“Work downstairs, life upstairs. That seems ideal for you.”
“Yep.”
Josie rolled to her back with a giggle. “So other than wow them with your conversational skills, what do you usually do with your women the morning after?”
He was finally free to give in to the temptation of her hair, and he twirled one red lock around his fingers. Not hot to the touch after all, but so soft he never wanted to let go. “The parade of women? I usually make them cinnamon rolls and then kick them out.”
He could see on her face just how badly she wanted to know more; the strain of playing it cool showed in the studied casualness of the hand she used to push her tousled hair back from her face, pulling it out of his grasp.
“Parade?” Her tone was breezy, but the insecurity underneath came through loud and clear.
So he set her straight. “Hookups mostly. Not many, and none recently.” He hesitated, then added, “None of them ever got this many words out of me.”
A smile bloomed across her face. “And the cinnamon rolls?”
“Coming right up.” He placed a kiss on the underside of her jaw and moved to slide out of bed, but she stopped him with a hand on his wrist.
“No. Stay.” Pink stained her cheeks, turning her into a riot of color against his white sheets. “I already know you can bake. You don’t have to impress me.”
He’d been planning to do it as a nice gesture and nothing more, but far be it from him to leave his bed when Josie Ryan was naked and asking for his company. So he stayed. And he kissed. And he touched. And he forgot his own name a few moments later when she returned the favor.
In the end, he did make her cinnamon rolls. And not the no-yeast kind he could simply mix together and slide into the oven. No, he made the kind that had to rise twice. The kind you made when you wanted to extend your lazy Sunday as much as possible because a bright, beautiful woman was chattering away next to you as you whisked icing ingredients.
“Best morning after ever,” Josie declared around a mouthful of warm cinnamon roll two hours later.
He leaned against the kitchen counter opposite her and looked his fill over the rim of his coffee mug. It was cliché as hell, but he wanted a mental snapshot of her exactly like this: in his kitchen, wearing his too-big T-shirt, chasing a stray bit of icing with her tongue.
“So I’ve been thinking,” she said once she’s licked her lower lip clean. At his silence, she rolled her eyes and stretched to nudge his foot with hers. “Since you asked, it occurs to me that I owe you a couch.”
He raised his mug in a salute. “Worth it.”
She leaned forward to clink hers against his, and he basked in the glow of their shared joke. “So worth it.”
“I hated that couch.”
She nodded sagely. “Honestly, its destruction was a blessing. Where was itfrom?”
“It belonged to Pops. I brought it with me from the farm.”
For a moment he was lost to the past, remembering the couch’s place of pride in Pops’s front living room, the one they’d reserved for company. The one he’d perched on uncomfortably as his mother begged Pops to just take her son for a few months so she could see about getting that job on a cruise ship. Thank God he’d agreed and that he’d insisted Erik remain with him when Suzanne turned up a few weeks later to take Erik with her to Austin, the location of her next big dream.
When he looked up, he found Josie watching him worriedly, and he offered her a reassuring smile. “No. It’s good. Change is good.” And to his surprise, the words were true. The changes he’d embraced recently made him happy. Happier than he’d ever been maybe.
“In that case, I have a suggestion.” She grinned and drained her mug. “You’re gonna hate it.”
* * *
Erik stepped backto survey his handiwork. Well, if he was being honest, to survey the woman who was surveying his handiwork. Said handiwork involved selecting, transporting, and successfully assembling the most basic black couch they could find at IKEA.
“I feel like we’ve passed an important test in our r-relationship.” She gestured broadly at their work, but her cheerful theatrics didn’t keep Erik from noticing her tiny hesitation over the last word. In response, he dropped to the couch and tugged her down onto his lap, kissing her until the worried crinkle between her eyes fell away. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but if they could survive both IKEA on a weekendandthe mostly useless sheet of assembly instructions, he was pretty sure they could survive anything.
“Seems sturdy,” he said when they came up for air.
She laughed and gave a little bounce that traveled straight from his groin to somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. “Yeah, but we’d better do a few tests to be sure.”
He wanted nothing more, although for the moment he was content to just hold her close and enjoy the way strands of her hair got hung up on his scruff when she ducked her head to kiss his neck. He’d spent a Sunday furniture shopping with Josie Ryan. None of that sentence computed for him. Not the furniture-shopping part—his new suit notwithstanding, he wasn’t a go-out-and-buy-new-things kind of guy—and not the part where he succumbed to laughter in the middle of the IKEA kitchen accessories department when the flirtiest, fanciest woman he’d ever spent time with had tried to provoke him into a spatula duel. Now, in the middle of this new life she’d helped him create, a sense of wonder propelled him to squeeze her tighter and nudge her chin upward for a kiss. He didn’t understand how someone so drawn to designer labels and white-collar success could be content snuggling with him in his worn-in jeans on a cheap assembly couch, but he planned to enjoy it while he could.
As if she’d read his thoughts, she shifted her head up to kiss him, but as their tongues met, his phone buzzed in his pocket.
