“Tell me straight, Lila Mae,” he said. “Do we need to go to Atlanta for Christmas? It’s a good time to get away. Lots of people take vacation, and we’ve both got people in place now to help out.”
“I do want you to meet my parents, eventually,” she said.
“I don’t want to meet them the day we’re getting married,” Trap said. “Though I suppose there’s time, if you’re thinking you don’t want to get married for ten months.”
When he said it like that, it felt very far away. At the same time, she hadn’t even told Trap that she loved him yet, nor had he said those words to her.
She honestly wasn’t sure if she’d fallen all the way in love with him yet, though when she first went to bed in the softest moments of the day—when his cologne still lingered in her noseand the scent of his skin still sat on hers—Lila Mae knew she loved him.
She smiled at the thought, and simply sat with her feelings, letting them course through her and out into the night sky around them.
“What kind of cake would we have?” Trap asked.
“White, of course,” Lila said.
“No chocolate?” He sounded like a disappointed little boy, and Lila Mae lifted her head and looked at him.
“I’ll get you your own chocolate cake. Okay, honey?”
He grinned, but the smile slipped off his face as he sobered only a moment later. “I don’t care what kind of cake we have,” he said. “Or where we get married, or what your dress looks like. Because I see me and you there, Lila Mae, and we’re making promises to each other that will stick and stay, and that’s all that matters.”
“So maybe here would work,” Lila Mae whispered. “I feel like I’ve made a lot of promises here, to myself, to the cats, to the people who work with me.”
“Hmm, I like that,” Trap said.
“And if we get married here, this is where our promises will stay,” she said.
He ducked his head and kissed her, and Lila Mae felt like they were sealing their promise to one another right then and there. So while he hadn’t told her that he loved her, and she hadn’t uttered those words to him, and she didn’t wear a diamond ring, she knew she’d be marrying Trap Walker right here at Feline Friends one day in the very near future.
Because this parcel of land in the Texas Panhandle was where promises stayed, and Trap had always been exceptionally good at keeping his word and making her feel like a princess.
39
“Let’s just go.”
Trap looked over his shoulder as a terrible clattering sound filled his house, originating from the kitchen where Lila Mae had been working for the past hour on her sweet potato casserole.
“It didn’t work.” She sighed and leaned into the countertop.
He got to his feet and rounded the couch to where his frustrated girlfriend stood with an oven mitt planted on her hip in pure frustration. He looked at the goopy marshmallow mess still somewhat…foaming over the dark orange yams.
“Why are some of them burnt and some of them aren’t melted?”
Lila Mae looked at him with pure disgust in her expression, and Trap backed up, realizing he’d made a huge mistake.
“I mean?—”
“I—can—see—it.” She swatted his chest with the oven mitt with every word. “If I knew why it was like that, I would’ve done something different.” She pulled her hand back for another swipe, and Trap grabbed her wrist.
He grinned at her, then pulled her toward him. She stumbled over her own feet and grunted, but Trap held her upright againsthis body. “It doesn’t matter, sweetheart.” He couldn’t stop smiling for some reason. “My momma’s not going to care about the sweet potatoes one way or another.”
Lila Mae sighed, and he extracted the weaponous oven mitt from her hand and tossed it onto the counter beside the sweet potatoes.
“I’m sure they taste fine, and what we bring to Thanksgiving dinner isn’t going to change how my momma feels about you.”
“I just want her to like me,” Lila Mae said with a sigh.
“Honey, it’s impossiblenotto like you,” he said. “Besides, she already loves you, just like I do.”
