by Nikki Logan
Trey moved closer. He could see now that when Fizz moved away he ran toward the door leading into the next room, then returned. It was almost like one of those old films where the dog was trying to communicate with the person.
And... Trey sniffed. That definitely smelled like smoke.
Smoke?
Where was Ella?
“Ella!”
No answer.
“Ella!”
“Trey?”
Suddenly she stumbled into the room. Her hair was falling loosely around her face, she was barefoot, and she looked like she’d just lost her last friend.
“Open the door, Ella. Let me in,” he coaxed.
“Why?”
“Just do it. All right?”
He could see that she didn’t want to. For some reason that made him angry. But she went to the back door and let him inside. “Are you all right? Fizz was going nuts.”
She looked at the little dog. “Tattletale.”
But she sounded...he supposed loving was the right word. It wasn’t a word he wanted to think about.
“Your house is full of smoke,” he said.
“Oh...not so much. It was worse before.” She looked up at him. “I burned the cookies.”
She sounded so guilty and her voice was so sad that he wanted to laugh, but he could see that it wasn’t a laughing matter to her. “Were they...special cookies?”
“They were for tomorrow. I wanted to make four batches, and I’ve already burned the first batch.” She was looking at him as if he had personally turned the oven up too high.
He held up his hands in front of him. “I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“No. I—that is, I know you didn’t. I’m just...I don’t operate well around you. I never have. I’m normally good at my job, and I know how to bake a simple batch of chocolate chip cookies. But apparently not today.”
“Chocolate chip? Homemade?”
She gave him a look. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is to me. My mother never made cookies.”
“Have you ever made cookies?”
He blinked. “Good point. I can’t blame someone else for something I’ve never done myself. Maybe I should give it a try. You said these are for tomorrow? I’ll help. Come on.”
She looked at him as if he’d just spoken in a language she didn’t understand. “Excuse me?”
“I said come on. What do you need to bring?”
“I’m not going to your house. You’re not making cookies. You’re the guest of honor and I’ve told you twice that I’m not going to...to stalk you again.”
Ah. There it was. “Ella, I’d hoped to avoid it, but we’re going to have to talk about that day sooner or later.”
“No. I don’t want to. Ever. And I’m not going to your house.”
“You can’t stay here. Breathing in all this smoke can’t be good for you.”
“I’ll be fine. The smoke will dissipate.”
“It’s going to linger for a while.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“What about Fizz? He’s just a puppy. He’s got those little, pristine, not yet totally formed lungs. Don’t you, boy?”
Fizz did his part, managing to do that cute little cocked head, sad-eyed look. Ella was no match for a pro like Fizz.
But, to her credit, she tried. “I’ll stay here and make the cookies. You take Fizz home with you, where the air is clearer.”
“Nope. Not a puppy guy.” Which was still true. He appreciated the dog’s intelligence and inventiveness, and conceded that he was a cute one, but Fizz still represented a whole laundry list of things that Trey did not want to deal with in his future. “Plus, what would the shelter think of you, palming your foster-puppy off on someone who is an avowed puppy-hater?”
She gave him a look. Okay, that might be stretching things a bit.
“Ella...” he drawled. “It’s cold in here. It’s smoky. And, like it or not, you and I have to deal with each other for another few days. I came here for Stu. You’re making cookies to help Stu. Let’s call a truce. Come to my house. I have a big kitchen and probably all the requisite kitchen appliances. Despite my puppy aversion, I’ll find an empty room and set it up so that he can run around safely while we get busy in the kitchen.”
A luscious pink rose up her cheeks. He could see where it disappeared beneath the collar of her white blouse. Something hot and dark made Trey think of what it would be like to back Ella up against a cabinet and let his lips dip beneath her collar to explore all that pale skin. Dammit! That was not going to happen. He cleared his throat.
As if she was afraid he was going to say something even more suggestive or embarrassing, Ella straightened up. “Okay, you win. Your house. We’ll bake cookies. You probably have a gigantic oven. I’ll be done and back here in no time.”
She certainly sounded eager to get away from him. Trey felt like frowning. Instead he just nodded. Could he really blame her for wanting to sever their relationship? It was amazing that she’d even agreed to talk to him. Her memories of him couldn’t be pleasant ones. He’d been a total jerk. So what was he going to do about that?
* * *
ELLA HOPED THAT Trey couldn’t see how nervous she was. And why was she nervous? She was just here to bake the cookies. He was just going to help. The fact that he had volunteered both to help and to offer his home still amazed her. But then it sounded as if he and Stu had a special relationship.
She tried not to feel glad, not to be happy that Trey, who was such a loner, had someone he could talk to. That was the old Ella thinking, the nosy Ella, the stupidly sentimental Ella, and Trey detested her brand of nosiness and sentimentality.
“What’s first?” Trey asked, coming up behind her.
She somehow managed not to jump, but she could not remain unaware of him, of his nearness.
“First we assemble the ingredients,” she said, showing him her recipe and naming the ingredients as Trey gamely tried to locate measuring cups, spoons and bowls.
“Then we mix.”
Trey mixed.
“And then?”
His voice was low and deep. He was so close... She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes. He was gazing at her. Waiting.
She swallowed. “Then we...these are chocolate chip...so we just drop them.”
He raised a dark, quizzical brow. “We drop them?”
Ella couldn’t hold back her smile. “Not on the floor. Like this.”
She showed him how. Trey followed her lead. Soon the first batch of cookies was in the oven.
“And now?” he asked, coming up behind her. She could barely breathe.
“Now we make sugar cookies. And we decorate them. And we don’t let the other cookies burn. Cookies don’t take long to bake. So we can’t get distracted.”
No question that reminder was for herself more than for Trey. She was the one who was far too aware of him. She was the one who was susceptible.
“Right. No distractions,” he said, and frowned. He took a step away.
Within minutes the chocolate chip cookies were out and Ella was batting Trey’s hand away. “You’ll burn yourself. They’re hot.”
He grinned and stopped reaching for a cookie. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.” He stared straight into her eyes.
“You have to wait,” she told him, her voice breaking.
Trey nodded. “I’m doing my best not to step out of line,” he said. “I’m trying to wait, to stop myself.”
Ella looked up at him again. His silvery blue eyes were so beautiful. They always had been. And his lips...
She reached for one of the still too warm cookies and handed it to him. “Just one. They’re for tomorrow.”
; He looked at her palm with the warm, chocolaty cookie resting on it. Then he lifted her hand, took the cookie. A smear of chocolate remained on her skin. He closed his eyes, then touched his lips to her palm.
His kiss—and it was a kiss of sorts—sent her heartbeat into overdrive. Her nerve endings tingled, reacted. She sucked in a deep breath. Did she make a sound? She must have made a sound, because his eyes turned fierce. He leaned toward her. Then he looked down. It almost sounded as if he was counting.
“Trey?” Her voice was shaky.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he said, and she could tell that he meant it.
“It’s all right.” But it wasn’t. She was already too susceptible to him. Touching would only make it worse. “Maybe we should get back to making cookies.”
He nodded, and soon she was coaching him in the intricacies of frosting sugar cookies.
“What is that, exactly?” she asked, gesturing to something green.
“It’s a Christmas tree.”
“Really? Does it look like any that you’ve ever seen?”
He laughed. Soon she was laughing, too. And Fizz was jumping around and woofing, clearly entranced with his two adults even if he didn’t have a clue why they were acting so silly.
“Fizz, would you like a Christmas tree, buddy? Can he have it?” he asked Ella.
“It’s not the best thing for him, but there’s no chocolate in it, so yes. Just one.”
He held out the cookie. “Fizz, what is this?”
Fizz gave his little baby bark.
“See? He said, ‘Christmas tree.’”
Ella chuckled. “It sounded more like ‘green blob’ to me.”
“Are you making fun of my artistic abilities?”
“You can’t be good at everything, can you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know why you keep implying that I’m good at so many things and that I’m some sort of hero. You know it’s not true. I’m just a man, Ella, and a very fallible one at that. That’s always been true. No one knows that better than you.” And now he was no longer laughing. He was staring directly into her eyes.
Ella knew she couldn’t handle that kind of close scrutiny. He had always made her too aware of herself. Aware of him. She turned back to the cookies, quickly finished decorating the last one and started to wrap them. “It’s not that I don’t know that you’re...human,” she said, still with her back to him. “It’s just that when I moved here you...your family was so much larger than life than mine was. You almost didn’t seem real.”
“But that was an act. You know it was an act.”
She knew. At least she knew part of it. She’d heard the yelling. “Yes. I knew that things weren’t...right, and that there was no harmony in your house.”
“Did you know why?”
He came up next to her and took the container of cookies out of her hands. The pads of his fingertips brushed her skin and she trembled. Quickly she shoved her hands behind her back.
“Your father...” She struggled for words. “He didn’t approve of your activities.”
“He didn’t approve of me,” he clarified. “And neither did my mother. You knew that.”
She looked up at him and nodded slowly. “Yes. I knew.”
She’d heard them one day when the windows were open. It was what she’d tried to stop in her naively childish way. Seventeen years old and filled with puppy love, she’d rung the doorbell and confronted Trey’s parents—total strangers whom she’d known even less than she’d known Trey. But she’d thought she’d known him. Because she’d made up dream scenarios in her mind; she’d raised him up on a pedestal, given him godlike characteristics that no human could ever live up to. And, filled with all of that young-girl naiveté, she’d told his parents they were wrong. She’d painted a picture of a young god, tried to tell them that they should be proud to have such a son. Not old or wise enough to know how to be tactful, and filled with self-righteous indignation, she had rebuked them.
And promptly and icily been turned out of the house.
“What happened that day? After I left? You never said.”
“No, I didn’t, did I? I merely took a page out of my father’s book and ripped you to shreds.”
She looked down at her hands, reached down and picked up Fizz and began to pet him as he nestled against her. Maybe it was wrong to use the puppy to hide her nervousness, but Fizz, despite his own frenetic behavior, was somehow calming—or at least as calming as anyone or thing could be under such circumstances.
“I suppose my interfering made things even worse.”
“It wasn’t that so much.”
But she could imagine what a bully like his father would have said about a small skinny girl defending his football-player-sized son’s honor.
“It was more that I’d spent my whole life hiding what was happening at home from the world. I was adopted, and when my birth parents gave me up it was because they already had three kids and I was an accident they didn’t want. They didn’t have good, honorable reasons for giving up a child, so I’d always felt like the runt of the litter. But my adoptive parents chose me because my birth parents had very high IQs and were physically attractive. They figured that with those genes and their own expectations and rules I would have to be a genius, an overachiever, someone who would be absolutely perfect and would live up to their expectations and needs in every way.
“I proved them wrong from the start. I didn’t like being treated like a show dog, and I didn’t turn out to be what they wanted. At school I swaggered, tried to act cool and uninterested. I took out my frustrations in sports. At home I rebelled. And I thought I had everyone fooled into thinking that I led a normal existence until you came along. Having you know...see...hear... I didn’t deal with it well. I behaved badly.”
“No. You were right. It was presumptuous of me to try to interfere with your personal life.”
“You thought you were helping me.”
“But it didn’t help. It made things worse, didn’t it?” Only the puppy in her arms kept her from losing control of her voice.
“It doesn’t matter. It was your intention that counted.”
“It does matter. I can only imagine what he said to you and—”
“Ella—”
“I always do this. I try to make everything perfect, and if they’re not perfect I try to fix things when not everything can be fixed. That’s what you said to me that day. And your voice—”
“I was embarrassed. You’d caught me outside feeling sorry for myself, angry at everyone, choked up and near tears. When you showed up and saw me on the verge of crying or kicking something I let loose on you. That was wrong.”
“No, I—”
“Ella, shh.” He stepped closer.
“But I want to explain.”
“No. I want to apologize. For not thanking you for thinking better of me than I deserved.”
“But—”
Fizz gave a little woof and clambered higher against her. Suddenly Trey smiled, a sly little smile. He stepped forward, right into her space, and took her into his arms. With Fizz still balanced against her shoulder Trey kissed her. Softly. Gently. Exquisitely. With such skill and tenderness that she thought she might cry.
It was over in a moment...and yet he was looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her again. Differently this time.
“Why?” she asked.
He smiled. “You wouldn’t stop apologizing...and it seemed like the right thing to do. Fizz seemed to think so.”
“Fizz is a puppy.”
“A puppy with good instincts. See? He even made a space for me,” Trey said, indicating the way Fizz had moved to her shoulder, enabling Trey to make his move without crushing the puppy.
She was blushing. She knew that she was blush
ing. Because she was totally discombobulated. Trey was an experienced kisser. He was probably bored being stuck here in Eagleton. Okay, he had been trying to apologize, and she had been dithering, not letting him.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For the kiss?”
More blushing.
“No! I mean...for the apology. I know I must have made things worse for you. I think I’ve always known and regretted that. And...I was embarrassed.”
“I hurt your feelings that day.”
“No,” she said slowly.
“Yes,” he insisted.
“Maybe. It was mostly that I was young and stupid and I had a crush on you. I’d built you up into some make-believe boy and it was a shock to have you speak to me that way.”
“I really am sorry. I’ll bet that no one else ever spoke to you like that in your life.”
She pulled back and looked at him as she cuddled Fizz in both arms. But Trey was still close, and he reached out and scratched Fizz beneath the chin. The little puppy licked his fingers. Trey gave Fizz an appraising look, but quickly turned back to Ella.
In that moment, she made a decision. “Don’t be sorry. When you yelled at me it helped me to move on. It woke me up out of my dream world of white knights and enabled me to live a happy life.”
“You say that as if your life is over.”
“Not over.”
“Good, because some white knight is going to come along one day.”
“I doubt that very much.”
He frowned.
She shook her head. “That’s not a negative thing. I’m not complaining. But it’s like this. Your parents weren’t happily married, I take it?”
“They weren’t happy people.”
“Mine were. They were exquisitely happy. My father’s job took him here and there, but my mother would have lived with him on the bottom of the ocean if that was where he needed to be. He would have moved us to the top of a cloud if she said that was where she wanted to go. We only moved here because my father got a chance at stability, and they wanted that for me, but lots of times they were so tuned in to each other that they didn’t even know I was there. I’ve never, ever seen any two people as in love as they were. And that’s why there won’t be any white knights for me. I want what they had, but I don’t think that kind of love comes around more than...I don’t know...once a century? Once an eternity? And I won’t settle for less. I want that, but I doubt I’ll ever find it.”