Diamond in the Ruff (Matchmaking Mamas Book 13) (10 page)

Well, the only way she was going to clear this up was by asking some very basic questions, Lily decided. “What relation is Rhonda to you? I know it’s none of my business, but I’m getting a very strong feeling that we’re not on the same page here—”

He’d drink to that, Christopher thought.

“Hold it,” he ordered out loud. “Back up.” He really wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Or had he? “What did you just ask me?”

He was angry because she was prying, Lily thought. She didn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with Christopher. She needed him to help her with the puppy. She just wasn’t good at these sorts of things, despite her best intentions.

“Sorry, I stepped over the line, I guess,” she told him. “I was just trying to get things straight, but if you don’t want to tell me about Lara, or Rhonda, that’s your right and I—”

This misunderstanding was getting way out of hand, Christopher realized. The only way to stop this rolling snowflake from becoming a giant, insurmountable snowball to end all snowballs was just to blurt out the truth to Lily, which he did—as fast as possible.

“Rhonda’s my neighbor’s Irish setter,” he explained in as few words as he could. “Josh called me in a panic just as I was driving to your place, said someone driving erratically had hit Rhonda and then just kept on going. She was alive, but had lost a lot of blood. I couldn’t turn him down.”

Rhonda was a dog?
The thought presented itself to her in huge capital letters. The rush of relief that ushered those words in was almost overwhelming. She did her best to refrain from analyzing it. She wasn’t equipped for that right now.

“Of course you couldn’t.” She said the words so fiercely, at first he thought that Lily was putting him on.

But one look into her eyes and he knew she was being completely serious.

And completely lovable while she was at it, he couldn’t help thinking.

Christopher only realized much later that his real undoing began at that very minute.

Just as hers did for her.

For Lily, it was realizing that the man who was helping her discover the right way to train Jonathan wasn’t just someone who was kind when it was convenient for him to be that way, or because he was trying to score points with a woman he’d just met and appeared to be moderately attracted to. The turning point for her, the moment she discovered that she had absolutely no say when it came to being able to properly shield her heart from being breeched, was in finding out that Christopher was selfless across the board, especially when it came to animals who needed him.

Her heart went up for sale and was simultaneously taken off the market by that same man in that very small instant of time.

Instantly distracted, Christopher stopped talking and took a deep breath. His question was fairly rhetorical because he had a hunch that he knew the answer to it. “What is that fantastic smell?”

It was very hard to keep her face from splitting in half; her smile was that wide and it just continued to widen. It had swiftly reached her eyes when she suggested, “Why don’t you come into the kitchen and see for yourself?”

Turning on her heel, she led the way into her small kitchen. She didn’t realize at the time that there was a bounce to her step.

But Christopher did.

In keeping with the kitchen’s compact size, there was an island in the middle, but a small one, just large enough to accommodate two of the three trays she’d placed in the oven earlier. She had taken the two trays out while the third one was still baking.

The closer he came, the stronger the aroma seemed to be. His appetite was firmly aroused and Christopher immediately transformed into a kid walking into his favorite candy shop. “Are those the same pastries you made the other day?”

“Some are, some aren’t. I like to mix it up,” she confessed.

The pastries on the trays were still warm and were most definitely emitting a siren song as he stared at them.

“Are these all for work?” he asked, circling the trays on the island slowly.

“No, they’re for me,” she corrected. “Not to eat,” she explained quickly. “Baking relaxes me. I usually give them away after I finish.” Gesturing toward the trays, she asked, “Would you like to sample one?”

She got as far as gesturing before he took her up on the offer he’d assumed she’d been about to make.

Chapter Nine

“Y
ou are, without a doubt, an amazingly gifted young woman.”

Christopher uttered the unabashed praise the minute he had finished savoring his very first bite of the pastry he had randomly chosen off the nearest tray. The pastry was filled with cream whipped into fluffy peaks and laced with just enough Amaretto to leave a very pleasant impression. It was practically light enough to levitate off the tray.

“I bake,” she said, shrugging carelessly. Lily was warmed by his praise, but she didn’t want to make it seem as if she was letting his compliment go to her head.

“No,” Christopher corrected her. “My late mother, God bless her, ‘baked.’ Her desserts, when she made them, always tasted of love, but they were predictable, and while good, they weren’t ‘special.’ Yours are definitely special. You don’t just ‘bake,’ you
create.
There’s a big difference.”

Christopher paused as he indulged himself a little more, managing to eat almost three quarters of the small pastry before he went on.

“You know, I’m usually one of those people who eat to live, not live to eat. Nobody could
ever
accuse me of being a foodie or whatever those people who love to regale other people with their so-called ‘food adventures’ like to call themselves. But if I had access to something like this whenever I felt like indulging in a religious experience, I’d definitely change my affiliation—not to mention that I’d probably become grossly overweight. Speaking of which,” Christopher went on, switching subjects as he eyed her, “why aren’t you fat?” he asked.

“I already told you, I don’t eat what I make.” Then, before he could say that he had a hard time believing that, she admitted, “Oh, I sample a little here, a dab there, to make sure I’m not going to make someone throw up, but I’ve just never felt the inclination to polish off a tray of pastries.”

Christopher’s expression told her that he was having a hard time reconciling that with his own reaction to the end product of her culinary efforts.

“If I were you,” he told her, “I’d have a serious talk with myself, because your stubborn half is keeping you from having nothing short of a love affair with your taste buds.” He licked the last of the whipped cream from his fingertips, discovering he craved more. “How
did
you come up with these?” he asked, waving his hand at the less-than-full tray of pastries that was closest to him on the counter.

Her method was no big secret, either. It was based on a practical approach.

“It’s a very simple process, really. I just gather together a bunch of ingredients and see where they’ll take me,” she told him.

As if to back up her explanation, Lily indicated the containers, bottles and boxes that had been pressed into service and were now all huddled together on the far side of the counter.

He thought that was rather a strange way to phrase it. But creative people had a very different thought process.

“That means what?” he asked her, curious about her process. “You stare at them until they suddenly speak to you?”

“Not in so many words, but yes, maybe. Why?”

He shook his head, still marveling at her stripped-down approach to creating something so heavenly. With very little effort, he could have easily consumed half a dozen pastries until he exploded.

“Just trying to familiarize myself with your creative process,” he answered, then added, “I’ve never been in the presence of a magician before.”

“And you aren’t now. It’s not magic, it’s baking. And that, by the way,” she said, indicating the pastry he’d just had, “was one of my low-fat pastries.”

He stared at her, undecided if she was telling him the truth or putting him on. “You’re kidding.”

“Not when it comes to calories,” she answered with solemnity.

“Low-fat?” he asked again, looking at the rest of the pastries.

“Low-fat,” she confirmed. “Told you you couldn’t tell the difference.”

Christopher shook his head, clearly impressed. “Now that’s really
inspired
baking,” he told her with just a hint of wonder.

If he wanted to flatter her, who was she to fight it? Lily thought.

“Okay, I’ll go with that.” She carefully moved around Jonathan, who appeared to be hanging on his hero’s every word. “Now, can I fix you some dinner to go with your ‘magical’ dessert?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m good,” he told her. When she raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to explain, he said, “I grabbed a burger on the way over here. I didn’t want to put you out.”

“Did you eat the burger you grabbed?” she asked. “Because I can still make you something a little more edible than a fast-food hamburger.”

He liked the way she crinkled her nose in what appeared to be unconscious disdain of the entire fast-food industry. “I’m sure you can, but the burger filled the hole in my stomach for the time being. Besides, that rain check I mentioned earlier was supposed to be for dinner, too. Dinner out,” he emphasized.

“You don’t have to wait to be seated if we have dinner in,” she pointed out gently. Lily viewed all cooking as an outlet for her and she thoroughly enjoyed doing it. She wanted to convince him that this definitely wasn’t “putting her out.”

“Don’t you like being waited on?” he asked Lily.

“Not particularly,” she admitted. Then, not wanting to sound like some sort of a weirdo, she told him, “Although I’m not overly fond of washing dishes.”

“Do you?” he asked in surprise. “Wash dishes,” he elaborated when he didn’t get a response.

“Yes.” Why was he asking? She thought she’d just said as much.

He glanced over toward the appliance next to her stove. “Is your dishwasher broken?”

She automatically glanced at it because he had, even though she didn’t need to in order to answer his question. “I don’t know, I’ve never used it. There’s just me and it doesn’t seem right to run all that water just for a few plates.”

There was a solution to that. “Then wait until you have enough dishes to fill up the dishwasher,” he suggested.

“That seems even less right.” Lily suppressed a shiver as she envisioned stacking dirty plates on top of one another.

“Leaving a bunch of dirty dishes lying around until there’s enough for a full load sounds awful. Either way is offensive,” she said with feeling. “It’s a lot easier if I just wash as I go. My mom taught me that,” she told him out of the blue. “This was her house—
our
house, as she liked to put it even though I never paid a dime toward its purchase. My mom handled everything,” she recalled fondly. “Held down two, sometimes three jobs, just to pay the bills.

“If there was anything extra, she proudly put it toward my college fund. By the time I was set to go to college, there was a lot of money in that little slush fund of hers. Enough to set me on the road to any college I wanted.”

Caught up in her reminiscing, Christopher asked, “So where did you go?”

He watched as her smile faded. Sorrow all but radiated from her. “I didn’t. That was the year my mother got sick. Really sick. At first, the doctors she went to see all told her it was in her head, that she was just imagining it. And then one doctor decided to run a series of more complex tests on her—which was when Mom found out that she wasn’t imagining it. She had brain cancer.” She said the diagnosis so quietly, Christopher wouldn’t have heard her if he wasn’t standing so close to her.

“By the time they found it, it had metastasized to such a degree that it was too hard to cut out and get it all. They went in, did what they could, and then Mom said, ‘No more.’ She told them that she wanted to die at home, in one piece. And she did,” Lily concluded proudly, her voice wavering slightly as she fought back the tears that always insisted on coming whenever she talked about her mother at any length.

“I used the money she had set aside for my college fund to pay off her medical bills.” Lily shrugged helplessly, as if paying off the bills had somehow ultimately helped her cope with her loss. “It seemed only right to me.”

Lily stopped talking for a second to wipe away the tears that insisted on seeping out from the corners of her eyes.

“Sorry, I get pretty emotional if I talk about my mother for more than two minutes.” She attempted to smile and was only partially successful. “I didn’t mean to get all dark and somber on you.”

“That’s okay,” he assured her. “I know what it feels like to lose a mother who’s sacrificed everything for you.” She looked up at him. “You’d trade every last dime you had just to spend one more day with her. But you can’t, so you do the next best thing. You prove to the world that she was right about you. That you
can
do something that counts, to make some sort of a difference. And I have no doubt that somewhere, tucked just out of sight, my mom and yours are watching over us and are pretty satisfied with the people they single-handedly raised,” he told her with a comforting smile.

She took in a deep breath, doing her best to get her emotions under control. His words were tremendously comforting to her.

“You think?” she asked.

“I know,” he countered. Looking at her, he saw the telltale trail forged by a stray teardrop. “You missed one.”

With that, he lifted her chin with the tip of his finger, tilting it slightly. Using just his thumb, Christopher very gently wiped the stray tear away from the corner of her eye.

Their eyes met for one very long moment and her breath felt as if it had become solid in her throat as she held it.

Waiting.

Hoping.

Trying not to.

And then everything else, her surroundings, the kitchen, the pastries, even the overenergized puppy that was responsible for bringing them together in the first place, it just faded into the background like so much inconsequential scenery.

She was acutely aware of her heart and the ramped-up rhythm it had attained.

Christopher lowered his mouth to hers and ever so lightly, like a sunbeam barely touching her skin, he kissed her.

The next moment, he drew back and she thought for a second that the sound of her heart, beating wildly, had driven him back.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to take advantage of you like that,” he told her, still cupping her cheek with the palm of his hand.

Her voice felt as if it was going to crack at any second as she told him, “You didn’t. And there’s nothing to be sorry about, except...”

“Except?” he prodded.

Lily shook her head, not wanting to continue. She was only going to embarrass herself—and him—if she said anything further. “I’ve said too much.”

“No,” he contradicted, “you’ve said too little. ‘Except’ what?” he coaxed.

Lily wavered. Maybe he did deserve to know. So she told him.

“Except maybe it didn’t last long enough,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper, her cheeks burning and threatening to turn a deep pink.

“Maybe it didn’t,” he agreed. “Let’s see if I get it right this time,” he murmured just before his mouth came down on hers for a second time.

This time nothing happened in slow motion. This time, she could feel the heat travel through her as if its path had been preset with a thin line of accelerant, a line that ran between the two of them as well as over the length of her.

They’d been sitting at the counter on stools that swiveled and were now turned toward one another. Lily caught herself sliding from the stool, her arms entwined around the back of Christopher’s neck.

He stood up at the same moment that she had gotten off the stool.

The length of her body slid against his. His ridges and contours registered with acute details. All the electricity between them crackled with a fierceness that was all but staggering.

He savored the sweetness of her mouth in a far more profound way than he had savored the flour-and-cream creations she’d made. The Amaretto in the pastry had been just the tiniest bit heady. The taste of her lips was far more intoxicating.

So much so that it sent out alarms all throughout his body, warning him that he was walking into something he might not be prepared for. Something he might not be equipped to handle at this juncture of his life, all things considered.

The magnitude of his feelings right at this moment was enough to make Christopher back away, concerned about the consequences that waited for him if he wasn’t careful.

It wasn’t easy, but he forced himself to draw back again.

“Maybe I better go,” he told her, the words that emerged sounding low and almost gravelly.

She needed time to pull herself together. Time to try to understand just what it was that was going on here—aside from her complete undoing. Time to fix the shield around her heart because it had seriously cracked.

“Maybe you’d better,” she agreed.

He tried to remember what had brought him here in the first place. It was difficult to get a fix on his thoughts; they were scattered and unfocused. All he was aware of was how much he wanted her.

“I just wanted to tell you in person why I backed out this afternoon,” he finally managed to say.

“I appreciate that,” she told him, then added belatedly, “I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

Her wits managed to finally come together. The relief she experienced at being able to think again was incredible. She almost felt as if she was in full possession of her mental faculties again. Or at least enough to be able to carry on a normal conversation. Even so, she didn’t want to push herself and have it all fall apart on her again.

Something about this man threatened her carefully constructed world and if she wasn’t on her guard, all the work she had put in to keeping her heart out of danger’s reach would go up in smoke.

“Why don’t you take one or two for the road? Or more if you like,” Lily suggested, doing her very best to sound casual. It wasn’t easy talking with one’s heart in one’s throat.

“One or two for the road?” he echoed. They’d just been locked in a kiss, so was she talking about those? he wondered, looking at her uncertainly.

“Or more,” she repeated again. “I can wrap up as many pastries as you’d like to take home with you. Maybe even give a couple to your poor neighbor for what he’s just gone through.”