“Sure. That sounds great.” Wait! Those words weren’t supposed to come from her mouth. She pinched her nose with the fingers of her free hand. Great, now her mouth was in cahoots with her heart. They were both fired.
“Awesome,” Christian said. “I’m picking up the girls from their after-school care at five. Would five-thirty be good for you?”
No.
Not good.
Not good at all.
“Sure, sounds great.”
“Perfect. It’s a date then.” He cleared his throat again. “I mean, not adatedate. A business date. A meeting.”
The mention of a date sent Hallie’s insides jumping on an inflatable bouncy house. They were still doing flips when she hung up the phone shortly after, and she stared at the call log for several long minutes, wondering what just happened. The timestamp listed their phone conversation as lasting for forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes?
She’d made a lot of calls in the three years since starting Hallie’s Cakes, and not once had she spoken on the phone with a client for that long. And she’d never enjoyed any of them as much as this one.
The screen went dark, waking her from her temporary daze. She tapped the phone to light it up again and opened a new contact. She’d need to reach out to Christian again for feedback on the other cakes he’d ordered, so she put a permanent place for him in her phone.
And that was theonlyreason, though she couldn’t explain why she labeled his number asChristian: My favorite client.
The prospect of having a woman over for the first time in three years forced Christian to take a hard look at the state of his house.
Technically, Hallie wouldn’t be the first woman to ever step foot inside the front door since Sabrina left. Mom and Dani made frequent visits. And sometimes Gemma accompanied Tyler when he came over too.
But those women didn’t cause his heart to beat against his rib cage in its attempt to leap from his body. This visit felt different.
And why would that be?
He refused to consider the reasons. Still, what he learned in his panic-induced assessment was that he couldn’t let Hallie see his place like this. He wasn’t a slob, per se. There were just only so many hours in the day. Between caring for the girls, earning a living, and all the baggage that came with that, the house fell to the bottom of his priority list on more days than not.
Perhaps it was time to hire a cleaning lady to take that burden off his hands. Of course, that wouldn’t do him any good right now. Hallie was due any minute to discuss Isla’s cake. Nothing but his own desperate attempts to straighten up would save him this time.
“What you doing, Daddy?” Penelope asked, kicking her legs against her booster seat while she and Isla finished their goldfish crackers and string cheese. They both stared at him as if emptying the sink of dirty dishes was an unusual task.
“I’m cleaning up a bit.” Christian strode over to the table, tripping over Princess Pumpkin—again—as she got under his feet. She didn’t know what to do with all the nervous energy buzzing in the house. She flitted around, barking like she couldn’t contain her anticipation that something exciting was about to happen.
Exciting? Or terrifying?
“Isla, after you finish your snack, I need you to help Nellie take the toys in the living room upstairs.”
Isla mumbled something through the crackers in her mouth. Little bits of orange crumbs flew onto the table.
“I didn’t catch that,” he said, making a mental note to wipe it down when he finished the dishes. “Chew and swallow your food and try again.” Unclipping Penelope’s booster seat, he set her down on the floor. “Go take your toys upstairs.”
She sped from the room.
Isla washed her snack down with a drink of water. “Can I help with the cake?”
“Sure, it’s your cake. Ugh … Pumpkin.” His groan sounded more like a growl when the dog zipped by him, knocking one of his legs out from under him. Lurching forward, he braced his free hand against the sink to catch himself, miraculously holding onto the stack of dishes in his other arm. “Don’t you have somewhere better to be?”
While Isla brought her snack plate to the sink, Christian retrieved the giant dog bone laying on the floor by the back door. He held it up for Pumpkin to sniff, then tossed it onto her bed. The retriever trotted over, took it in her mouth, and got comfortable in the cotton-covered memory foam.
High-pitched squeals of laughter from the other room reached his ears. The girls were not taking his instructions seriously. They’d probably stopped to play with the toys instead of taking them upstairs. At least they were occupied, allowing him to tackle a couple more tasks before Hallie arrived. The rest would have to be good enough.
He jammed Isla’s snack plate onto the top rack of the dishwasher in the only spot it would fit. This wasn’t the most organized loading job. It fell under the pack-as-many-dishes-in-as-he-could method, so Hallie wouldn’t see how many days he’d gone without doing them. Sliding the rack inside, he bent over to make sure the height of the dishes cleared the spray arm.
