“You sure do know how to make a guy feel useless, Anna Grace.”
“I—you—you’re not useless.”
“I dunno. You don’t need help with your ants. Don’t need help with your peaches. Probably wouldn’t let me hold a door for you if it was raining a hurricane and you had your hands full. Don’t matter what it is, you don’t ever take help, do you?”
“Like the help you offered in your own kitchen?”
She gave herself a mental pinch. Her prissy side was coming through again.
But his slow grin told her she’d walked into that.
“Aw, now, that’s different. You lost fair and square on that one.” He leaned into the counter. “Besides, I reckon that pie you took was good payment for a job well done.”
“I baked that pie.”
“And I’m right looking forward to this one. So you gonnalet me help with your peaches or not?”
She brushed an errant strand of drying hair out of her eyes. “You have toearnhelping with my peaches.”
His gaze dipped to her mouth again. Abruptly, he stepped back. “Dunno, Anna Grace. Ain’t so sure you’re ready for that.”
The back door flung open. Kaci shuffled in with a goofy grin. She’d wrapped a sarong around her waist, and her belly button ring glinted in the light. “You get that pie in the oven yet?” she asked. “Lance is firing up the grill.”
She stopped and glanced between them.
Anna turned back to the peach. “Almost.”
“No hurry if you’re busy,” Kaci said.
“Just waiting on the all-clear to go outside for the man-work,” Jackson said.
“Huh.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Anna watched Kaci give them both another once-over.
“Well, if that’s the case, you go on out there,” Kaci said
“Yes, ma’am.” Jackson snitched a peach slice and winked at Anna. He took the plate of ribs Kaci pulled out of the fridge, then disappeared out the back door.
Kaci fluffed her hair and tied it back into a ponytail. “He flirting with you?”
“I think so.”
“Sugar, if you don’t know for sure, he’s not doing it right.”
If the strawberry taste in her mouth and the weird thumping of her heart were any indication, whatever it was he was doing, he was definitely doing it right.
And based on the way Kaci was grinning, she knew it.
But it wasn’t until after the pie was in the oven that she realized Jackson hadn’t told her where he’d gone when he left her alone in his kitchen. But then, she hadn’t told him about her biscuits either.
They’d been too busy talking about her peaches.
Jackson didn’t knowhe was a pie man until that long spell between the best pies he’d ever tasted. Those funny notes she kept sending him had him intrigued, but if he were the kind of man to fall in love, it would’ve been the peach pie that did him in.
Her ex-husband was a lug-head to walk away from Anna Grace’s pies.
Thoughts like that made him glad he’d gotten out of the kitchen when he had. But then he’d gone and snagged the seat next to Anna when the ribs came off the grill, and with her eating that peach pie right next to him, he was getting ideas he shouldn’t be having. Not with hunting season coming on.
