Chapter Seventeen
Two nights later Emma climbed into her comfy king bed . . . and immediately felt Jake snuggle in behind her under the covers.
While this broke at least a dozen different boundary rules, she couldn’t help but smile. “So you aren’t even going to pretend to stay on your side of the bed tonight?”
“Really, don’t we pretend enough as it is?”
Her brows shot up to her hairline. He was in it to win it tonight. “Well played.”
“Thanks.”
She felt that sexy grin of his against her shoulder and instantly her resolve dissolved like sugar in water. Seeing the man’s rugged beard when he smiled was bad enough. But feeling that masculine pelt rubbing against her skin was worse. Panties-catching-on-fire worse.
They really shouldn’t be doing this. Pretending not to have a shared past was one thing. Playing house and sleeping—just sleeping—in the same bed was a whole different, far more dangerous thing. She had to be strong. “Maybe you should take the futon sofa tonight.”
He made a rumbling noise in his throat that sounded like a cross between an incredulous scoff and an indignant grunt. “That lasted all of twenty minutes last night.” The next sound was definitely more of a grumbling rumble. “Twenty minutes we could’ve spent cuddling.”
Had it been that long?
“Okay, it was more like ten minutes,” he amended.
She grinned.
“Ten minutes before you broke down and threw yourself at me,” he clarified, lips brushing against the back of her neck with every word.
Took her a while to get all the tingling to simmer down enough for her to fully register what he’d just said.
“I did no such thing!” She elbowed him in the stomach.
He scored her earlobe with his teeth.
She fitted every inch of her back against his front and gave him a full-body cat stretch.
He groaned, long and low. “Damn, woman, you fight dirty.”
“Let that be a lesson to you.”
“Lesson learned.” The two words were whisper-weapons wielded against her skin, joined by the sliding of his calloused hand over her belly. But he didn’t stop there. His warm, rough fingers continued its journey and splayed out wide, his thumb just barely skimming below the hem of her tank top. Not enough for her to call him on it. But definitely enough to distract her beyond saving.
“Touché,” she muttered.
His lips curved up and slid over her hair in a barely there kiss. “Go to sleep. The longer you stay up, the longer I do.” He shifted his hips against hers to demonstrate his point.
Why was this a bad idea again?
In slow increments, she let her body relax and melt against him like molasses. Dammit, why did he have to be such a perfect fit? She’d never, in her whole life, slept better than she had last night in his arms. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get addicted to it. Start craving it. Needing it.
She might never be able to sleep without his arms around her again.
Maybe that was the evil genius’s plan all along.
“You do know that after the doctor clears you, we’re going to go back to how things were prior to you sleeping in my bed, right?” she asked, trying her best to keep them both hitched to the reality of the situation before she went and did something crazy.
Like break down and throw herself at him.
Because truth be told, last night if he hadn’t made the first move and slipped under the covers to pull her into his arms, she would’ve joined him on the futon and done the same.
He just broke first.
When he ignored her question and continued to draw in slow, deep breaths to try to get to sleep, she pressed on. “Jake, you know this is just during your recovery—”
“Shhh,” he interrupted.
She snapped her mouth shut. And then turned to him in disbelief. “I can’t believe you just shushed me.”
“It was either that or kiss you silent.”
Was it wrong that she was wholly disappointed he hadn’t chosen the latter?
“Are we not going to talk about it?”
“We can definitely talk about it,” he murmured, his voice no longer teasing. “Or rather, the Jake and Emma who didn’t just meet the other week can.”
Fair enough. She turned over and put her hands over his when he wrapped his arms around her.
Even though he didn’t push, she felt the tension still vibrating through his frame.
“I would’ve kissed you back if you’d kissed me,” she admitted quietly.
“I know, sweetheart.” His arms finally started relaxing around her, before flexing to pull her in closer. “That’s why I shushed you instead.”
For Jake, resting and recuperating for two whole days—the first time he’d really slowed down in working memory—had been great. Especially the part where he’d been able to hold Emma in his arms each night.
But by the next day, he had to return to reality, and his apartment, for one very basic reason. His siblings had all seemingly lost their damn minds.
After eventually learning about Emma’s call from the hospital, Daryn had apparently been searching for Jake ever since. The only problem was that Jake just plain hadn’t noticed his cell phone was dead until yesterday; it was not as if he got a lot of calls usually. When he finally did notice, he’d of course gone out to his truck to recharge the phone, and that was when he heard the eleventy million voice mails from all three of his siblings.
Yes, he was now officially including Carter in that bunch.
But that was a can of wormlike emotions he was saving for a rainy day to open.
By the time he got to the last message, he heard his baby sister threatening to order an APB out on his ass if he didn’t call one of them back. Taking a shot in the dark, he’d called his own apartment first. Sure enough, he’d found a hysterical Haley there to answer.
Next came his call to Daryn to cancel the panicked missing persons report they’d filed.
Then Jake spent most of the three-hour drive home back on the phone with Haley, who launched a full-tactical interrogation about Emma, interspersed with verbal slaps upside his head for—irony of ironies—going off the grid without a way for anyone to contact him. After that, he and Haley had a fun night eating takeout and catching up while he repaired the two gaping holes she had made in the drywall next to his front door to break into his apartment. He didn’t ask for details on why his baby sis knew to do that, or how she managed to accomplish it without any obvious tools; suffice it to say that for a girl who lived the modern hippie-gypsy lifestyle, she’d always been viciously protective of her brothers.
Good times.
The next morning, with three finally calm siblings, a just-acquired clean bill of health from his doctor, and no more than a mild lingering headache, Jake drove back down to Juniper Hills at around ten with grand plans for an excitement-free day finishing up the last of the repair work on the bakery . . . which he bid a quick farewell to the second he saw Emma zipping around in the middle of what looked like some sort of baking meltdown.
While five men and one woman he recognized from around town watched her in visibly concerned silence.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod. We’re not going to finish in time!” cried out Emma while simultaneously popping a miniature cake the size of a softball out of a baking tin with one hand and mixing up more cake batter with the other.
The guys had their hands up in the ready position as if they were waiting for the kickoff in a touch football game, while the woman was slowly inching her way out of the kitchen.
“What’s all this?” Jake walked over to Charlie, the single dad who ran the hardware store in town, since he knew him best. Before Charlie could reply, they both ducked to avoid a blob of bright-blue frosting flying right past their heads.
“The party! The girls! They’re so looking forward to this!” Emma’s frenzied answer to his question sounded strung together by a thin cord of sanity. “Anabelle already told all her little friends that they’re each getting personalized cakes designed to match the Disney princess they’re coming dressed up as!”
Judging by the double-oven door hanging on its hinge, the dozen or so ruined cakes in the sink, and all the bright-colored frosting decorating her hair and the tip of her nose, he was going to assume she’d had a rough morning.
“Honey. Breathe.” He edged over to her like he would a manic wild animal doing somersaults from tree to tree. “Just take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on. From the beginning, so I can catch up.”
The closer he got to her, the more vigorously the five men in the room shook their heads to warn him. The woman just held her hand over her eyes as if expecting a massacre.
Seriously, what the hell happened here this morning?
As if hearing his unspoken question, Emma began talking at a mile-a-minute speed. He got a few face splatters of cake batter and frosting during her animated retelling of the morning’s events surrounding her now-broken double oven, a bunch of supertechnical baking reasons why her big industrial oven and the space-age silver monstrosity she called her pie oven weren’t suited for smaller cakes, and how she was nowhere near finished baking the thirty minicakes she needed to have ready by noon for a five-year-old’s birthday party.
“Sweetheart, I don’t understand. I thought you weren’t cleared to cater yet. Did you get an early building inspection or something?”
“This isn’t a catering job. We’re all doing this for Megan’s boss.”
At her use of “all,” the men’s football-ready hands instantly flattened out to look more like they were being held hostage in a stickup.
Jake looked over at Charlie again questioningly.
“Dennis and his wife are throwing a birthday party for their daughter, Anabelle, and her friends today, but the forty minicakes they’d ordered didn’t get delivered,” explained Charlie.
“That baker should be strung up by her apron strings!” called out Emma.
Whoa.
While it was admittedly cute to hear her still be so adorably PG even when she was viciously pissed, Jake wasn’t foolish enough to smile. He just nodded in agreement instead.
“Dennis was one of our very first friends when we moved into town, Jake, not to mention the one who’d first given Megan a part-time job back when she was barely speaking in public, and also the one who started her on the road to her dream career as a librarian in the first place.”
She did a track-star-worthy hurdle over some broken oven parts to get to what looked like a giant toaster oven to slide another two minicake tins out. “Even if I didn’t owe him literally everything for what he’s done for Megan, I just hate letting my friends down,” she exclaimed as she used a giant cookie pan to fan the pint-size cake. “Did I mention Megan and I are little Anabelle’s godmothers? And that Megan’s boss and his wife had tried to get pregnant for ten years before they were finally blessed with Anabelle?”
She scurried over to the counter to whip up two bowls of frosting, one purple and one pink, before rolling flat a white Play-Doh-looking ball and quickly using a cookie cutter to make a bunch of tiny flower cutouts. “Worst of all, a little girl’s dream princess party is hanging in the balance if I don’t finish these cakes!”
Jake calmly walked over to the sink and washed his hands. Then he put on a frilly apron and grabbed a bunch of kitchen utensils that looked sort of like the long putty knives he used to spackle holes in the walls on job sites.
He started passing them out to the guys.
Emma screeched to a halt and gaped at him. “What are you doing?”
“Helping.” He spun the two putty knives in his hands like an old Western gunslinger. “You and Marie over there can focus on baking the last of the cakes, and the guys and I will take care of the frosting—looks as straightforward as mixing grout or mortar. We’ll just lay the foundation and spackle it on the cakes for you before you finish ’em up all pretty.”
Shoulders sagging in both disbelief and relief, she blinked at him. “Ohmigod, that might actually work.”
“Of course it will.”
“Uh . . .” voiced Marie from about as far away as she could be while still technically in the kitchen. “I’m not so sure you want me around the cakes. Tried-and-true recipes and even the simplest dishes seem to have mysteriously tragic outcomes around me. There’s a reason why my husband does all the cooking.”
Jake liked Marie’s husband. He was a good guy. Fantastic with Marie’s two girls from her first marriage.
“Not just that.” Marie pointed at herself and the other five guys. “We weren’t sent here because we’re the best suited for the job. We’re all the rejects from the party. All the other parents have mad skills with crafts and face painting and balloon animals and stuff.”
“Yup.” Charlie nodded. “We have no skills. The party is starting soon, so all the other parents have their big, important jobs. We were the only ones who could be spared.”
“I usually have one job at these parties, and that’s to keep an even variety of Capri Sun juice packs in the cooler throughout the day,” added Zeb, the oldest in the bunch, who had three daughters, if memory served. “As soon as the cake fiasco was announced, my wife dumped all the juice packs in a kiddie pool with ice and told me my job wasn’t a real thing before shoving me out the door with strict instructions to help but don’t touch anything.”
“Hey, my wife told me the same thing,” chimed in Dominic, a funny dude Jake hadn’t had a chance to get to talk to more than a few times. “Then she went and assigned my six-year-old nephew my usual party task . . . as if I hadn’t been voted the best gift-table present stacker ever at the last party.”
The remaining two guys praised them for having had roles instead of sitting on the sidelines like they’d done at the last couple of parties.
These guys were a freaking hoot.
Jake wasn’t much for making friends outside his construction circle, especially not with the dad group. But he could see himself hanging out with these guys.
One day.
When he had a kid and wife so he could join the club.
His eyes strayed over to Emma. The woman was made to be a mom. A great mom. The kind who would run herself ragged to single-handedly make cakes for forty girls, even if she ended up destroying her entire kitchen in the process.
Jake turned back to the motley crew before him. “Well, come on then. Let’s get in there and save the day.”
Marie shook her head soberly. “All kidding aside, our spouses are right. We really should be sticking to the more hands-off helping.”
“I disagree,” Jake informed them with a smile as he handed Marie a piping bag. “You can handle the writing of all the girls’ names on the cakes.”
Marie paled and gave him a hell-no head shake. “Emma should handle that.”
He raised a pointed brow over at the two finished two-tier cakes decorated like colorful little ball gowns. “Unless those first two party guests really are named Jamio and Biamca, I think you would definitely be helping Emma out there.”
Emma gave him a huffy scowl. “My hands shake when I’m on adrenaline overload—so sue me.”
Leaning in to whisper so only she could hear, he teased with a hidden grin. “What a coincidence—your hands shake when you’re curled up in bed with me, too. Interesting.”
He sidestepped to avoid getting clocked in the head with a batter-covered whisk.
While the now not-quite-as-stressed-looking Emma (thank you very much) was busy blushing and glaring, Jake grabbed the cookie pan she’d used to fan the cakes earlier. “Trent, I’ve seen you do those weighted rope workouts like a champ. You handle this cake fanning.” He turned to Charlie next. “You can take care of adding the food coloring to the frosting to make the colors Emma needs; it’s just like mixing latex paint colors at your shop.”
It wasn’t at all the same, but Charlie looked loads more confident after hearing that.
Jake winked at Emma. “Don’t worry, babe. We’ve got your back on this.”
For the next two hours, they all got into a synchronized-swimming-like rhythm, where Emma took care of baking the minicakes to perfection and doing the fancy decorations, while the others did their assigned tasks that helped keep them all churning ’em out.
Zeb ended up being a surprise star in the cake assembly, using his experience laying brick and tile to mortar and grout the cake layers like a pro.
And at the end of the assembly line was Jake, who used his make-Martha-Stewart-proud, two-putty-knife technique to spackle the frosting on nearly as prettily as Emma did.
And in between cakes, he took care of his other job, which was calming Emma down with inappropriate jokes, all in the name of getting her to blush harder than she was freaking out.
At a quarter after noon, they were officially done.
He and Emma collapsed onto the nearest bench in exhaustion, shortly after Marie and the guys transported the finished cakes back to the party.
After a few minutes of satisfying silence, she lifted her head sluggishly off his shoulder and murmured gratefully, “You were amazing today, Jake. There’s no way we would have finished without you taking control of the situation. Seriously, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Group effort all the way.” He turned to press a kiss to her forehead. “We make a pretty good team.”
That was as effective as a butt pinch in getting her back up on her feet. Seconds later she was briskly tidying up the kitchen like it owed her money. Sighing, he got up and joined in the cleaning extravaganza.
“So I heard the guys invite you to the birthday party.” She said it so casually, he almost missed the nervous wobble in her voice toward the end. “Were you thinking of heading down?”
She quickly ducked low to put something away. “Because,” she continued, her now noticeably shy voice floating up from the kitchen island, “if you were, maybe we could go together?”
“Took the words right out of my mouth, sweetheart.”
She popped her head up like a prairie dog. “Yeah?”
He gazed at her and fought the urge to drag her into his arms so he could taste if that bit of frosting at the corner of her lips was as sweet as she was. “Yep. It’ll be my first kid’s party, though, so I’ll of course need you to show me all the proper etiquette and stuff.”
Emma smiled, no longer quite so nervous-looking, as she untied her apron and rinsed off her hands. “I’m sure the other dads will show you the ropes.”
She immediately pursed her mouth shut, but she didn’t call back the words. Probably hoping he hadn’t heard her fully.
Oh, he’d heard it all right.
Other dads.
Damn, the meaning embedded there had a nice ring to it. Especially coming from Emma’s lips. And directed at him.
While he wanted nothing more than to ask her why she looked so panicked—or, better yet, why her eyes had softened before the panic had hit—since she seemed ready to bolt, he pivoted and headed to the bathroom to wash up instead. “I’ll be right back. Just going to clean up and make myself a bit more presentable.”
Sometime between her saying what she’d said and his replaying it a few more times in his head on the way to the bathroom, he knew.
He’d gone and fallen head over heels for his girl next door all over again.
And the chances of his getting his heart ripped out of his chest again were even higher this time around.