Alison Roberts - Winning His Heart

Kevin was dead, but even before his death, had been the death of their friendship, which had been just as painful. Now, the Jaffreys had moved. It seemed shocking that Kayla was Mrs. Jaffrey now.

Really, with the death of his father, David felt as if he had begun to learn a lesson that had not really stopped since: love was leaving yourself open to a series of breathtaking losses.

And still, this kitchen softened something in him that did not want to be softened.

The kitchen was a mess of the nicest kind: recipe books open, mixing bowls out, blobs of yellowy batter—lemon chiffon cake, at this time of the day?—spattering the counter. David was painfully aware that there was a feeling of homecoming here that he no longer had at home.

He realized some of it was scent: Kayla’s scent, lemony and sweet, that clung to her, and the sweater he was holding. There was the fresh smell of the toast she’d had for breakfast, but underneath that he remembered more good things. He swore he could smell all the cookies that had ever been baked in that archaic oven, and Thanksgiving dinner, and golden-crusted pies that lined the countertops after the original Mrs. Jaffrey had availed herself of Blossom Valley’s apple harvest.

He compared that to the hospital smells of his mother’s house—disinfectants and unappetizing food heated in the microwave and smells he did not even want to think about—and he felt like he never wanted to leave this kitchen again.

“Mom asked me to return your sweater,” he said past the lump in his throat. “She remembered your name.”

Kayla scanned his face and took the sweater wordlessly from his hands, hanging it on the back of one of the chairs.

There. He’d done what he came to do. He needed to be in the water, to swim until his muscles hurt and until his mind could not think a single thought. Instead, he found himself reluctant to leave this kitchen that said home to him in a way his mother’s home would never do again.

Instead, he found himself wishing Kayla would press her hand over his heart again.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

No. “Yes.”

But she seemed to hear the no as if he had spoken it.

She regarded him thoughtfully. It was as if she could see every sorrow that he carried within him.

“I’m trying out recipes in an effort to keep busy and keep my mind off Bastigal. Would you like to try some homemade ice cream?”

He thought of the congealed porridge at his house. He thought he had to say no to this. He was in a weakened state. This could not go anywhere good.

But suddenly none of that mattered. He had carried his burdens in solitude for so long and it felt, ridiculously, as if they could be eased by this kitchen, by her, by the appeal of homemade ice cream.

He could not have said no to her invitation if he wanted to.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TO ADMIT KAYLA’S KITCHEN, and her invitation, and Kayla herself, were proving impossible to say no to felt as if it would be some kind of defeat, so instead of saying yes, David just lifted a shoulder as if he could care less whether he ate her ice cream or not.

Kayla did not seem to be fooled, and her eyes were gentle as they lingered on his face. Then she acted just as if she had heard the yes that he had not spoken.

“It’s not quite ready. Give me a second.”

“I hope it’s not rose petal,” he said, needing her to know he had not surrendered to her charms or the charms of her kitchen completely.

“Oh, way better than that.”

“But what could be?” he said drily.

“I bought this at a yard sale,” she said, turning away from him and back to her crowded countertop. She lifted off her counter a bowl big enough to bathe a baby in.

At first he thought she meant she had purchased the bowl at a yard sale but then she trundled over to a stainless-steel apparatus that squatted on her floor with a certain inexplicable air of malevolence. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed it before since it took up a whole corner of the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asked warily, and gratefully, as something in him shifted away from that awful picture of porridge dripping down the wall in his house next door.

“It’s called a batch freezer!” Kayla said triumphantly. “What are the chances I would find one just as I’m contemplating buying an ice cream store?”

“Cosmically ordained,” he said.

She either missed his sarcasm or refused to acknowledge it. “Exactly.”

“It reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“That’s ridiculous. If I remember correctly, HAL was not nice.”

“You slept through ninety percent of that movie. And you were the one who insisted we rent it.”

“I was in my all-things-space stage.” She sniffed. “It disappointed.”

But what David remembered was not disappointment, but that there had been a bunch of them in somebody’s basement rec room gamely watching the vintage sixties movie Kayla had rented.

Somehow she’d ended up crammed next to him on a crowded couch. And partway through—after gobbling down buttered popcorn and licking the extra butter off her fingers—he realized she had gone to sleep and her head was lolling against his shoulder, and the cutest little pool of drool was making a warm puddle on his shirt.

And that he hadn’t embarrassed her by mentioning it when she woke up.

“How much did you pay for this contraption?” he asked gruffly, moving over to inspect it.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said happily. “That’s a steal. New ones, of commercial grade, start at ten grand. This size of machine is eighteen thousand dollars.”

He realized, uncomfortably—and yet still grateful to have his focus shifting—that Kayla was way more invested in the idea of owning the ice cream parlor than she had originally let on.

“Presumably,” he said carefully, “More-moo already has one.”

“They don’t,” she crowed triumphantly. “They buy their ice cream from Rolling Hills Dairy, the same as you can buy for yourself at the grocery store. There is nothing special about that. Why go out for ice cream when you can have the same thing at home for a fraction of the price?”

“Exactly. Why?”

“That’s how I plan to be different. Homemade ice cream, in exotic flavors that people have never had before.”

She frowned at his silence, glanced back at him. “And, of course, I’ll offer the old standbys for boring people. Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. But still homemade.”

“So what flavor is this that you’re experimenting with?” he asked, curious despite himself.

“Dandelion!”

“And that’s better than rose petal?” he asked doubtfully.

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Have you done any kind of market research at all?”

“Don’t take the fun out of it,” she warned him.

“Look, fun is playing volleyball on the beach, or riding a motorcycle flat out, or skinny-dipping under a full moon.”

Something darkened in her eyes when he said that, and he wished he hadn’t because a strange, heated tension leaped in the air between them.

“Fun is fun, and business is business,” he said sternly.

And he was here on business. To return a sweater. But ever since he had walked in the door and felt almost swamped with a sensation of homecoming, his mission had felt blurry.

“That’s not what you said in the article for Lakeside Life,” she told him stubbornly. “You said if a man does what he loves he will never work a day in his life.”

What did it mean that she had read that so closely? Nothing, he told himself.

“I’d play with the name,” she said, ignoring his stern note altogether. “That’s part of the reason I like it better than rose petal, well, that and the fact it would be cheaper to produce. I’d call this flavor Dandy Lion.”