Chapter 8
I STRIPPED OFF MY SKIRT and reached for my jeans, tossing them aside at the last minute for a pair of yoga pants.
Ford was coming to my house to cook. I still wasn’t sure how I missed that when I’d agreed to the cooking lesson thing.
I’d assumed we were going to meet somewhere to take lessons together.
From a professional. Not that he’d insist on coming to my house to teach me himself.
I’d thought about making the argument that being alone together in the last place we’d had sex—and the mid-coital omelet—might blur the lines established in our agreement, but I could already hear him chastising me for not being able to handle being alone with him.
There was no way I was giving him that much gloating material.
Instead, I’d tried to suggest a professional kitchen.
He’d called me cher in that accent that threatened to melt me and pointed out I had everything we needed in my kitchen except food.
I couldn’t argue; Elena made sure my kitchen was stocked for a gourmet chef’s needs.
It was my fault it never saw any action.
Or hadn’t until Ford. He’d already changed that.
I offered to order the food we needed if he’d give me a list. He’d actually laughed and said not to worry about it.
He’d bring everything. Which meant I didn’t have anything to do until he showed up at my house except obsess about my clothes and there was no way I was doing that.
That was date behavior, not something friends worried about.
I switched back to the jeans, pulled on a T-shirt and grabbed my e-reader.
I’d just finished a friends-to-lovers story I adored.
I didn’t have enough time to really sink into something new, but I could at least pick my next read.
Work left me very little time to read for pleasure and my Tbr grew faster than I could tame it, but as I scrolled through the dozens of books on my Kindle, I kept thinking about the book Ford had been reading at the bar the night we met—Discovery of Witches.
I tried to push my thoughts back to the romantic comedies I usually gravitated to, but the sexy vampire-witch story wormed its way into my head.
Rather than waste the time I had fighting the inevitable, I gave in and bought the e-book, grabbing a grapefruit seltzer while it downloaded.
I wanted a glass of wine, but not as much as I wanted my wits sharp when Ford was in my kitchen, teaching me to cook.
The fact that he’d commandeered my reading list was enough upheaval for one evening.
“It begins with absence and desire.” Hmm.
The opening line to the Harkness book hit a little too close to home.
At least the desire bit. I could pretend for now that I didn’t think about Ford when he was absent.
It was a lie, but I could pretend. I swiped to the next screen and lost myself in the book about a book.
I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until the soft knock on the door announced Ford’s arrival.
My nerves spiked and I drew in a slow, deliberate breath, willing myself to calm the fuck down.
At least the book had kept me from agitated pacing more suited to a date than an evening with a friend.
I was going to keep saying the friend thing over and over in my head until I had the label tattooed on my brain.
There was no way I was letting this slip into anything else.
As soon as I opened the door, Ford met me with a bag full of groceries and a smile that made my stomach do a little flip.
I wrestled with the sudden worry about how to greet him.
My girlfriends usually got hugs when we met for coffee—or really anything—but that felt like blurring a line with Ford.
He didn’t wait for me to decide. Shifting the grocery bag to one arm, he gripped my waist with his other hand, leaned in to press a quick kiss to my cheek and then gently nudged me to the side as he entered and headed to the kitchen.
His part of it took less than three seconds and left me standing in the open doorway, warring with my errant heartbeat.
“What’s on the menu?” I asked, following in his wake, determined to get my thoughts back in line and away from the brush of his warm lips against my skin. Cheek kisses were definitely a friend thing. Strangers practically did that.
“We’re starting with a classic.” He set a bag of flour on the counter along with eggs, butter, powdered sugar, and a foil packet of yeast. “The beignet. Brought to New Orleans by the Acadians in the eighteenth century. It was declared the official state donut in 1986.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.
“That can’t be a thing.”
“I assure you it is.”
He pressed his palm to his chest, and I got momentarily sidetracked by the way his hand looked against the faded cotton of his T-shirt.
I bit my lip again, imagining what it would feel like to slide my hands under the soft fabric.
To touch his warm, bare skin. Which wouldn’t do.
We were cooking, not sexing. I glanced up and caught Ford staring at my mouth.
“Fine. You were saying.” I made a go on motion with my hand, determined to get back on track. His lips curved in a grin I was pretty sure meant he was on to me.
“A stellar start to any brunch,” continued Ford. “The perfect snack, and a beloved hangover food of both tourist and locals alike.”
He sounded like a documentary narrator—kind of a Creole version of David Attenborough but sexier—and I bit my lip to keep from laughing at the image. There might have been the barest flash of heat in his eyes as his gaze drifted to my lips, but it was gone too soon for me to be sure.
“I know what beignets are. I didn’t realize the cooking came with a history lesson.”
“All part of the service, cher.” He set a jug of vegetable oil on the counter next to the other ingredients and folded the empty grocery bag. “I assume you have a stand mixer?”
“You assume I know what that is.” I knelt in front of the cabinet by the stove, opened the door and tugged on the heavy mixer. “Just kidding.”
I turned to look up at him and got an unobstructed view of long denim-clad legs a breath away from me. For a moment, I wasn’t someone getting a cooking lesson; I was a woman on her knees in front of a man I’d had my lips on. One I planned to take in my mouth again in forty-eight hours or so.
Heat flashed deep in my core, and I felt my face flush. If the way Ford’s breath hitched in his chest was any indication, we shared the same thought.
“Let me get that,” he said, squatting down beside me and breaking the spell.
He grabbed the mixer and lifted it like it weighed nothing, setting it on the counter beside the ingredients.
“Grab the measuring cups and a small bowl.” He let the water in the sink run until it was hot and then filled a mug. “First we’ve got to bloom the yeast. It’s dry now. We’ve got to wake it up.” He measured out a cup of water into the bowl and held it out toward me. “Touch it.”
I arched a brow at him, and he hit me with a grin that made it clear the double entendre was intentional.
“It should be warm to the touch but not too hot or it will kill the yeast.” He waited while I dipped the tip of my finger into the warm water. “See?”
I nodded. “This cooking thing is tough.”
“Smart ass. Open the yeast and sprinkle it in the bowl.”
I did as he said, tearing the foil packet open and sprinkling the granules on the water. They smelled like good sourdough bread and floated on the surface for a second before dissolving into a putty-colored paste. Ford sprinkled a pinch of something on top of the floating yeast.
“Sugar,” he said. “Just a bit to feed them and get them started. Salt will kill them.”
“You keep talking like it’s alive.” I had a basic understanding of yeast, but Ford made them sound more like an animal than a dough ingredient.
“That’s because it is. An organism, not an animal. But it’s all part of the magic.”
He fitted what looked like a pirate hook but in hindsight was probably a dough hook to the mixer and started measuring flour and eggs and butter into the bowl.
“The butter’s got to be soft, see?” He pressed a fingertip gently into the pale-yellow surface of the butter and then stuck his finger in his mouth, reminding me of all the other things he’d done with his mouth.
The man made cooking sexy. I was so fucked.
“How do we tell when this is ready?” I held out the bowl and its now frothy contents.
“See all the bubbles? It means the yeast is active and going to work. It’s ready now.” He dumped the yeast mixture in with the rest of the ingredients and started the mixer on low, gradually increasing the speed as the dough came together.
After a few minutes of mixing, the dough started to pull away from the walls of the bowl. In a few more minutes, it was a smooth ball thwapping around the bowl.
“Well, that wasn’t hard at all.” I pressed a tentative fingertip to the ball of dough, smiling to myself when it sprung back to normal.
“What do we do now?” I glanced up and caught Ford watching me as if I were the most fascinating creature in the world and he wanted nothing more than to study me.
It was disconcerting, and I felt my cheeks heat in response to his attention.
“Now,” he said, draping one of the checked linen tea towels Elena had picked out for me over the bowl holding the ball of dough. “We wait.”
He leaned back against the counter like he had all the time in the world while I tried to keep my focus off the way his soft gray T-shirt stretched over his chest. His jeans rode low on his hips in a way that made me want to slide my hands under the waistband to grab the tight ass I’d dug my heels into when we fucked.
I needed to get a grip. Not literally. Definitely not literally.
“How long?” Surely I could avoid running my hands over the flat planes of his stomach for fifteen minutes or so. Even in my butter-stroking weakened state, I could hold out for that long.