Page 22

Abby looked adorable. She’d pulled her hair back from her face and was wearing one of my mother’s aprons as she decorated Christmas cookies, a look of intense concentration on her face. She had a smudge of flour on her cheek, and another one near her right collar bone.

I walked around the island and kissed her cheek.

“How’s it going, darlin’?” I asked.

“Good.”

My mother gave us a fond look.

“She’s picking this all up way faster than I am,” Clara groused. “And it’s not even my first lesson.”

“That’s okay Clara, you have many other skills,” my mother reassured her. “We don’t need these cookies to look fancy anyway. They’ll still taste the same.”

My brother had been trying to teach Clara to bake ever since they’d gotten back together. Allen, like our mama, loved baking and was quite good at it. Poor Clara just could not pick it up. She might have been a skilled emergency medicine doctor, but she was a disaster in the kitchen.

“Are you finished for the day?” Abby asked me.

“Yeah, I am. You about done here?”

“You can both relax until we go to church tonight,” Mama interjected.

Abby dropped the knife she was using with a clatter. “Church?”

“We always go to church on Christmas Eve,” Mama explained. “I confess that we sometimes skip a week of Sunday services, but we’d never miss going on the big holidays of Christmas and Easter.”

I didn’t usually attend services, much to my mother’s annoyance, and I suspected that this was her way of sneakily getting me to church. Too bad for her I was a grown man who couldn’t be forced to attend church anymore.

“We can’t go to church with you, Mama. Abby’s on call. She has to be available in case something comes up.”

I grabbed Abby’s hand, pulling her away from the counter.

“If y’all will let me steal away my girlfriend for a while, we’ll see you tomorrow for Christmas dinner.”

Abby was quiet on the walk back to my house. Hopefully someday soon it would be our house.

“You can go to church without me,” she said as we entered the house. “If you want to go, I mean. I’ll be fine here on my own.”

“I haven’t been to church since my uncle’s funeral six years ago,” I told her. “My mama was hoping if she got you to go, she’d be able to guilt me into coming as well.”

She smirked. “Are you using me as an excuse with your mama?”

“You got that right,” I said. “Plus, I’ve got plans for you tonight, and they don’t involve leaving the house.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “Yeah, they start with us making dinner and end with me having you for dessert.”

She stepped closer, wrapping her arms around my neck. Everything inside me seemed to calm whenever we touched. Her hair was messy, and she smelled like sugar and vanilla. I’d never thought of those scents as arousing before, but I did now.

“How about if you have dessert before dinner?” she asked. “Like maybe right now?”

I leaned forward and nipped at her ear lobe. “I might could have dessert a little early.”

She batted her eyelashes at me.

“Great, how about we take this to the bedroom?”

“I’ll race you.”