“You said no one would interrupt,” he reminded her.
“Mechanical timers excluded.” She moved away from him to slide her hand into an oven mitt and take the pan out of the oven.
While she was doing that, he surveyed the ingredients, bowls and utensils spread out over the counter. “How many cookies do you plan to make?”
She gestured toward the counter. “The list is there.”
He read aloud: “Pecan Sandies, Coconut Macaroons, Brownies, Peppermint Fudge, Sugar Cookies, Rocky Road Squares, Snowballs, Peanut Brittle, White Chocolate Chip Cookies with Macadamia Nuts and Dried Cherries.” He glanced up. “You don’t have a shorter name for that one?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I guess people would at least know what they’re getting,” he acknowledged. “As opposed to a snowball.”
“Snowballs are one of my favorites,” she told him. “Chopped dates, nuts and crispy rice cereal rolled in coconut.”
“There’s no gingerbread on the list.”
“Kristen and I baked that last week.”
“What are these?” he asked, pointing to a plate of cookies she’d baked earlier.
“Those are the Pecan Sandies.”
“Can I try one?”
“Sure,” she said.
He bit into the flaky pastry. “Mmm. This is good,” he mumbled around a mouthful of cookie. “No wonder so many people put on weight over the holidays with these kinds of goodies to sample.”
She froze with the spatula in hand, wondering if he was just making a casual comment or if he’d noticed the extra pounds she was carrying. She was wearing yoga pants and a shapeless top that disguised all of her curves, but especially the one of her belly.
“What can I do to help?” Trey asked. “Because if you don’t give me a job, I’ll just eat everything you make.”
She chided herself for being paranoid and turned her attention back to the task at hand. “You can start by pouring yourself a cup of the coffee you wanted.” She indicated the half-full carafe on the warmer. “Sugar is in the bowl above, milk and cream are in the fridge.”
“Can I get you some?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
While he doctored his coffee, she measured out flour and sugar and cocoa powder.
“What are you making now?”
“Brownies.”
“One of my favorites,” he told her.
She laughed. “Did you skip breakfast?”
“As if my grandmother would let me,” he chided, stealing another cookie.
She put a wooden spoon in his hand and steered him toward a pot on the stove containing the butter and chopped semisweet chocolate she’d measured earlier. She turned the burner on to medium-low. “Just keep stirring gently until the ingredients are melted and blended.”
He sipped his coffee from one hand and stirred, as instructed, with the other. “I think I have a talent for this.”
“Just so long as you keep your fingers out of it.”
“I’ll try to resist.” He caught her as she moved past him and hauled her back for a quick kiss. “But only the chocolate.”
“I’m going to have to send you out of the kitchen if you continue to distract me,” she warned him.
“I like kissing you.”
She felt her cheeks flush. “Stir.”
He resumed stirring.
She had expected that Trey would end up being more of a hindrance than a help, but aside from stealing the occasional kiss at the most unexpected times, his presence really did help move things along quickly. He willingly measured, chopped and mixed as required and without complaint.
Rita called home just after two o’clock to tell Kayla that the auction was over and that they were going for dinner in Missoula and would be home late. It was only then that Kayla realized she hadn’t given any thought to dinner—or lunch. She immediately apologized to Trey for not feeding him, which made him laugh, because he’d been steadily sampling the cookies and bars while they worked.
“But you’re probably starving,” he realized. “You haven’t touched any of this.”
“I had a brownie,” she confessed.
“A whole brownie?”
“It’s not that I’m not tempted,” she admitted. “But most of this stuff would go straight to my hips.”
His gaze slid over her body, slowly, appraisingly. “I don’t think you need to worry.”
Kayla half wished her mother could have been there to hear what he said, except that she wouldn’t have invited him to help her with the baking if her mother had been home.
“But cookies probably aren’t a very healthy dinner,” he continued. “Do you want to go out to grab a bite?”
She should offer to cook something there so they could sit down and talk, but the truth was, after standing around in the kitchen most of the day, her feet and back were sore, and the idea of sitting down and letting someone else prepare a meal was irresistible. “I do,” she decided.
Of course, going out with Trey meant giving up another opportunity to tell him about their baby, because she didn’t dare whisper the word pregnant within earshot of anyone else in town. She might have control over what appeared in the Ramblings column, but the Rust Creek Falls grapevine had a life of its own.
They went to the Ace in the Hole. The bar wasn’t one of Kayla’s favorite places, but it did have a decent menu and wasn’t usually too busy on a Sunday night.
It wasn’t until they were seated in the restaurant that she thought to ask, “Your grandparents weren’t expecting you home for dinner?”
“I called them while you were getting changed and told them that I was going out.”
She didn’t ask if he’d mentioned that he was going out with her—she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Whether or not Melba had deliberately called about the pickles to force her path to cross with Trey’s, as he believed, she suspected it would be dangerous to encourage the older woman’s matchmaking efforts.
Especially when she was worried enough about getting her own hopes up. Yes, she had to tell Trey about the baby, but she’d thought it might be easier if they knew one another a little better. But as they were getting to know one another, she was letting herself get caught up in the romance of being with him—talking and flirting and kissing. For a girl with extremely limited dating experience, he was a fantasy come to life. A fantasy that she knew would come crashing down around her when she told him that she was pregnant.
And she wasn’t ready for that to happen. Not yet.
* * *
After their meal, Trey drove Kayla back to the Circle D.
He wasn’t anxious to say good-night to her, but he could tell that she was tired. She’d been on her feet in the kitchen all day, having started her baking hours before he showed up, and was obviously ready for bed.
Of course, thinking about Kayla in bed stirred his memories and his blood and made him wish that she didn’t still live in her parents’ home—or that he wasn’t staying with his grandparents.
He’d been back in town a little more than a week—barely nine days—but she’d been on his mind each and every one of those days. No one he knew would believe it if he told them that he’d spent the day in the kitchen with Kayla, but the truth was, he didn’t care what they were doing so long as he was with her. And when he couldn’t be with her, he was thinking about her.
Now that he knew her a little better, he wondered how he could have been so blind as to overlook her for so many years—even if she was his best friend’s little sister. Because she was also a smart and interesting woman with hair as soft as the finest silk, eyes as blue as the Montana sky and a smile that could light up a room. And when she smiled at him, she made him feel like a superhero.
No oth
er woman had ever made him feel that way. No other woman had ever made him feel as good as he felt when he was with her. He loved touching her and holding her and kissing her. In recent years he’d had a few relationships, but for some reason, those had been short on the simple things—like kissing and hand-holding.
He and Kayla had already made love, and he wanted to make love with her again, but for now, he was enjoying the kissing and hand-holding and just being with her.
He was also taking a lot of cold showers.
As enjoyable as it was to spend time with Kayla, she also got him stirred up. But he was determined not to rush into anything. Not this time. He wasn’t a teenager anymore—or under the influence of spiked wedding punch—and he was determined to take things slow, to show Kayla that she was worth the time and effort.
* * *
Kayla didn’t tell Trey that she’d been asked to help out at the elementary school, but when she showed up at the gymnasium at three o’clock, he was there, anyway. Of course, there were a lot of people there. With the pageant scheduled for the following weekend and much work still to do, the teachers had obviously tried to pull in as many extra hands as they could.
Apparently Trey had been asked to contribute his, as he was already hammering a set together, Natalie was working on costumes—and flirting with Gavin Everton, the new gym teacher—while Kayla was put to work painting scenery.
She felt perspiration bead on her face as she stretched to paint stars in the night sky. She was wearing leggings and an oversize flannel shirt, and while the bulky attire did a good job of disguising the extra pounds she was carrying, it also ratcheted up her internal temperature considerably.
She swiped a hand over her brow. “It’s warm under these lights.”
“Why don’t you take off that flannel shirt?” Trey suggested.
“Because I’m only wearing a camisole underneath,” Kayla told him.
He grinned. “And the problem?”
She waved her paintbrush at him. “Don’t you have to go hammer something?”
He lifted the tool in acknowledgment and returned his attention to the set he was building.
On the pretext of retrieving a box of lace and ribbon, Natalie sidled over to her friend. “How do you resist jumping his bones?” she asked.
“It’s not easy,” Kayla admitted.
“So why don’t you give in and share all the details with your friends who have no romantic prospects and need a vicarious thrill?”
“Because I want what Kristen has with Ryan,” she admitted. “A happily-ever-after, not just a holiday fling.”
“I want a happily-ever-after someday, too. But in the meantime, I’d settle for a little happy-right-now.”
“Is that why you were chatting up the new gym teacher?”
Natalie’s gaze shifted to the man in question. “He’s cute,” she acknowledged. “But not good fling material.”
“How can you tell?”
“Residential address.”
“What does that mean?”
“He lives in Rust Creek Falls, which means that a casual hookup could—and very likely would—result in awkward encounters after the fact.”
“Or maybe a relationship,” Kayla suggested.
Natalie shrugged. “Maybe. But the risk might be greater than the reward.”
But when Gavin came over to ask Natalie for her help untangling the strings of candy garland that would line the path to the Land of Sweets, she happily walked away with him.
Over the next few hours, many more people came and went, giving a few hours of their time, including Paige Traub, Maggie Crawford, Cecelia Pritchett and Mallory Dalton. Both Paige and Maggie had young children, and as Kayla picked up on little bits and pieces of their conversation, she wished she didn’t feel compelled to hide her pregnancy. She wanted to be free to join in their circle and listen to their experiences and advice.
Instead, she was on the outside, alone with her questions and fears. A soon-to-be single mother still afraid to tell even the father of her baby about the baby.
She capped the paint, dropped her brush into the bucket to be washed and wiped her hands on a rag.
Trey must have finished his assigned task, too, because he closed up the toolbox and made his way over to her. “My stomach’s telling me that we worked past dinner.”
“Your stomach would be right,” she confirmed.
“Why don’t we head over to the boarding house to see what my grandmother cooked up tonight?”
Kayla brushed her hands down the thighs of her paint-splattered pants and shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere dressed like this.”
“I think you look beautiful.”
She looked at him skeptically. “I think someone must have hit you in the head with your hammer.”
He smiled as he wiped a smear of green paint off her cheek. “Do you really have no idea what you do to me?”
“What do I do to you?” she asked warily.
“You tangle me up in knots inside.”
“I’m...sorry?” she said, uncertain how to respond to his admission.
“I don’t need you to be sorry,” he told her. “I need you to stop taking two steps back every time we take one step forward.”
She frowned. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
He looked pointedly at the floor so she could see that she had—literally—done exactly that.
He stepped forward again.
She forced herself to hold her ground.
“Good.” He framed her face in his hands and, despite the presence of several other people still lingering in the gym, lowered his mouth to hers. “That’s a start.”
Chapter Nine
While Kayla seemed to be resisting Trey’s efforts to get closer to her, he also knew she had a hard time saying no to anyone who asked for help. The elementary school production was a case in point. So instead of asking her if she wanted to take a trip into Kalispell to go shopping with him, an invitation that he suspected she would politely decline, he stopped by the ranch the next day and said to her, “I need your help.”
Not surprisingly, she responded, “With what?”
“Christmas shopping.”
“I’m sure you’re perfectly capable of shopping.”
“You’d think so,” he acknowledged. “But the truth is, I suck at shopping even worse than I do at wrapping.”
She managed a smile. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“It is,” he insisted. “I never seem to know what to buy, and on the rare occasion that I have a good idea, I end up with the wrong size or color.”
“That’s why vendors introduced gift receipts.”
“We had a deal,” he said, reminding her of the bargain he’d extracted from her in exchange for keeping her identity as the Rust Creek Rambler a secret. Not that he would ever have betrayed her confidence, but he wasn’t opposed to using the leverage she’d given him to spend more time with her. “And I’ll buy you lunch.”
She sighed. “You’re right—we had a deal. You don’t have to bribe me with lunch.”
“You’ll earn it,” he promised, as she followed him out to his truck. “I have a couple of things for my grandparents, but I’ve just found out that Hadley and Tessa are coming to Rust Creek Falls for the holidays, and I don’t have a clue where to start finding something for either of them.”
“What about your parents and your brothers—are they coming, too?”
He shook his head. “Not this year.”
“Isn’t it strange, not being with your own parents for Christmas?”
“Not really,” he said. “Because when we were kids, we were always at Grandma and Grandpa’s. It would seem stranger to me not to be here.”
“I gue
ss that makes sense,” she agreed. “Okay, tell me about the cousins you need to shop for.”
“They’re Claire’s older sisters. Both of them live in Bozeman. Hadley is a twenty-nine-year-old veterinarian who never turns a stray away from her door. Tessa is a twenty-seven-year-old graphic designer and movie buff.”
Half an hour later, they were at the shopping center. She moved with purpose and though she claimed not to have anything specific in mind, she assured him she would know when she found what she was looking for. Since he honestly didn’t have a clue, he was content to let her lead the way.
For Hadley, she found a set of glass coasters with etched paw prints that somehow managed to be both elegant and fun. For Tessa, she found a book of iconic movie posters that he knew his cousin would love. As they exited the bookstore, he couldn’t help but be impressed by her efficiency.
“I bet you’re one of those people who has all of her shopping and wrapping done by the first of December, aren’t you?” Trey asked her.
“Not the first,” she denied. “But I don’t believe in leaving things to the last minute, either.”
“It’s still ten days before Christmas,” he pointed out.
“Apparently, we have different opinions of what the last minute is.”
“Apparently,” he agreed. “So tell me—have you sent your letter to Santa yet?”
She shook her head. “I think the big guy’s going to be kept busy enough meeting the demands of those under the age of ten.”
“Is that how old you were when you stopped believing in Santa?”
“Who says I stopped believing in Santa?”
His brows lifted.
She shrugged. “Santa made Kristen’s wish come true this year.”
“Huh?”
So she told him about Ryan riding in the parade as Santa Claus and his subsequent proposal to her sister.
“My grandparents told me that she was engaged, but they didn’t tell me how it happened.”
“Well, that’s how it happened,” Kayla said.
Merry Christmas, Baby Maverick! Page 11