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“What?” Blake asked, but he suspected he already knew what.
“I’m just wondering if you do anything for yourself,” she said, her voice light and airy.
“I do things,” he said.
“I can’t find a wooden spoon.” She looked at him. “A whisk?”
“Who uses a whisk?” Blake stepped over to the drawer too and started rifling around. “I don’t know. The housekeepers—” He cut off, because he’d just played into Gina’s hand.
She giggled, and his annoyance soared at the same time his hormones fired at him. He told himself he just hadn’t dated anyone in a while, but he knew that wasn’t it. He didn’t care about dating. He didn’t go to town for a reason. He didn’t want to meet someone else.
He wanted Gina Barlow. He always had.
He stopped looking for some stupid kitchen utensil and looked at her. Her eyes danced with delight, and that only ticked up his attraction to her. “Is the hiking a date?” He didn’t mean to bark the question, but he totally did.
“What?” Gina asked.
“I just need to know,” he said without breaking eye contact.
“Do you want it to be a date?”
“Yes.” He saw no reason to be dishonest about it. In the next moment, he realized what kind of can he’d just opened. He fell back a step, trying to get his mind to quiet. “I need to turn back time.”
“I don’t think we can do that anymore,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked. “We used to.”
“Twenty years ago,” she said, turning away from him. She held a wooden spoon in her hand, and how she’d found it, he didn’t know. “We were younger, when there was all the time in the world.”
“There still is.”
Gina shook her head, and Blake hated that he’d introduced awkwardness into their friendship.
He took a big breath and tried to find a way out of this mess he’d made with just a few words. “I want to turn back time,” he said. “Thirty seconds.”
“Then do it.” She stirred the soup and cast him a sideways glance that didn’t hold that flirty quality he wanted.
“Okay,” he said. “Yes, I have housekeepers. They work for the lodge, and we as family members can pay a fee and have them come clean our cabins once a week.”
“Mm hm.”
“My mother doesn’t know what to do with herself now that she’s not as active at the lodge,” he said. “She still does the accounting, but she wants to be home with Daddy too, and when she’s home, she bakes. Who am I to tell Sharon Stewart that I don’t want her bread?”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He wanted her to stop stirring that blasted soup. The spoon made a scratching sound on the bottom of the pot that was slowly driving him toward madness.
“I just want to know where we stand. The hiking, the eating lunch together, the talking about our lives, and the past, and all of it.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide and unassuming. The fire gathered, and Blake held up his hand. “I’m not done.”
Gina frowned, but she did snap her mouth shut. She also flipped off the gas, and the flame beneath the pot extinguished. Blake sure hoped this second, budding relationship with her wasn’t about to go as cold.
“I have feelings for you,” he said quietly. “I can’t help it. You’re here, and you’re so much the same while being a completely new person too. I want to get to know you.” He took a breath and kept on going, having committed himself to the lion’s den now. At least he wasn’t barking his sentences anymore.
“I know I belong here, on this ranch and at the lodge. I guess I want to know if you think you can belong here too.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide.
