I’m not prepared to be faced with the vision of Quinn wearing an apron and strutting back into my kitchen, my spare rolling pin resting on his beefy shoulder.
It doesn’t matter that he does not need a rolling pin to bake bread. He looks half cocky, half eager to please. It’s adorable.
The rolling cart he’s pulling is more or less full of everything I asked him to fetch. “Thank you,” I say. I lose myself in his long, tall frame, his tousled salt and pepper hair. His curled bicep reminds me of that hug we shared last night, and I would love nothing more than to relax into his embrace, fit my head against his warm chest. Guide him to the bedroom and let him have his way.
The thought of all the things those big, rough hands—not to mention his sexy lips—could do to me threatens to zap my work ethic.
I square my shoulders and clear my throat, thinking this will somehow make me appear strong, invincible to his charms. “Thank you,” I say, putting out my hand to take the rolling pin. He hands it over and our fingers touch.
Tamping down the electricity we’ve just exchanged, I set the rolling pin aside and begin scooping out ingredients and chucking them into bowls.
Quinn’s eyes are still on me; I can feel them.
“Don’t you need to measure things?”
I smile but keep my eyes trained on what I’m doing. “I’m at the point now where I can eyeball basic measurements. And I know most of my recipes by heart, I do them so much.”
“You’re amazingly talented, you know,” he says.
This makes me chuckle. “I’ve worked very hard. It’s a skill. Anyone can do what I do. You just have to work at it.”
He huffs. “Some people have a gift for it. You’re one of them.”
I shrug, adding the dry ingredients to the wet and turning on the commercial-sized mixer. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
I turn to face him. “Well, you’re a teacher. You obviously believe people can be taught to understand art and how to write.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
“So is art, music, or writing a talent or a skill?”
“Both.”
“But if some of it is talent, then why bother teaching it?”
“Because it’s part of a well-rounded education, whether or not you have the talent. And learning it might bring out someone’s natural talent.”
I cross my arms and eye Quinn skeptically. “And I would argue that talent is not a measurable, reliable thing. But hard work and skill is.”
Quinn laughs. “Okay, this is getting too philosophical. How about we test your theory?”
I walk over to the freezer and take out some from-scratch pastry dough and pie crusts to thaw on the kitchen island. “What are you suggesting?”
Quinn towers over me, following me around the kitchen. His hands are in his pockets, trying to look non-threatening, but still, his height, his mass is close enough to transfer his heat and his whole energy into my skin. “Well, it looks to me like you’re doing everything here. Give me a recipe to do and I’ll do it, from beginning to end, and I’ll prove to you that I have no talent for baking even though I am intelligent enough to understand recipes and can follow directions.”
I swivel to face him, nervously wiping my hands on my apron. “Oh, but can you follow directions?”
“Sugar, if you tell me what you want me to do with these hands, I am but your loyal subject.” He holds up his hands, showing me the backs and then the fronts of his long, rough fingers. The way he’s holding them in the air in front of me, if my mind were in the gutter, I might imagine them cupping my face…or my breasts…or one of them touching the bare skin of my tummy, sliding down into my panties, those fingers slipping into my heat, nudging all the secret places that have ached for so long. My cheeks blaze and my mouth waters. Would it feel good this time, to hold someone between my legs, letting that someone know my body…be inside me? My body screams yes. This someone? Yes.
“Mal. Are you okay?”
I snap out of it. “Hmm? Oh. Sure. Testing your theory. Right. I could give you directions, but how would I know you wouldn’t flub the execution just to prove your point?”
Quinn’s winning smile, the smile that has surely gotten him out of one scrape or another in the past, and has no doubt given him advantages with countless hookups, further chips away at my resolve. “Scout’s honor.” And he does the scouting salute to great effect.
I watch the two-finger salute with wide eyes.