His slow smile weakened her knees. “You went to all this trouble. You deserve to enjoy it.”

  She trembled. She didn’t cook for herself. She fed other people.