Then fetching a big ladle for the spaghetti.
Then prettily arranging bread in a basket.
It was just that literally everything she did was sexy.
And to think his subconscious had once gifted him with a dream involving Elizabeth Hurley and a vat of chocolate pudding. He’d revisited that one more than once when he was on active duty in the navy.
Times changed. Warmth and beauty and laughter and a kitchen full of people he liked and a woman upon whom he had what could only be described as a painful crush, even at his advanced age of nearly forty, was apparently what got his motor running.
When they all sat down at the table, the clink of forks against plates was deafening, thanks to the fact that no one said a thing. The silence was as tense as a trampoline.
Mac was quiet because he’d just copped on to the source of tension at the table, and he was moving his eyes between Gabe and Eden with speculative surprise.
Avalon was quiet because she was captivated by the novelty of her cool, collected older sister’s discomfiture, and she was witnessing it with a sort of rapt glee.
Eden was quiet, possibly because she’d been caught baldly ogling Gabe from across a field, and then they’d had what amounted to eye sex, a moment of zinging, unguarded eroticism that he hadn’t been able to help and that had been better than actual sex with some women in his past, and it felt almost as though everyone here had watched them actually rut out there.
And Gabe was quiet because, absurdly, he felt almost... was the wordshy? It couldn’t be. He wasnevershy. It’s not like he didn’t encounter attractive women all the time, and it sure as hell wasn’t as though he didn’t know how to talk to them.
It was just that there had never really been... stakes... before. And somehow this kept him from opening his mouth.
Gabe and Eden were carefully not meeting each other’s eyes now, because it was precisely what Avalon and Mac wanted them to do.
And the kid was probably quiet because she was at dinner with her elementary school principal, a generally surreal and not necessarily welcome experience for a ten-year-old. Also, her plate of spaghetti also featured a few florets of broccoli she’d promptly herded with her fork to what probably equated to Annelise Harwood’s version of a leper colony. Far, far away from all the other food.
He’d watched Eden’s jaw go tense when she’d seen Annelise do that.
And right after that Annelise coolly met her mom’s eyes. And her own jaw gave a stubborn little jut.
Aha. Vegetable wars, if he had to guess.
It was so quiet, in fact, that when Mac leaped to his feet and said briskly, “Let’s have some music!” everyone visibly gave a start. No one went so far as to clap a hand over their hearts, but Eden dropped her fork with a clatter on her plate.
Fleet Foxes filled the room with pretty, anodyne harmonies and Mac sat down again.
Enough was enough. Gabe took charge, because that’s what he normally did. When in doubt, always start with the kid.
“Is it weird seeing your principal outside of school?” Gabe asked Annelise.
“Kinda,” Annelise said shyly.
“A lot of kids seem to think principals live at school, the way Santa lives at the North Pole.”
“Ha ha ha!” Annelise laughed, somewhat uncertainly.
Given her expression, odds were pretty good she’d at one time thought that was true.
“Doyou live in a house?” Annelise asked a moment later.
“I live in the cafeteria. Carl the janitor is my roommate. We skate around in our socks when everyone goes home.”
Annelise laughed so hard at that she spluttered, and Eden had to rub her back.
All the grown-ups laughed, too.
Ice broken, somewhat.
“That is hiLAR. You do not! I want to live in the cafeteria, too!”