Chapter 13
Thirteen
I like your personality. What disorder is it?
—Romeo to Mable
Romeo
I was frozen to the spot as I watched her bend over the lip of the bathtub to reach for a towel.
As if last night wasn’t enough—seeing her naked before I’d slipped my worn t-shirt over her head had been pure torture—I now had an even more provocative mental picture of her.
Clenching my jaw to keep the moan of despair from leaving my lips, I trudged through the snow, barely feeling the wind that before had cut through me like a whip.
Brawny barked and bounded toward the back door, waiting happily for me to catch up.
His tongue lolled when I finally reached the porch, and I smiled despite feeling like my every nerve ending was on fire.
When I got there, I stomped the snow and ice off my boots and then got the small handheld broom to do the same for Brawny.
Once he was cleaned off, I took his snow boots off and opened the back door of my cabin.
When I’d told Apollo what I was looking for, he’d fully come through.
A cabin on fifty acres, with the ability to buy more if I ever wanted to. A river that practically ran right behind my house. A barn with room for equipment—though the horses had been an added bonus, according to Apollo.
The cabin itself was two stories. The top part was a loft that looked over the open-concept cabin. There was one bedroom. One bathroom. And a super large closet that also doubled as my safe room.
Letting Brawny in, he went directly to the food bowl that I’d set out for him right before we left.
He started inhaling his breakfast while I went to the kitchen to get a look at what we had to eat.
The food that we’d brought from Mable’s place was good for dinner, but it wouldn’t pass for breakfast.
I had all of six eggs, bread, and a couple slabs of bacon I’d intended to cut into slices for breakfast.
A creak along a floorboard had me glancing over, and when I did, my belly went taut.
Mable stood at the mouth of the kitchen, her eyes bright, as she stared in awe at my kitchen.
“This place is very nice,” she said as she took it all in.
I did, too, and wondered if she thought I was a complete dumbass for having a chef-level kitchen when I couldn’t cook for shit.
“My brother-in-law had it redone for me before I moved here,” I explained. “He went a little overboard on the kitchen because he loves to cook. I guess he assumed everyone does, because he didn’t hesitate even a second to make this into a place that a chef would love.”
“Well, I mean, you may not use the twenty-thousand-dollar range, but at least it looks pretty.”
I choked on my own spit. “I’m sorry, what?”
She pointed at the stove. “That’s a Viking range. Seven burner. I actually priced them last year when mine went out, and that’s my dream oven. But I just can’t justify spending that much on an oven that I could do the same exact thing on one that’s half that price.”
“Aesthetics?” I shrugged. “My sister had a lot to do with what was chosen. Apollo did all the contracting out and labor, but my sister chose pretty much every appliance and piece of furniture in this place.”
“You didn’t want to help?” she wondered.
My stomach tightened again.
I didn’t want to lie to her.
But telling her the truth was never going to happen, no matter how much she was beginning to mean to me.
“What are you thinking you want?” I asked. “Because I have six eggs, some toast. Potatoes…and that’s about it.”
“Do you have heavy cream?”
I blinked. “No.”
She sidled up to me where I was at the fridge and said, “Are those my groceries?”
I nodded. “Cody came out with a box of the stuff that was going to go bad in your fridge. But I can’t tell you what’s in there besides the chicken on top.”
She bent into the fridge and practically shoved her head between the top of the fridge and the box.
“Good news, I have heavy cream.” She came back out with it. “As long as you have self-rising flour.”
I frowned. “I have flour…I think. Everything that’s in my pantry is something my sister stocked. It’s all the basics, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between self-rising flour and regular flour…”
She snickered and pushed past me, giving me a whiff of my body wash wafting off of her.
Her hair was up high in a bun with small tendrils escaping the confines of the rubber band in her hair.
“Isn’t that going to be a bitch to get out of your hair?” I asked her, eyeing the rubber band with skepticism.
“Probably,” she admitted. “But I’m not a big fan of my hair touching my neck. Hence, putting it up.”
I walked to the kitchen drawer while she went into the walk-in pantry and searched through the junk drawer for the package of hair ties that Dru had left behind the last time that she was here.
I came up with one and turned to see her walking to the counter with her hands full.
“Okay, we can make two things now that I’m seeing all the ingredients you have.” She set her bounty down carefully. “One thing will take me two and a half hours to make, because the dough has to rise. The other will take me forty minutes max.”
“What takes two and a half hours?” I wondered, flabbergasted that anyone would take that long to make anything, whether it was good or not.
“Cinnamon rolls,” she answered, her eyes gleaming.
“Oh.” I licked my lips as the thought of having a homemade cinnamon roll sank into my soul. “I like cinnamon rolls.”
I hadn’t had a good cinnamon roll since I was a kid, and that was when I thought “good” was a McDonald’s pull-apart one that probably wouldn’t mold if I left it out for two years.
“The other option is biscuits,” she added. “They’re not as good, but still really great on their own.”
“Hmmm.” I tapped my bottom lip. “Is there any reason we can’t have both?”
Because both sounded great.
Her lips quirked up at the edge. “I mean, I guess not.” She looked out the window behind me. “Looks like we’re going to be here a while. No one should be driving in this.”
I looked behind me at the snow that was now being blown directly toward the kitchen window.
“I’ll help,” I offered. “I can measure ingredients with the best of them.”
She giggled. “Let’s do the cinnamon roll dough first,” she suggested. “Then we can do the biscuits and some eggs with bacon.”
I washed my hands because, despite having gloves on earlier, I had still shoveled out a ton of horse shit.
When I was done, I said, “Tell me where you want me.”
A gleam came into her eye that made my heart pick up speed, but she shook her head and put half of the ingredients to the side before saying, “Let’s get started. You can pour everything that I say.”
I expected her to pull up a recipe on her phone, but instead she started to list off everything that she needed measured out.
“You know all this by memory?” I asked as I poured some flour into a measuring cup.
“I know all my recipes by memory,” she said.
“I learned to not leave anything in my room that I wanted because Birdee saw no problem going in there and taking it.” She gestured toward a big bowl that I’d pulled out on the counter.
“Before you dump that flour in there, I need some really hot water from the sink measured into about eight ounces. Then we need to put the yeast in there.”
“I have yeast?”
She gestured toward a jar. “You sure do.”
“Huh.” I chuckled. “Imagine that.”
“You’ll have to thank your sister for preparing you for a Nor’easter.”
I would.
Maybe I’d send her a picture of my cinnamon roll later with a caption that read: Look what you being an overbearing prepper did for me.