“Hungry?” she asked.
“I was.”
Her eyes sparkled with humor. “Growing up in the Mulcahy house, if you didn’t like what was on the table, you could either go hungry or find the peanut butter.”
“That’s kinder than my house. We ate what mom cooked. Period.”
“I think Pop was brought up that way too, but after mom died and he was doing the cooking, he gave us an option.”
Jack looked as if he was listening, really interested. The men she’d dated had been good-looking like Jack, but so far no one measured up in other areas, criteria she hadn’t even realized she’d instinctively been using as a scale to rate her dates. Odd that she only just reasoned out that her biggest yardstick was her father, the first man in her life.
“Would you like more wine?”
“Um…no thank you. I still need to drive home. I had no idea that it was already after nine.”
The teasing light in his eyes belied the seriousness of his tone when he asked, “Do you have a curfew?”
“See if I let you have dessert,” she teased, clearing his place first and then her own.
“Just leave the dishes,” he said when she started to rinse them off. “You cook. I clean.”
“I could get used to that.”
“Now,” he said, moving to stand beside her, “what’s this about dessert?”
She opened the fridge and pointed to a bowl of raspberries and a cellophane-covered pie dish.
His attention wavered from the delectable woman in his sights to the pie in his fridge. “What kind of pie?”
She giggled and reached for the dish. “It’s Peggy’s buttermilk pie.”
“How did you wrangle one out of her? People usually wait in line for one of those pies. I remember more than one fistfight in the parking lot over the years whenever an order got misplaced.”
Cait smiled at him and his heart stuttered before picking up the beat again. “She’s my best friend.”
“And?” Jack figured there’d be more to the story.
“I’ll fix the hole in their barn roof come Saturday…for free.”
“I don’t know that I’m worth the price of your labor.” Her scent clouded his brain. Lilacs. Cait smelled of lilacs.
“Anyone who’d risk breaking his neck at dusk chasing a stray puppy through the woods to make sure that he’s not injured…and then opening his home to that puppy…deserves the whole pie.”
While he’d been studying her delicate bone structure and the curve of her cheek, she’d grabbed another bowl from his fridge. “Whipped cream?” he asked.
“The real kind,” she told him, “not the kind from a can.”
“I will owe you for this but plan to take advantage of the offer and have one piece now, one piece before bed, then breakfast…”
His gaze swept up from the bowl of whipped cream in her hands to her startled, green eyes as the gut-wrenching thought of what he’d like to do with that cream short-circuited his brain.
She cleared her throat and asked, “Still hungry?”
“Mmm.” For more than food. Did he dare tell her that? While the silent debate was raging inside of him, she sliced, scooped, and dropped pie, cream, and berries.
“There you are.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Dig in.”
Jamie chose that moment to bump into Jack and plaster himself to Jack’s leg. He groaned watching that first forkful of flaky confection fall off his fork and get snapped up between little black lips. “Why, you little devil!”
“No more for you, Jameson,” Caitlin’s voice was stern. “Too much sugar will give you worms.”
“Actually—” Jack began only to stop when Cait glared at him.
“Meg said that’s what mom always used to say.”
“But if Grace is allergic to dogs, why would your mom say that?”
Cait rolled her eyes. “Because my parents grew up with dogs.”
And that, thought Jack, is that. He’d seen that look before on Caitlin’s face and knew when to drop the subject. “Think I’ll make some coffee.” But while he was making coffee, the image of Caitlin wrapped in his arms kept interrupting his thought process, making it hard to think straight.
“Need any help?”
He shook his head and filled two mugs with coffee, handing one to Cait and setting the other on the table. “Dessert looks great…dinner was amazing.”
“Simple,” she corrected him. “Sometimes, simple is best when you’ve had a long day and it’s late. Besides, I can’t eat a big meal after eight o’clock.”