Not a Chance(5)

"Don't you have to have eggs or something?" Arden asked.

"I don't know. If I eat breakfast I eat at the diner. Or Sweet Nothings whenever Dustin drags me there."

"So you can't cook?" Arden sat back on her heels and rubbed her upper arms.

Travis glanced up at her. "Nope. I was kind of hoping you could."

"Me?" Arden asked. "The princess? I have people who do that sort of thing for me."

Travis gave her a wry smile. "We'll figure it out together," he said.

They found a cast iron griddle and put it on the coals in the fireplace. Then they mixed their ingredients in a bowl they'd found until they wound up with a thick mess of something resembling batter. It stuck to the griddle and they burned the first batch, but they started figuring it out after that and by the third try wound up with some fairly edible corn cakes.

They ate with their fingers on the living room floor in front of the warm fireplace. Travis was thoroughly happy for the moment. Of course, he was a live-in-the-moment kind of guy. And this moment felt warm and communal and peaceful.

"What kind of pie is your favorite?" Arden asked him without looking up.

Travis frowned in thought. "Apple, I guess. But only if Rita Hendricks makes it. She may look like a hardened career woman, but she’s got a serious Martha Stewart streak in her."

“Apple pie,” Arden shrugged. “That’s very all-american of you.”

“‘Course Mrs. Tomlin...do you know her?”

Arden nodded.

“She makes a mean peach cobbler. So that might be my favorite.”

Arden was suppressing a grin, now. “You sure?”

He thought for a moment. “You know, little Amy Simmons made a blueberry pie for her 4-H cooking project last year. It had this layer of cream cheese stuff on the bottom. That was pretty damn good.”

“Little Amy gave you a pie?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged.

“She’s eleven.” She was grinning and maybe trying not to laugh.

“Well she can bake as good as the grandmas around here.”

Arden shook her head. She took a monstrous, very unladylike bite of her corn cake.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. It’s just cute, that’s all.”

He grinned, then. “So what’s your favorite pie.”

"I like coconut cream," she said, with her mouth full. "But I don't know how to make it."

"You don't know how to make pie?"

She shrugged. "I don't know how to make anything. Do you?"

Travis shook his head. "I manage to find food to eat. But I'm not sure how."

"We should take a class. They have classes in the city."

"Or you could just watch YouTube videos for free."

Arden nodded. "That's a great idea. I'm going to find one on how to make pie."

"I wonder if there's any instruction on survival cooking." Travis licked the cake crumbs from his fingers and then leaned back on his hands. Arden did the same.

"I think we've got that down pat." They leaned forward and high-fived each other.

Boredom and full bellies led them back to their pallets where they dozed off.





CHAPTER FOUR



Arden woke up later that morning. She was facing Travis's pallet, but he wasn't there. She glanced up at the couch. He had pulled off the plastic cover and was lounging with his feet up and reading a romance novel.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

He turned the book and showed her the cover. A full-bosomed woman was clinging to a bare-chested man. Travis waggled his eyebrows at her. "Pretty hot stuff. June has boxes of them down in the basement." He nodded toward the door that led into the kitchen. There were two boxes sitting next to it.

"You're reading romance novels? Is this something you do often?" She took note of the fact that he was already nearly halfway through it.

"Not often. Just whenever I'm snowed in at a place where there aren't any car magazines or thriller novels...and with a chick who won't sleep with me."

Arden rolled her eyes. It had taken her a while to realize that he was hitting on her strictly because of gender and geography--she was the closest female. Once she'd figured that out, she'd managed to relax. It would be easy for her to resist a man who had no feelings for her other than a general lust for the female half of the population. Arden had never been interested in casual sex. Of course, if she had, Travis was exactly the kind of man she would have picked. And there was nothing wrong with admiring the physical beauty of another person so long as you didn't indulge in inappropriate fantasies.

"You know," Travis said, his eyes still moving back and forth over the page. "I think I'm actually going to check out some more modern romance novels. They're written by women, after all. I could probably pick up some good tips."