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“Punch it,” he instructed.
“I’m not a violent person.”
“Trust me, the dough is asking for it. Go on. Make a fist andpound itlike you’re on a real third date.” He said it with a wink.
I bent my head to the dough so he couldn’t see my cheeks redden. I rolled the dough into a ball, then sank my fist into it with a satisfyingsmack.
“Atta girl,” he said in a husky voice.
“Stop making it sound so dirty!” I laughed while using the dough as a punching bag. “Thisisfun. Forget dinner. I want to do this all night.”
“Easy there, Rocky,” he said. “I think you finished it off. Give it here.”
I tossed it through the doorway, and Donovan caught it like a football receiver. He fed the dough into a pasta strainer, which spit out flat fettuccine noodles onto the kitchen counter. I madeoohandahhnoises while watching. When all the dough was converted into noodles, he dumped them into a pot of boiling water. Then he began heating the sauce in a pan.
Even if it wasn’t the kind of dirty that I expected, it was still a lot of fun. Helping make the dinners I was eating made me feel slightly more useful, too.
“You said you own a shop? In Indiana?” Donovan asked.
“Yeah,” I said while cleaning the flour off my desk. “A clothing store.”
“What’s it called?Feisty Fabrics?”
I laughed and said, “Nellie’s Boutique.”
“Who’s Nellie?”
“My mom. She was the one that opened the store.”
He nodded along while stirring the pasta with a wooden spoon. “And you help her run it?”
How much should I tell him?
“I pretty much run it all by myself,” I said carefully. “Along with the manager I hired, Andrea.”
“Did your mom retire or something?”
I hesitated. Opening up wasn’t easy for me, even in the best of circumstances. My every instinct was to brush off the question and change the subject.
But I felt like I could trust Donovan. Iwantedto open up to him.
“My mom… died last year. She and my dad both.”
He stopped stirring the pasta and turned to face me. Alarm and concern were painted on his face. “What happened?”
“There was a big ice storm last October,” I explained numbly. Like I was talking about something mundane, like the thickness of the pasta dough. “Roads were slicker than a hockey rink. Traffic on the interstate came to a stand-still, but a semi-truck didn’t realize it until too late. My parents were in the car in front of him, and…” I paused as my throat tightened. “They never saw it coming.”
“Oh, Molly,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s the reason for this trip,” I said. “My girlfriends wanted to take me away for a week. Help me forget everything. The funny thing about it all? The pandemichashelped take my mind off of it. It’s the first thing that has distracted me since they died. How’s that for irony?”
And you,I thought to myself.You’ve helped distract me, Donovan.
He gazed at me like he wanted to do something. I’d seen that look a hundred times, whenever I told someone about my parents’ accident. Sadness and pity and regret all mixed together in his storm-cloud eyes. It reflected back onto me and mademewant to cry all over again.
Then he walked to the divider, reached across my makeshift pasta desk, and pulled me into a hug.
It was the first time we had made any sort of contact. It was the kind of hug given with his entire body, like he wished he could hug my soul, too. After the shock of touching another person wore off, I relaxed and savored the way he felt. Chiseled arms and a hard, wide chest. Flour-coated fingers laced into my hair, holding my head against his shoulder.
