One Winter's Sunset: The Christmas Baby Surprise / Marry Me under the Mistletoe / Snowflakes and Silver Linings

Cole skimmed the directions. “I’m good with the chicken and vegetables part, but I have to admit, the words roux and piecrust have me terrified. What the hell is a roux?”

She laughed. “I have no idea.”

Cole read over the directions again. “Sure you don’t want to just call for pizza?”

“Cole Watson, you’re not giving up already, are you?”

“Me? Never.”

“Me, either.” She turned the book back toward herself. “Besides, I need to learn how to do this.”

“Why? Why now?”

“Because it’s about darn time I learned how to cook,” she said, instead of the truth—that she had this dream of baking cookies with her child. Of being in the kitchen with Sweet Pea on a stool, helping to measure and stir. Building a family life of just two. She’d wanted that for so long—

Then why did the thought suddenly sadden her?

Outside, she could hear the sound of Joe chopping wood. She gestured toward the door. “If you want to help Joe, I can handle this.”

Cole arched a brow.

“I can figure it out. And if I don’t, I’ll blame you and call for pizza.” She grinned, half hoping he’d leave, half hoping he’d stay.

“I’d rather stay and help you. I should learn to cook, too, since I’m living on my own now.”

She didn’t remind him that he could afford a team of chefs to make him food around the clock.

“After all,” Cole said, leaning in toward her again, “didn’t you say you always wanted me to help you instead of hiring someone to do the work? Let me help you, Emily.”

She considered him for a moment. What would it hurt? Maybe together they could puzzle through this whole roux and piecrust thing. He had a point. She couldn’t say no when he was offering the very thing she’d asked him for.

“Okay, then, you have onion duty.” She plopped the offending vegetable onto Cole’s cutting board.

“You just want to see me cry.”

“No, but it is definitely a bonus.” She took the celery, trimmed off the ends and began to cut it into little green crescent shapes. Across from her, Cole had peeled the onion and sliced it down the middle. He made slow, neat, precise slices in the vegetable, so exact it was as if he’d measured them.

Cole stopped cutting and looked up at her. “What?”

“You’re treating that onion like it’s a prototype or a stock report. It won’t break if you chop it fast, Cole. We only have so long to get dinner on the table.”

“I like things neat,” he said.

“Neat? That’s an understatement. You should have been an accountant, Cole, with all those straight lines. Though, there were a couple times you didn’t mind a mess. One in particular I remember.” The last few words came out as a whisper. “Remember the closet in our first apartment?”

“That wasn’t a closet—it was an overgrown shoe box. It was impossible to keep neat.” He stopped slicing and looked up at her, and a knowing smile curved across his face. The kind of smile that came with a shared history, a decade of memories. It was a nice, comfortable place to be.

“The ties,” Cole said. “You’re talking about the ties.”

Oh, how she would miss this when her marriage was dissolved. All the memories they held together would be divided, like the furniture and the dishes and the books on the shelves. She’d be starting over with someone else. A blank slate, with no inside jokes about food fights and messy closets.

Emily craved those memories right now, craved the closeness they inspired. Just a little more, she told herself, and then she’d be ready to let go. “Remember that day you couldn’t find the red one with the white stripes?”

He nodded. “The one you gave me for our first Christmas. I said it was my lucky tie and I wanted to wear it on my first sales call.”

Their gazes met, the connection knitting tighter. She smiled. “You were so mad, because you like everything all ordered, and this was out of order. So I tore the closet apart looking for it, and because I was frustrated and in a hurry, I just threw all the ties in a pile on the floor. You came in and found me—”

“And at first I was upset at the mess, but then you held up the tie—”

“And I told you that if you made a mess once in a while, maybe you wouldn’t be so uptight.”

They laughed, the merry sound ringing in the bright and cheery kitchen. “But you forget the best part,” Cole said, moving a little closer, his voice darkening with desire. “How we ended up making love on that floor, on top of the ties, and having a hell of a good time.”

“In the middle of a mess.”

It had been a wild, uninhibited moment. They’d had so few of those. Too few.

Cole caught a strand of her hair in his fingers and let the slippery tress slide away. “Why didn’t I do that more often, Emily?”

She ached to lean into his touch, to turn her lips to his palm, to kiss the hand she knew so well. “I don’t know, Cole, I really don’t.”

He held her gaze for a moment, then a mischievous light appeared in his eyes and his hand dropped away. He shifted his attention to the onion again, and this time did a frantic chopping, sending pieces here and there, mincing it into a variety of tiny cubes. “There. Done. And messy as hell.”

She laughed. “I think the pie will be all the better for it.”

“Oh, yeah? Wait till we make the crust. You might not feel that way with flour in your hair.”

“You wouldn’t.”

He eyed the five-pound bag of all-purpose flour on the counter. “Oh, I would. And I will. I never did get you back for throwing my ties on the floor.” Cole came around to the other side of the bar, scooping up a bit of flour in his hand. “Are you sorry about that?” he asked.

There was a charge in the air, fueled by the innuendos and heat between them. It was delicious and sweet and she hoped the feeling stayed. “Not one bit.”

Cole held his hand over her head. “You want to rethink your position, Mrs. Watson?”

She hadn’t been called that in months, and the name jarred her for a second. She remembered when Cole had first proposed and she had written Mrs. Cole Watson a hundred times, until the proposal felt real and she could believe she was really going to marry the man of her dreams. Soon, she wouldn’t be Mrs. Watson anymore. Or a missus at all.

“I’m sorry, Cole,” she said softly.

He dropped his hand and met her gaze. “They were just ties, Emily. I didn’t really care.”

“I know,” she said. She was trying to hold on to the moment, but knew it was a butterfly, fleeting, impossible to catch. Eventually, Cole would go back to work, and she’d be on her own again. A single mom. Better to end it now than to prolong the inevitable. Emily returned to the vegetables. “Let’s, uh, get this pie made before Carol comes home.”

If he sensed the change in her, he didn’t say anything. He helped her finish chopping the vegetables and cooked chicken, then lifted the heavy food processor onto the counter and helped her assemble the ingredients for the piecrust. “Okay. Here goes nothing,” Cole said, pushing the pulse button. Several pulses later, the flour and butter and ice water had coalesced into a crust. “Voilà!” Cole said, lifting off the plastic lid. “Piecrust.”

“I am impressed,” she said. “What are you doing for your next trick, Superman?”

He grinned. “That you will have to wait to see, Mrs. Watson.”