Chapter 17 #3
Across the table, Dillon was looking at his plate, and his ears had gone red, and Tessa had her hand pressed flat over her mouth.
“Mom scanned the recipe written in Gram’s hand and sent it last night.” He cleared his throat. “She, ah, wanted me to tell Grace something.”
“Don’t,” Reno said, because he could feel exactly where this was headed and he wasn’t sure he could take it in front of a table full of people.
“She said,” Dillon went on, mercilessly, the way only a brother can be, “that any woman willing to bake that pie for Reno is already family, and she’ll fight anybody who says different.”
Reno looked at the pie. Then he looked at Grace.
She was watching him with the same calm directness she’d had in the bakery the day she kissed him and told him the next move was his.
She wasn’t blushing. She’d gone past blushing into something deeper.
She’d reached all the way into his family, past him, around him, to a recipe in a dead woman’s handwriting, and she’d baked the one thing on earth that could tell him, in front of his brothers and his niece and her daughter, exactly what she’d decided about him.
He understood her loud and clear. He’d been waiting for weeks for her to decide. And she had.
“Aren’t you going to try it?” Lily demanded, into the silence, outraged on behalf of dessert.
Grace cut the pie into eight pieces so everyone could have a slice.
Reno put a bit in his mouth, and closed his eyes as a wash of memories flooded over him, some of the best of his entire childhood.
Holiday meals with the whole Steele clan.
Birthday dinners. The day he got into law school, and the day he passed his bar exam.
Sitting in Gran’s kitchen talking with her while she cooked.
It was his grandmother’s pie. Not close. Not a good imitation. It was the thing itself, the brown sugar and the bite of bourbon she swore cooked all the way out, the salt she added because she said sweet without salt was just loud.
It was exact taste of being eight years old in a kitchen in Texas with a woman who’d told him he had good hands and a good heart and that the two together would take him anywhere he wanted to go.
“It’s perfect,” he said to Grace.
“It’s your grandmother’s,” she replied. “I just followed her directions.”
“No,” Reno said. “You put the love in it that makes it taste like hers.”
Everyone at the table, very kindly, found other things to look at. Hank asked Makayla about the Founder’s Day concert. Tessa started slicing the cherry pie and Dillon helped her plate slices.
Madison looked from her uncle to Grace and back, then leaned over to Lily and said, conversationally, “I think your mom likes my uncle.”
Lily replied, “Obviously,” with such withering four-year-old contempt that everyone started laughing again and gave Reno the cover he needed to get his composure back.
Under the table, where no one could see it, Grace’s foot came to rest lightly against his. She didn’t look at him when she did it.
He didn’t move his foot. Neither did she.
He drove them home under a sky thick with stars, Lily asleep in her car seat before they cleared Hank’s driveway with the worn-out copy of Ferdinand Madison had given her—you keep it, I read it a million times—clutched against her chest.
Grace was quiet in the passenger seat, the comfortable kind of quiet, her head tipped against the window and her eyes on the sky.
“Madison liked you,” he said, because it needed saying out loud.
“I liked her, too.” A pause. “She’s carrying a lot for fourteen.”
“She is.”
“She’ll be all right.” Grace said it like a person who knew something about carrying a lot and coming out the other side. “She’s got people now. Not just Hank but uncles and cousins and aunt Tessa.”
He carried Lily in and laid her down. Grace did the quiet work of getting a sleeping four-year-old into pajamas without fully waking her, which Reno had decided over the past two weeks was a kind of magic nobody gave mothers enough credit for.
Reno put Cinnabun on the floor under the window where he belonged. The night-light came on. They eased the door most of the way shut.
“Porch,” Grace said. Not a question.
The lake was as smooth as glass and the moon laid a long pale road across it toward the dock. The frogs were going strong, and Marshmallow materialized from wherever cats spent their evenings. She arranged herself on the back of the couch tonight.
Reno had been a careful man his whole life. He’d built cases one fact at a time. He’d spent three years not letting himself want anything, and recent weeks wanting one thing so much he’d had to hold perfectly still to keep from frightening it off.
She’d made her move at the bakery and told him the next one was his. He’d been carrying that, too, all this time, waiting until he was sure she meant it.
She’d baked him his grandmother’s pie in front of his whole family.
She meant it.
“Grace.”
She turned her head. In the spill of light from the kitchen window her face was open and unhurried and entirely unafraid.
She was the bravest person he’d ever met, and the fact that everyone in her life believed she was fragile only meant none of them had watched her square her shoulders the way he had.
He reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, giving her every chance to lean away.
She leaned in.
He kissed her. Not the way she’d kissed him in the bakery, where she’d run the whole show and he’d held still and let her. This time he was the one moving, gentle and certain, one hand at the side of her jaw the way she’d put hers.
She made a small soft sound against his mouth and turned toward him, and her hand fisted lightly in the front of his shirt right over the spot where the flour handprint had been weeks ago.
His heart did the thing again where it completely rearranged itself around a new feeling, then settled and found its shape.
When they broke apart she kept her forehead against his for a moment, breathing fast and shallow.
“That was the move?” she murmured.
“The beginning of it.”
“Took you long enough.”
He smiled at her and she rolled her eyes back at him. He said, “I wanted to be sure I had all the facts, first.”
She laughed, the silvery one that sounded like heavenly bells chiming, but quietly so she wouldn’t wake Lily. It was, hands down, the best sound he’d ever heard.
They sat a long while after that, her tucked against his side and the cat radiating disapproval behind their heads. The moon working its slow way across the water.
He didn’t tell her what he suspected was coming Monday.
In the first place, he wasn’t sure. In the second place, she’d earned a weekend to just be happy. Monday would come soon enough, and Cooper would tell them whatever it was that made a careful man drive to another state and come back unwilling to say what he’d learned.
Reno knew that whatever it was, it had the power to hurt her in ways that no kiss and no pie could armor her against.
He’d give her the weekend. He’d give her this.
The storm could keep till Monday.