She didn’t say anything because he’d mentioned he had an early shift tomorrow—in only a few hours, she realized—but she fully intended to visit the theater in the morning to check out the orchestra pit and the trunk once more.
* * *
Vivien walkedto the theater down the hill from Jake’s (she preferred going down rather than up the hill) the next morning.
It was after nine o’clock, and she’d felt more than a little guilty about sleeping in when Jake had to get up for his shift at five a.m.—and on aSunday.
But the look of pleasure in his eyes when she walked into the kitchen erased any lingering remorse.
“I heard you singing in the shower,” he said, handing her a cup of ambrosia—a.k.a. coffee—as he looked up from his computer.
“Unfortunately, it was a solo, not a duet,” she replied, bending over to give him a sultry kiss with lots of tongue.
Which he returned, turning up the heat and adding a boob cup while he was at it. “And what were you singing this morning?” he asked, arching a brow.
She smirked and bumped her hip against his. “It was a song fromOklahoma!Didn’t you hear me?”
“No, I’ve been working for the last four hours while you were snoring away.”
“I don’t snore,” she said.
“Mmmph,” he said with studied innocence. A pair of dark-framed glasses—a new development—sat next to his laptop on the counter, and she immediately wanted to see him wearing them. Cute guys in glasses were one of her favorite things.
But before she could ask, Jake cast her a curious glance. “So what were you singing?”
She grinned down at him. “‘I Cain’t Say No,’” she said, then twirled away before he could grab her and prove the point.
His eyes were laughing as he looked at her from where he was stranded at his computer screen. “I sang a duet by myself yesterday morning in the shower,” he confessed as his phone beeped with an alert.
She stopped and looked at him. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at the display on his phone. “Oh, good, that’s not for me. What were we saying?”
“You said you were singing in the shower yesterday.”
He smiled and lifted his mug of coffee to sip, watching her over it with dark, smoky eyes. “Oh, right. A duet, but, alas, I was singing it as a solo. Nevertheless, I struggled through.”
“What was it?” she asked. He had a nice enough voice, true—a decent baritone—but he wasn’t quite as regularly vocal as she was. And certainly not as powerful when it came to belting.
“‘Agony,’ fromInto the Woods.What else?”
She burst into laughter as he grinned and checked his phone as another alert came in.
“Well done, grasshopper,” she said.
“Hey, I’ve got to take care of this—can you feed Carmella?” he said, distracted again.
“Feed who…what?” She looked around. She didn’t see an aquarium or even a goldfish bowl, and she knew he didn’t have a cat or a dog.
“Carmella—over there on the counter. The Mason jar,” he said as he turned his attention to the computer with a whole bunch of complicated-looking programs on it. “One and a half cups water, one and a half cups of flour, stir it all together, pour it in. Oh, but pour off the icky gray stuff first.”
Huh?
She looked around and, sure enough, saw a Mason jar on the counter. Was that Carmella…or was that what she was supposed to feed Carmella—whoever or whatever Carmella was—with?
“Uh, Jake, some help here. Who’s Carmella?”
“In the Mason jar. My sourdough mother.” He flapped his hand in her general direction. He must have seen the bewildered look on her face. “It’s the mother of my sourdough starter—fermenting there in the Mason jar on the counter. Feed her, but pour the yucky gray liquid off the top first.”
