“There’s coffee in the coffee pot. And breakfast will be ready shortly. Bacon, eggs, hash browns, and pancakes.”
“Good grief. That’s a lot of food.”
“You have a lot of work to do today. I mean, I assume. You are a rancher after all.”
“Sure. But I managed to get by most days with my sweet roll.”
She moved away from the stove, crossed the kitchen, and grabbed hold of his forearm, stretching up on her toes and kissing him on the cheek. “You can have one of those too.”
He smiled. Didn’t even think about it. Didn’t feel like it was being pried from his mouth with a crowbar.
“Stay with me tonight,” he said.
“With you?”
“Yeah. Pack up, come stay with me.”
“Okay,” she said, looking a little bit stunned. “Yeah. Okay.”
Zane had no idea what the hell he was doing. But he wasn’t upset about it. That was for damn sure.
Chapter Sixteen
Cara was buzzing by the time Zane dropped her off at the bakery.
She breezed in a little bit later than normal and ran a sweet roll out to his car before getting to work.
She left her packed bags in his truck because she would meet him up at his place later.
She felt giddy. She felt like dancing in the middle of the kitchen.
But she wasn’t going to do that, because she had customers, and she had work to do. So there was no time for demonstrations of… What was this? She felt like she was… No. She wasn’t going to apply deep feelings to it. It was like finally getting to live out a crush. There. That felt comfortable. She hadn’t liked the term a few weeks ago. It felt substantial. Now it felt like something buoyant. Like something the two of them had missed. Maybe that was what it was.
Neither she nor Zane had had normal experiences of life. They hadn’t been teenagers the way that other people did. It was probably also why their age difference didn’t really feelsignificant.
They had experienced unusual things. The kinds of things that had made her feel out of step with her peers, the kinds of things that made him feel out of step with his.
Nobody had an equivalent life experience to Zane, at least nobody she’d met.
And while hers wasn’t the same, she had a very different experience of childhood than a lot of people.
Yes. This was a kind of buoyant high school experience, the sort that both of them had been denied, and what could be wrong with that? It was fun.
She giggled, in spite of herself, even though Annabelle looked over at her quickly.
She couldn’t help it.
It was like there was a bubble of joy rising up in the middle of her chest, and she couldn’t stop herself from… Well, giggling like an idiot.
She hummed and went out into the dining room to help clear some tables, and that was when Jackson walked in, followed separately by her sister-in-law. She was there for her morning sweet roll and coffee, which she usually did before Jackson arrived.
She could only pray that Jackson didn’t approach her while Marlowe was there. Except, of course, he did. He made a beeline right for her.
She bent down and started to wipe the table.
“I know that you told me you’d circle back about a dinner date, but I got a couple of tickets to a cabaret performance over in Bend. I was wondering if you might want to come out for dinner and a show.”
She could feel her sister-in-law watching her. She took a deep breath and looked up at Jackson. “I can’t.”
