Chapter Ten Lily #2
I leaned toward the selection she’d pulled out. Barrett was still watching me, even as Bryce asked him for help setting up a game. “I don’t have a snowman or a reindeer or a bell. Let’s pick six shapes and make four of each. Sound good?”
Maggie did the little bouncing move on her toes she always did when she was excited, and as we parsed out the shapes we liked best, she did it again. It was little things like that I’d remember when I left, and my heart squeezed for a moment before I could stop it.
When she’d made her final selections, she looked up at me for approval.
“Those will be fun.”
“You might need to decorate the reindeer. I don’t think I’ll be any good at it,” she said.
“We all have to start somewhere—and even if it’s an unholy mess, that’s better than going nowhere at all.”
The words were out before I knew what I was saying, and I could hear my father’s voice as if he were standing next to me. The breath I sucked in was shaky at best, everything spinning topsy-turvy in my brain for a split second. I turned, pretending like I was looking in the bag again.
Maybe I should have stayed home.
Maybe this was too much.
What was I thinking?
“What do you need next?” Maggie asked, pulling me from the absolute no thank you of my thoughts.
“A rolling pin and some flour, if you please.”
“Yes, Chef.” She saluted. I exhaled a short laugh under my breath while she set the flour on the counter, then started pulling open drawers and paused. “Dad, do we have a rolling pin?”
Barrett’s eyes locked on mine as he nodded. “Drawer right behind you. Don’t think it’s ever been used, though.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, batting my eyelids.
He leveled me with a supremely unamused look. God, he was so good at those. It wasn’t even fair.
“What?” I asked innocently. “I could’ve said Daddy.”
“Lily,” he warned.
I sighed. “Fine. Christmas truce?”
Maggie appeared next to me with the rolling pin.
As I hefted it in my hand, Barrett made a small noise of concession. “Does that mean you’re going to be nice?”
“I’m always nice,” I pointed out. God, this thing would make a great weapon. “Ask your children.”
“The nicest,” Bryce said. “Why would you call him daddy? You’re not related to him.”
“I wouldn’t,” I told Bryce firmly, attention drifting briefly over to the man in question. “Not my thing.”
The set of his jaw and the glint in Barrett’s eyes were just about my undoing, and I swallowed, tearing my gaze away as I took the container of flour from Maggie and began sprinkling a thin layer across the counter’s surface.
She leaned in next to me. “Why is the dough cold?”
“Because if we don’t chill it for a few hours, the butter melts and we get big blobby shapes for our cookies—and I promise, no one wants that.” I tilted my head toward the table. “You think your dad will eat a blobby reindeer? I don’t think so.”
“So I am allowed to eat these?” he said. “That’s a surprise.”
I gave him a quick look. “That’s your Christmas present. See? I said I can be nice.”
For a second, we stared at each other across the room, the reality of spending this holiday together draping a blanket of tension thick in the air. He broke first, and a hairline crack slipped down the center of my chest.
Feeling the crack was harder than defining it. It was an awful lot like regret. That I’d said yes. That I’d felt lonely all day—sick of my company and a grumpy little dog who kept ignoring me—and was somehow unable to maintain any sort of distance from this family.
Me. With a family—this family—on Christmas. The me from even six months ago would’ve called present me a lying ho.
Maggie and I rolled out the cookies, and I found her to be a perfect baking assistant. She followed directions, wasn’t bothered by correction when it was necessary, and before I knew it, we had a dozen in the oven and another dozen waiting to go.
Bryce and Barrett were engaged in a surprisingly even round of Monopoly, and even though I didn’t want to, I found myself watching them from the corner of my eye.
There wasn’t a single comment made about the mess we were making in the kitchen—and believe me, we were making one.
There was flour on the floor, in Maggie’s hair, and a little bit in mine too.
It seemed he was watching that out of the corner of his eye, too, both of us circling how the other interacted with our two pint-size buffers.
He was patient with his son, correcting him gently when he’d make a decision, but instead of telling him what to do, or that Bryce was wrong, Barrett managed it in a way that never came off heavy-handed.
Which . . . shock of the century, right? I thought heavy-handed was his middle frickin’ name.
“Think about the properties you didn’t buy when you landed on them,” he said. “If you hoard all your cash, it makes it harder down the road.”
“But I have more money than you,” Bryce said. “Isn’t the goal of the game money?”
Barrett nodded, hooking his arm over the back of the chair next to him. The muscles in his biceps did things to the stretch of the shirt, and when I found myself staring, I gave myself a mental bitch slap.
No, Lily. His sleeves are no business of ours.
“You grow your money with investments. We haven’t played this in a while, and I probably went easy on you the last time, but make sure you’re thinking about how to win long term, not just right now.”
Bryce sighed. “This game takes forever, doesn’t it?”
Barrett smothered a smile as he stared fondly at his son. “Yeah.”
The look in his eye held more of my attention than any single part of his body in that damn shirt.
The way he loved his kids was right there—like I could scoop it up and hold it in the palm of my hand.
The dichotomy of how he was with me twisted my brain a little bit.
A Christmas truce with this version of Barrett was about seventeen kinds of dangerous.
“How do these cookies look?” Maggie asked, leaning in front of the oven window. “Should we take them out?”
I blinked out of my stupor, wiping my hands on the towel slung over my shoulder. Joining her by the oven, I set my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Perfect. See that tiny little bit of browning on the edges?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll show you when I take them out. That’s how you know they’re done. We still want them to be soft.” I slipped my hands into oven mitts and nudged her backward. “Careful.”
With the first dozen settled on the top of the stove, I found myself smiling when Maggie took a deep, appreciative whiff. “Those smell so good.”
A pang of nostalgia almost took my legs out from underneath me, the reverberations seeming to go on and on, only weakening when I closed my eyes and took a deep breath too.
“I haven’t made this recipe in a long time,” I told her.
She looked up at me. “How do you know it so well, then?”
I turned and found a spatula in one of the drawers, setting it beside a cooling rack next to the finished cookies. “It was my mom’s recipe. She swore these were the best sugar cookies in the world.”
“Did the two of you bake these every year at Christmas?”
The pressure on my chest was overwhelming, the squeeze of it on my bones making it hard to keep my face even while I slid the next batch of dough into the waiting oven. “No, we didn’t,” I answered quietly.
It was impossible not to think about all the years I’d sat in the next room and not asked if I could help. Hadn’t asked what she could teach me. It was the kind of thing that haunted me if I wasn’t careful, and I made it a firm point not to be haunted over things I couldn’t change.
Maggie handed me the spatula, then watched carefully while I tested the bottom of the cookies still on the pan. They needed to cool just a bit longer before coming off.
“Does your mom still make them?” she asked cautiously.
Even though a Christmas movie was playing in the background—one of the versions of The Grinch—it felt like everyone went quiet waiting for me to answer.
I kept my eyes down on the cookies, then gave her a tiny smile. “No, honey. She doesn’t.”
When I turned to do . . . something, anything, to keep my hands busy until I could move the cookies from the baking sheet to the cooling rack, my eyes shifted up and over.
Barrett was staring right at me, a thoughtful expression on his face that scared the absolute shit out of me. After a beat, I tore my gaze away.
“Okay,” I said before clearing my throat. “Let’s get these cookies moved.”