Anna wrapped a towel around herself and barely made it to the door before Lance cannon-balled into the deep end, sending water splashing across half the yard and the windows.
Inside, she shuffled through the drawers, looking for the knives that she was certain had been next to the sink last time she was here, but she couldn’t find them. When she straightened, Jackson was watching her from behind the small counter between the kitchen and the living room.
Her heart gave a bigthud, but she wasn’t sure if it was surprise or excitement. She hadn’t seen him since he’d left her in his kitchen.
But they’d traded plenty of notes through Kaci. His momma must’ve kept him well-stocked with that paper.
Today he wore a different pair of board shorts but the same faded Alabama T-shirt and the same big, crinkly eyed smile. His hair was shorn so tight she wouldn’t have suspected curls, and his face was clean-shaven. “Hey, there, Anna Grace.”
Something fluttered in her chest at the way her name rolled off his tongue. Something suspiciously similar to a pheromone-induced adrenaline rush. “Do you have to call me that?” she asked, though it was impossible not to smile back.
“Well, now, it’s pretty, and it fits you, so I reckon I do.” He settled on a barstool on the other side of the counter, propping up his tan forearms. He grabbed a peach and shifted it between his hands. “Brought some extra peaches so you can make one of those just for me after our rematch tonight.”
Another frisson of awareness prickled her wet skin. She bent over and, out of desperation, peeked in the dishwasher to hide her reaction.Bingo. There were the knives. She plucked a paring knife out of the silverware section, then gave one of the peaches a sniff. Peach season was winding down, but these smelled sweet and yummy.
He looked yummy. In anI’m only in it for the lustkind of way.
Maybe Kaci was onto something with that expiration-datething. “Nobody told me you were coming, so I only brought one crust,” she said, and she gave him a wink Kaci would’ve been proud of. Her cheeks warmed, but she didn’t care.
Because he’d leaned closer. His gaze dropped to her mouth.
And she had a suspicion he wasn’t as dumb as he wanted her to believe.
“No problem,” he said. “Kaci probably has flour and bacon grease somewhere in here.”
She almost dropped the peach. “Bacon grease? Inpie crust?”
“Ain’t that how your momma taught you to make it?”
“Mymommataught me to make pie taste like pie and pig taste like pig.”
“Then what do you do with your bacon grease?”
In the middle of her shudder, she caught the look. TheI’m playing games with the uptight Yankeelook.
She’d be damned.
She’d been rednecked.
This one was alotsmarter than he let on.
She jutted her chin until her nose was high enough for her to stare him down. “I donate it to our annualHicks Without Hogsdrive at work.”
“Right decent of you.” But if that ornery spark was any indication, his coughing fit had nothing to do with the pollen count.
She took the paring knife to the first peach. The skin slid off in even, curving strips. “Somebody has to give us Northern folk a good name.”
He rolled a peach out of the neat line she had arranged them in. “Baking pies like that, all you need to do is loosen your tongue up a little, and nobody’s gonna notice the Northern part. You make biscuits too?”
She snatched his peach away and put it back in place, but only to distract herself from thinking about him thinking about her tongue. “Three-point question.” She sliced her peeledfruit and dropped the slices into the bowl, then grabbed another.
“How about a trade instead?”
And there was that tart strawberry flavor sitting on the back of her tongue again. “What kind of trade?”
He shifted her last three peaches, putting the smallest in the middle. “You tell me all about your biscuits, and I’ll tell you where I went while you were putting my kitchen together.”
The way he asked about her biscuits inspired thoughts that had nothing to do with baking. “Oh, I think I’m going to need something better than that.”
