He couldn’t expect them to plan everything, always call or text first, ask questions about his life. It was a two-way street—and the very reason he’d been so frustrated with Farrah these past few weeks.
He felt like he was trying. Saying all the right things, and giving her space, and letting her come to him.
And she hadn’t come to him.
Until now.
He pulled open the back door and got hit square in the face with the scent of browning pork and starchy potatoes and butter. “Hello?” he called. He couldn’t quite believe that Farrah had come to Steeple Ridge. Sheneverhad before. Insisted she wouldn’t.
Scraping from the kitchen sounded and then Cody peered around the corner. “Oh, hey, Darren.” He spoke too loud to be casual, and he wore a panicked look on his face. Before he could say anything else, Farrah joined him.
Hope shone in her teal eyes, sucker-punching Darren again. “You’re late,” she said like it was no big deal that she’d come to this farm where she’d claimed she’d never step foot again.
Darren didn’t know how to respond, so he simply stepped past the pair of them and moved into the kitchen.
“I’ve just started peeling the potatoes.” Farrah edged around him without actually touching him, but the electricity from her nearness practically shocked him. “So let me show you that.” Her nervousness was a palpable being in the air, and Darren didn’t know what to do with it. How to erase it.
“Is this part of the lesson?” he asked.
“Yes. You missed the onion chopping, but I showed Cody so he can teach you.”
Darren exchanged a glance with Cody, who now wore a grin the size of the Mississippi River. He made a shooing motion as if Darren wasn’t already standing in the kitchen with Farrah and made a show of stomping downstairs.
“Wash your hands first.”
Darren followed her directions and stood beside her as she peeled a potato. “You try it.” She handed the peeler to him, and he picked up a potato with the skin still on. It felt small in hislarge hand, but he managed to get the blades of the peeler across it.
“I have water here.” She indicated the steaming pot already on the stove. “It has quite a bit of salt in it, because potatoes taste like nothing, so you have to flavor them.”
He nodded, not quite trusting his voice to work properly.
“We caramelized the onions and married them with beef stock. Then I browned the chops and stuck them in the oven while the gravy reduces. Four hundred degrees.”
Darren went along with her though words likecaramelizedandbrownedandreduceswere quite advanced culinary vocabulary for him.
He did manage to pick up a knife and get the potatoes in similar-sized cubes. Farrah put them all into the now-boiling water at the same time and stepped back. “Now we usually do a vegetable, but you rarely eat anything green, so I didn’t bring anything tonight.”
“I think we have frozen peas.” They were probably left from when Sam used to make dinner a year ago, and Darren had no idea how to take them from rock hard to edible, but he stepped toward the refrigerator anyway.
“It’s fine,” Farrah said.
“Oh, I forgot.” Darren froze, now only a foot from her. “You don’t like peas.” He gazed down on her, her peachy-pink skin a bit sun-kissed from her work on the farm these past few weeks. His natural instinct to take her in his arms, lean down, and kiss her reared so high he flinched toward her.
Instead of touching her, he whispered, “I miss you.”
He expected her to jump back, grab her keys, and disappear out the front door.
She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. “I miss you too.”
He took both of her hands in his, a rush of adrenaline shooting through him at the skin-to-skin contact. “Why’d you come to the farm tonight?”
She lifted her chin. “To apologize. Something I should’ve done a long time ago.”
“For what?”
“I haven’t been exactly forthcoming with things,” she said, her voice low and barely audible.
Darren held very still, as he’d known she hadn’t told him everything about her past, her life, herself. He’d been fine with the pieces she had given him, because he believed that was why they’d been dating—they’d been getting to know each other one little bit at a time.
