I turn in bed with a stretch. The morning air is cool on my skin, and the faint sounds of farm equipment float in through the cracked window. I open my eyes and squint against the early morning sunlight filling the bedroom.

The events of yesterday come back to me as I blink awake. The mortifying experience of being caught making out half naked in Kase’s truck shoots to the forefront of my thoughts. I groan and turn my face into the pillow.

I wish I could bring myself to regret it. I really should. I’m twenty years old and really should know better than to be so reckless. But Kase’s hands on me—sweet merciful God, his mouth on me—was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I’m not sure I would take the moment back if half of Falls Edge happened upon us.

Luckily, they hadn’t, and as we sped off for home, I could barely get my shirt back on before succumbing to an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop, a circumstance that proved contagious when Kase lost his composure too.

Once we caught our breath back at the farmhouse, I’d half expected Kase to have his wicked way with me. He certainly could have. Even though I was sated, my body still hummed from the incredible orgasm he’d pulled from me. Still, in the hours after, he exercised restraint he didn’t have before. We spent the evening in front of the television, curled up together, talking sometimes, kissing other times. Always touching but never going further.

When I was too sleepy to keep my eyes open, he helped me get settled in the guest room for the night. I didn’t ask why he wasn’t inviting me into his bed, but a little part of me appreciated the space. As much as I wanted to stay close to him, I wasn’t quite sure what it would be like to sleep next to someone in a strange bed and strange house.

More awake now, I sit up and look around the room. This isn’t home. But it’s a home. A house. A little thrill runs through me with that thought.

Wallpaper with yellow roses covers the bedroom walls. The antique furniture is minimal—a small bureau and an end table by my bed. The quilt covering my legs is a patchwork of floral pastels, softened by age. How long has it lived in this house? I get the feeling much of what fills the McCasker farmhouse has been here through several generations of his family.

Eager to explore more and find Kase, I shower and dress quickly. With bare feet, I descend the stairs and take a short tour through the empty first floor. Kase must be working. The note he leaves in the kitchen confirms it.

June, future queen of the McCasker farm…

Hope you slept well. I’ll be in the pasture all day. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back before sundown.

Kase

P.S. Didn’t sleep a wink last night thinking of you.

I smile. Butterflies flit around my belly. Warmth floods me the same way it does when Kase is near. Immediately I regret that I have to spend the day without him. Still, Kase neglecting the garden isn’t quite the same as neglecting the farm. The livestock needs attention regardless of the property’s fate.

I poke around the kitchen, finding its amenities sparse. The fridge is nearly bare. The cupboards are stocked with canned food and an economy-sized pack of instant macaroni and cheese—Kase’s specialty and our dinner last night. I’m used to relying mostly on the hotel’s kitchen for sustenance. I’m not sure I can survive on what’s here.

Opening the last cupboard, I find a stack of old cookbooks. Their covers are yellowed, but I flip through the first one titled Miss Dixie’s Home Cooking. I take a mental note of a few promising dishes and step away to pour myself a cup of coffee from the brewed pot on the counter.

I scoop up the rest of the cookbooks, move to the dining room, and take a seat at the head of the large farmhouse table that fills almost the entire room. I set aside Miss Dixie’s culinary wisdom. The next one has a simple cover with a sketch of a cornucopia. I open the first page, and in thick pencil strokes it reads Haidee’s Recipes.

Inside are pages filled with dozens of handwritten recipes. The more I read, the hungrier I get. I’m strangely motivated too. I’m certain my cooking prowess is no better than Kase’s, but seeing the handwritten recipes inspires something in me. Maybe being here makes me want to play house, because I’ve never actually had one to myself that I didn’t have to share with hundreds of guests and hotel staff. Plus, when’s the last time Kase enjoyed a home-cooked meal?

With nothing else on the agenda except to wait for Kase to finish work, I grab my keys and head to the store to stock the kitchen for the week. I’m not sure either of us can stomach any more meals out at Mackie’s.

I spend the afternoon shopping and then claiming the first floor as my domain. I discover silver flatware and placemats from the sideboard in the dining room. To complete the setting for dinner, I pluck a few lilies from the front path and place them in a white ceramic glass vase for the dining room table. The smallest touches make the house seem a little brighter and less like the sparse bachelor pad that Edwin and Kase have been content with.

Moving on to the kitchen, I organize the food I picked up shopping and map out a plan for dinner. Country fried chicken, creamed corn, and homemade biscuits are on the menu. Ambitious? Maybe. Never mind that I’ve barely cooked a scrambled egg for myself without the help of one of the hotel’s chefs. The new space and seemingly endless stretch of time is too inviting to pass up though.

As the sun sinks toward the horizon, I buzz around the kitchen, moving from bowls of flour and egg batter to the cast iron frying pan I could barely lift onto the burner. I drop in some breaded chicken breasts and jerk back when the hot oil crackles and pops toward me.

When boots drop on the back porch, I hurry to investigate. I smile as Kase comes into view. I push open the screen door and lean against the jamb. “Welcome home.”

His face is flushed, and his clothes are covered in a thousand little green specks of grass like he’s been mowing all day.

“You look like you’ve been up to something.” He looks me up and down with that subtle hunger in his eyes that does something to my insides every damn time.

I glance down at my clothes. My cutoffs and T-shirt are covered in flour and various stains from my cooking adventures. I reach for my hair, tucking one of many loosened strands back into my messy bun. God, I must look like a hot mess. Probably not the sexy house guest he was looking forward to seeing.

Before I can make excuses, he frowns and sniffs the air. “Is something burning?”

My eyes go wide. “Oh no!” I turn on my heel and run to the kitchen.

Smoke is billowing off the frying pan. Panicked, I swish my hands in the air above it. Suddenly Kase is beside me, his hand on the burner knob.

“You’ve got the heat a little high, babe.” He lowers the flame singeing the chicken in the pan. “There. That’s better.”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine now. Here.” He plucks the tongs from the counter and flips the chicken, revealing the charred black side.

As the smoke dissipates, I sigh with some relief and no small amount of embarrassment. After a whole day’s planning, I still burned our dinner to a blackened crisp. Fabulous.

“You okay?”

I look up at Kase, trying to blink away the tears stinging my eyes.

“What’s wrong, baby? Don’t be upset.”

His sweet words make the emotions well up even harder. Am I crying over chicken? I shrug and wipe at my eyes. “I wanted to do something nice for you.”

He laughs softly, but his expression smooths again as he cups my cheeks, forcing me to meet his gaze. His eyes glitter with warmth and something else—something I can’t name.

“Thank you,” he says softly. He bends so our faces are close and kisses the tip of my nose. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s done for me in a long time. You really didn’t have to cook for me.”

I swallow over the knot in my throat. Before I can explain about the recipe book and everything else, he leans in and kisses away all my thoughts. I don’t know how long we stand that way, tasting each other like the day kept us apart too long. He smells like grass and sweat, and I can’t get enough of him. I lean in so more of our bodies touch. Then a pop from the stove startles me.

“Damn it,” he says. “Now I’m burning our dinner.” He nudges me back and deftly moves the well-done chicken from the pan onto a plate.

I sulk a little. Dinner is a long way from being what I’d hoped for. Thankfully I battered enough chicken to attempt another batch. I’m about to get started on that when the egg timer starts dinging.

“Oh no! Crap, crap, crap. I totally forgot.”

I grab two towels and push Kase out of the way so I can open the oven. I pull out the tray of biscuits that I hadn’t bothered to check on. Then a little bubble of happiness comes to the surface as I rest them on the unoccupied burners and survey the results.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I didn’t screw these up.” The biscuits are nicely formed and only a little browned. Haidee’s recipes didn’t have pictures, but these are exactly how I imagined they should turn out.

“There you go,” Kase says. “This is your specialty. Biscuits. They are utterly perfect.” He lightly taps the top of one.

“We’ll see how they taste, I guess.”

“I’m sure they’re amazing. Ow.” He jerks his hand back after trying to pull one loose. “I will gladly be the guinea pig the minute they cool off. Let me go clean up, and I’ll be right down.” He kisses me swiftly on the lips and disappears up the stairs.

I take a deep breath, restored enough to try salvaging my somewhat botched meal. Thankfully, I have better luck with the second round of chicken without distractions.

Kase’s timing is perfect. He comes behind me and wraps his arms around my waist as I plate up two dishes. He’s warm and damp from his shower. When he kisses my neck, I almost spoon the corn onto the floor.

“Quit it, Kase. I’m trying to feed us, for heaven’s sake.”

“Sorry. You’re just so very sexy when you’re being domestic.”

“Don’t get too used to it. This clearly isn’t my calling.”

He releases me with a chuckle, and we take our plates to the dining room.

“Wait for me next time,” he says. “We can figure out dinner together.”

“You’re the reason I burned it to begin with. You’re too distracting.” I’m only half kidding. I can’t imagine concentrating on much of anything when he’s around. He has the unique ability to make me forget what I’m doing in the space of a look.

I set my plate at the head of the table where I’d planned my culinary masterpiece earlier. Then I halt.

“Sorry. Is this your spot?”

Kase frowns, confused. “For what?”

“For meals.”

He laughs. “June, my spot is in front of a TV tray in the living room. Takes my mind off the taste of powdered cheese and loneliness. So, please. Sit. You’ve earned that spot with our feast.”

I offer a hesitant smile and lower into the seat. We eat in silence for a few minutes. The chicken is decent. Corn and creamy butter is reliably tasty. And the biscuits… I take a bite into one just as Kase does. I study his face as I chew on the fluffy goodness.

His eyes close with a moan. “Oh yeah. Biscuits are definitely your thing.”

I smile broadly, proud that I did at least one recipe in the book justice. “It’s okay for a first try, I suppose. I found some old cookbooks in the cupboard. Who’s Haidee? This was her recipe.”

“That’s my grandmother. She and my grandfather passed away before I was born. Edwin had already taken over the farm.”

I take another bite of my biscuit. My thoughts hover around the obvious void, the space where his mother should be.

“Where is your mom?”

He keeps his attention on his meal. “She ran off when I was little. She wasn’t ready to be a mom, I guess. Edwin raised me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. I’d like to know more but sense that I’m hedging a sensitive subject. I’ve spent all day waiting to be with him again, so I decide to keep the mood light. “At the risk of sounding totally cliché, how was your day?”

He chews his bite, a small smile creeping in. “Better than most, I suppose, because I had seeing you to look forward to.”

“Do you like the work you do here?”

He shrugs. “It’s all right. I don’t dislike it. I didn’t have a plan after graduation, so when I came back, I realized how much needed to be done around here. Even with a couple guys helping us out here and there, it’s a lot to keep up between Edwin and me.”

I push the corn around my plate, hoping to avoid acknowledging that this job and the responsibilities that go with maintaining the property will be disappearing before long.

“How about you? How was your day? I see you’re putting your mark on our bachelor pad.” He nods toward the vase of tiger lilies.

“I hope you don’t mind. They were blooming, so I thought we could enjoy them inside.”

He traces his fingertip under a curled petal. “Edwin always said they were my mom’s favorite. I guess when someone’s been missing from your life for so long, you don’t have much else to cling to but little things like that.”

My heart aches for him all over again. I can relate to being motherless, but knowing that my mother was taken from me too soon has to be different than feeling purposefully abandoned. I don’t know how to ease that pain for him, but something inside me wants to make him feel less alone with it.

“I missed you today,” I say softly.

He looks over, as if my words pulled him away from another place. “Did you now?”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” I say quickly, even though I don’t mean it.

“It already has, believe me.” His crooked smile makes me want to kiss it off him. “But I’m thinking it has everything to do with me leaving you in this old house by yourself all day.”

I shrug. “I didn’t mind so much. It’s so different from what I’m used to. I mean, the hotel is beautiful. But this…”

I tug my lower lip between my teeth. How do I explain to him how simply being in a home can inspire such potent feelings? I’m not sure how to share the sentiment without acknowledging the inevitable demise of the house. Unfortunately, avoiding the minefield of that topic is becoming increasingly difficult the more time I spend around Kase.

“I’m enjoying being here more than I expected to,” I finally say.