Page 100 of Not Your Average Vixen
She’d extended the olive branch. Would he take it?
The answer: a colossal no.
Nothing. The man couldn’t even agree on something as trivial as snow acting like…snow.
She turned to him, ready to lay into him yet again for excessivebah humbugbehavior when the gondola lurched, and she fell forward into his arms.
Suspended in time, they stared at each other.
“Dan said that the gondola’s been acting up,” he said, their noses touching as he held her in his firm grip.
“Oh,” she replied, capable of nothing else.
She stared into his eyes and again saw that flash of searing pain. And heaven help her, her heart literally ached, wanting to quell whatever storms raged inside him. Because no matter how hard he tried to put up an icy front, she knew firsthand that the man was capable of fiery passion and all-encompassing desire. But before she could say another word, he morphed back into aloof curmudgeon mode.
He set her back on her side of the gondola. “You need to stay over there to keep the weight even. Do you think you can do that?”
She bit her tongue and ignored him.
How would she get through the night with this Grinch?
Luckily, they’d be with Cole and Carly, but that would only be for a little while. She’d put him to work. That’s what she’d do. After the kids were in bed, she had to assemble the croquembouche. A labor-intensive endeavor, the French dessert consisted of several ping-pong ball-sized profiteroles, a pastry similar to cream puffs, stacked into a tree-shaped tower that’s held together by drizzled caramel. She’d made the many profiteroles this morning, but the real work was in constructing the tower and making sure it held its cone-like Christmas tree shape before decorating it with sugar and almonds.
She’d put him on caramel duty or make him hold the cone that held the dessert in place.
“What do you want me to do with a cone?”
She blinked. “Did you say something?”
He frowned. “No, you said something. You’re doing that thing again where you talk out loud without realizing it.”
She huffed her disbelief. “I do not do that!”
“You just said you wanted my balls in a cone,” he answered without the hint of emotion.
Dammit!
Screw him! No, not screw him!
To hell with him!
She lifted her chin. “I don’t want your balls,Scooter. I was thinking about all the things I needed to get done tonight. You’re going to help me put together a dessert made of many ball-shaped pastries that requires a cone.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Street cones? Like the ones they put on the road? What the hell type of dessert requires diverting traffic?”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. He may be all Mr. Surly, but he didn’t know a damn thing about baking.
“It’s a pastry cone used to shape the dessert and hold it in place. And no, it’s not made with an orange traffic cone.”
He sat back and watched her. “You know a decent amount about baking.”
Bridget stared at the man. “Is that a question or a statement?”
“Question.”
She sighed and glanced at the mountain. “I know enough.”
She could feel his eyes on her, taking it all in as if he were weighing her worth.
