Chapter 23
twenty-three
FINN
L iving with Harper gets more challenging every day. Which is why it’s a good thing I’m now officially employed with the Lake Starlight Fire Department. Now I can keep looking for somewhere to live and be able to afford the rent without dipping into my savings.
I’ve been looking, but Harper wasn’t kidding when she said it can be hard to find something in town.
I’ve eyed a few places in Anchorage that are available.
It’s not as though it’s five minutes away, but it’s under an hour.
But now that I have the job here, I definitely want to find a place in Lake Starlight.
That way I’m close to work and Harper. I mean my child.
We’ve been getting to know each other for the past few weeks at her place. Her stomach has been bothering her, and she’s been spending more time with her head in the toilet than anything, so it seemed the safest bet.
However, she’s come around the last couple of days and insisted that we go do something tonight. I guess she’s tired of being holed up in the house. So, I rebooked what we were originally meant to do the day that her sickness really took hold.
I was out on a run this morning when she left the house and in the shower when she returned from work, so I haven’t seen her all day.
When I walk in the kitchen, I find her wearing black leggings and a thin cropped sweater, but it’s not how sexy she looks that catches my attention—though she looks incredible, and my dick notices too.
I’m taken aback by the small swell of her belly.
She must notice where my gaze transfixes.
“I know, right? It just kind of popped. I noticed it this morning.” She gently pats her stomach.
Some weird surge of male pride swells my chest. “It seems like it came out of nowhere.”
“Tell me about it,” she says with a smile, but she must notice my eyes haven’t left her stomach. “Do you want…” She shakes her head.
“Yes,” I answer, hoping we’re talking about the same thing.
“Okay.” She removes her hands from her stomach, and I slowly walk over to her.
My hand reaches, but I hesitate for a moment, my palm stretched over but still millimeters away.
“It’s okay.” She takes my hand and places it on her stomach. I cradle the small swell in my palm, and my fingers widen.
“Damn,” I say softly. “They’re growing.” I push back the tears in my eyes.
“Let’s not use plural. Twins do run in my family.” She laughs, and I look up at her. She stops, and our eyes catch.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I remove my hand, and she straightens, both of us ignoring that pull once again.
She clears her throat. “So where are we headed?”
“Anchorage.”
Her head rocks back. “Really?”
“Do you want me to tell you what we’re doing?”
“Hell no. I love surprises.” She walks past me toward the front door, and the scent of her flowery perfume trails behind her.
Fuck. There goes my dick again.
That scent throws me right back to the night we spent together. It was all over the sheets after she left the hotel room and had me reliving everything we’d done on said sheets until I checked out the following day.
“You coming?” she calls from the front door.
Not at the moment, but I have a feeling I will be later tonight to thoughts of you.
“Yup.” I grab the truck keys off the counter. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
An hour later, we pull into a parking space at the community college.
“Newsflash, I sucked at school the first time around, Finn. I’m not keen to do it again.”
I turn the truck off and shift in my seat to look at her. “I thought you liked surprises?”
“I do, but not the kind that involve school.” She’s frowning, and there’s something more behind her reaction, but I want to keep this light.
“We’re not here for class. Well, not really.”
Her head tilts. “Not helping.”
“Come on. It will be fun, I promise.”
With a sigh, she puts her hand on the door handle and exits the truck. I meet her at the front, and we head inside.
“I know I said I like surprises, and I do, but I’m feeling a little anxious now. Can you give me a really big hint?”
I stop her with a hand on her elbow. She turns and looks at me before we enter the building.
“We’re just doing a cooking class. I noticed that neither one of us is even close to line cook status—no offense—and I thought we could brush up on our skills.”
Her shoulders relax, and she smiles. “That I can handle. No promises I’ll be able to do anything more than boil a pot of water by the end though.”
I chuckle and hold the door for her, then tell her the classroom number we’re supposed to find. It takes us a few minutes, but we do locate it.
The classroom is for the culinary arts students and is essentially a large kitchen with all the cooking equipment running in a large U shape along three of the walls and rows of stainless-steel tables in the middle of the room.
There are already some other people in the classroom when we enter. It appears that it’s mostly couples, which I guess I should have expected, but I didn’t really give it a lot of thought.
“Welcome, welcome.” The instructor, an older woman in her fifties with curly dark hair to her shoulders and glasses on, waves us inside. “Just pick any station you want. We’re going to get started in a few minutes.”
When she starts the class five minutes later, it’s us and five other couples.
She claps her hands together, and the quiet conversations going on around the room trail off.
“I’d like to take a moment to welcome everyone to class.
We’re going to focus our efforts tonight on preparing a meal from start to finish, including an appetizer and a dessert.
And the best part is that you get to take everything with you to enjoy. ”
A few yelps and woohoos ring out through the class.
“My name is Ellen, and I’ve been an instructor here for more than twenty years. Before we get started, I always like to get a quick introduction from everyone so we know who we’re working with tonight. So when I point to your group, please let me know your names and what brought you here tonight.”
She points at the couple farthest from us, who are here to celebrate their anniversary. Next up is an older couple who have been dating a while, then a couple who thought it would be something fun to do to have a night away from the kids.
It’s not until she points in our direction that I realize we probably should have talked about what we were going to say. Harper looks at me wide-eyed, waiting for me to answer.
I raise my hand in greeting. “Hi, everyone. I’m Finn, and this is Harper.
” I clear my throat and decide that I’m just going to be honest about the reason I brought us here, minus some of the details.
“We’re expecting a baby in the spring, and neither of us is particularly adept in the kitchen, so I thought this would be a fun way to better our skills. ”
“Can you put chicken nuggets and fries on a baking sheet and turn on the oven? If so, you’ll be all right,” says the woman who said she was here with her husband for a night away from her kids.
Everyone else in the class laughs, including Harper.
“Congratulations,” Ellen says, then moves on with the class, explaining what we’ll be doing first.
I lean down to speak into Harper’s ear, and her floral scent hits me again, making my dick twitch. “I hope that’s okay. Seemed easier than explaining to everyone what the situation is between us.”
She turns her head to look at me when she responds, and our lips brush. She blinks and covers her mouth, stepping back. “Sorry. Yeah, that’s fine. No biggie.” Then she turns and gives her full attention to Ellen.
We do a pretty good job of putting together the appetizer and the main dish, and while the pork tenderloin cooks in the oven, we move on to making a chocolate mousse for dessert. We’ve got our chocolate, butter, cream, sugar, and eggs ready to go in front of us.
“Okay, it says to beat the sugar and egg whites together until they’re foamy.”
Harper looks at me. “Do you know how to separate the egg whites from the yolk?”
I cringe and shake my head. “No, but I can give it a try.” Ellen demonstrated for us before she sent us off to work on our own.
Harper slides the glass bowl in front of me.
I pick an egg from the carton, crack it on the side of the bowl, and try to do what Ellen did, moving the yolk from one half of the shell to the other, allowing the egg white to fall into the bowl.
It’s going okay until the third pass when it slips off the edge of the eggshell and falls into the bowl.
“Shit.”
Harper giggles.
I arch an eyebrow. “You think it’s easy? Why don’t you give it a try?”
She doesn’t back down from the challenge, shrugging. “All right.”
She bumps me with her hip, and I slide to the side so she can stand in front of the bowl. That’s one of the things I hope our child inherits from their mother—her backbone and the way she seems to go at everything straight on.
Harper cracks the egg, but she doesn’t even get the chance to separate the yolk from the white because she cracks it too hard and the entire egg slides into the bowl.
“Shoot.” She frowns at it.
“Hey, guys, how’s it going?” Ellen looks at our bowl and cringes. Yeah, we’re not killing it at this cooking thing.
“Neither of us can crack an egg and separate it,” I say.
“Not to worry, that’s why they invented these.” She holds out something that looks like a large metal spoon with slim gaps along the outer edge. “It’s a yolk separator. Toss those eggs in the trash, and I’ll show you how it works.”
Harper dumps the eggs in the bowl into the garbage, then slides it in front of Ellen. She shows us how to use the separator, and the egg whites slide nicely into the bottom of the bowl, leaving the yolk resting on the large spoon.
“Oh, that’s so much easier,” Harper says. “Making us do it the hard way, I see, Ellen.”
Ellen hands a kitchen tool to me. “I just like to get everyone to try to do it themselves because not everyone has one of those.” She winks, then walks over to next couple to check on them.
“This should be easy now,” Harper says with a smile.
We work through the recipe, not having any more trouble now that we’ve handled the egg white situation.
We work well as a team, one of us naturally stepping in to handle a step in the recipe while the other one plays the role of assistant, then we switch without even discussing it. I’m hopeful it’s a sign of things to come when we coparent together.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask as Harper folds together the cream and egg yolks.
She glances at me quickly before returning her attention to the bowl. “Sure, what’s up?”
“You seemed to have a reaction to being at a school when you thought maybe I’d signed us up for a class or something. As if you thought I’d planned for us to prep for the ACT test.”
The corners of her lips tighten. “It’s a sore spot for me. I was never good at school. I got by, but it was always a struggle.” She shrugs. “My dad was a teacher, and my mom was a principal, so I always felt like it should come easier to me, you know?”
The impression I’ve always gotten from Harper is that her parents are supportive, though I’ve yet to meet them. “Did they make you feel that way?”
She shakes her head. “Not especially. I mean, they’d be on me when I didn’t study for a test—which was most of the time—or if I handed in an assignment late.
But any parent does that. I just always felt like because they worked at our high school, I should have represented them better than I did. God knows my brother did.”
“He did well at school?”
“Easton wasn’t a scholar, but he did better than me. He had to be a good student so it would help him get a scholarship to play baseball in college.” She sets the rubber spatula against the edge of the bowl. “I think we’re ready for the chocolate.”
“I’m sorry. That sucks.” I hold the bowl of melted chocolate over the other bowl, and Harper uses the spatula to slowly fold it into the mixture.
“It’s partly my own fault. I think when I realized that I could never live up to anyone’s expectations, I just stopped trying and maybe went too far the other way to make sure they didn’t have any expectations for me, period.”
My chest pinches. I hate hearing her feel anything but the way she should—proud, confident, and successful.
“Were you good at school?” she asks. She’s done folding in the chocolate, and she brings the spatula up to her mouth. Her tongue darts out, and she licks off the chocolate mixture.
My eyes widen, my heart rate picks up, and my dick twitches. I have to dart my glance away. “I was okay. Not a star student, but I got by.”
“Well then, hopefully our baby will inherit your genes in that regard.”
My gaze snaps back to hers, and I frown. “Hey, don’t do that.”
“Do what?” She appears genuinely perplexed.
“Sell yourself short.” Harper has some chocolate beside her mouth, and I can’t stop myself from bringing my hand up to cup her cheek and swiping it with my thumb.
“You’re an intelligent woman who runs her own successful business.
A woman who was fully prepared to raise this child on her own if it came down to that.
You’re kind, almost always look at the bright side of things, and you care deeply for the people who matter in your life.
Just because you didn’t pull an A+ average in high school or college doesn’t mean shit. None of that determines your worth.”
Harper’s eyes widen, and the space between us heats. My palm feels as if it’s on fire where it rests against her cheek, and my lips tingle, wanting to feel hers again.
“All right, everyone.” Ellen claps her hands at the front of the room. “We should be finishing up with the mousse right about now so that we can take the pork out of the oven in a few minutes.”
I drop my hand from Harper’s face, and she looks away from me, turning back toward the table to spoon the mousse into the smaller takeaway containers so we can leave with it.
I’m not sure what it is about this woman that makes her so irresistible, but I need to get a handle on my attraction to her before it ruins everything we’re trying to build.