She holds out the bowl to me, which I take and dump into the stand mixer.
“This is gonna be a glaze. We use it in two steps. One, whenthe cake comes out and we flip it on the plate. We’ll add just a drizzle. Then we’ll use it again after the sponge has cooled.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, turning the mixer on low.
“Now add this icing sugar, slowly,” she says, and the way the soft light of the early Kentucky evening hits her face right now is fucking unreal. “Half a cup at a time. Don’t go getting all impatient and dump it in there. It won’t cream right. It will be too wet.”
Christ. How is baking with her doing it for me?
I let my eyes trail over her, lost for a moment in the way she shifts her hips as she checks how level her sugar is in the measuring cup.
Olivia lets out a laugh and pokes me in the chest when she catches me staring. “Stay focused. Remember, moment of weakness? Best co-parents? Keeping things uncomplicated here, Reed?”
I look down at her as I tweak her chin. “Right.”
Wrong.I want to complicate the fuck out of things. Averting my eyes from hers, I get back to the task at hand.
“Tell me. What part of Ireland is your family from?” Liv asks tentatively as we watch the mixer do its thing. The leaky faucet to tell her the whole truth about my family and my father drips constantly in the back of my head.
I’m silent as she continues with a devilish grin. “It will help me feelrelaxedto know more about your family history.”
“Such a brat,” I mutter as she giggles, pouring a little vanilla into a teaspoon and adding it to the mixer bowl.
“Plus, since I didn’t know my birth parents,” Olivia offers, “it might help me to know more about yours.”
I hate talking about my past, but I know she deserves to know as much as I can offer. The memory of my mother’s screams creep in but I push them away, forcing myself to give a little to Olivia. At the very least, sharing this with her will keep my mind off wanting to fuck her right here in my kitchen.
“I’ll tell you what.” I study her pretty face. “I’ll tell you about my family if you tell me about yours.”
“Deal,” she answers almost immediately, her smile widening. As if I could deny her anyway.
“Belfast,” I say slowly. “My family is from Belfast.”
“You still have a bit of an accent.”
“We came here when I was six. I don’t really remember life in Ireland.” I can feel my body tensing as I speak, and I try so fucking hard not to let my history control me.
“How old were you when your mother passed away?” Olivia asks as if she’s interviewing me for a documentary.
I shake my head. “Uh-uh. My turn. Tell me about your birth parents.”
“I don’t remember a lot, though I do remember snippets from my fourth birthday. They come to me in dreams. I swear sometimes I remember the way my mother smelled. The smell was like sugar cookies or vanilla, and when I smell it, mostly when I’m baking anything sweet, it’s comforting.”
Olivia blows out a raspberry as she continues talking.
“I have quirks that remind me of my adoptive parents, probably just from being raised by them.” She uses a spatula to push down the icing as it mixes. “But I have no idea who I’m like at my core. In a sense my entire personality, who I am, is a mystery.”
She takes a lick, and some of the mixture sticks to her lip.
I move closer. She doesn’t back up, but her breath increases as I swipe the sugar off her lip with my thumb then suck it into my mouth. I love the way she has to force her gaze from my mouth back to my eyes and, when she does, her pupils are blown wide as the pink I crave climbs her cheeks. The air between us is so charged you could power a damn city block.
“I was seventeen when my mother died,” I answer her earlier question, pointing to the bowl. “You gotta add something else to this?”
She looks down in question at the icing. It’s perfectly whipped.
“Shit, yes. Just a little milk.”
She grabs the carefully measured-out amount and pours it in.
