Page 38 of Perfect Pairing
“Yes. Basically all the fun shit.”
“Desserts can be fun without all the stuff that could potentially make someone sick, Ezra,” she scolded.
“Shit, I know, you’re right,” I said, scrubbing a hand over my face. “It’s just…this is two days away. Hansen didn’t give me a lot of time to plan, and of course my dad was totally useless.”
Then again, we’d been so busy working on home renovations that, for all I knew, Hansen could’ve told me ages ago, and I’d simply forgotten.
“How’s Hansen?” she asked. “And your dad?”
“They’re good…” I said slowly. “Hansen is finally enjoying his new school. It seemed like once he came back from Christmas break, he started to really settle in. He’s had a few friends over, and I even had a group of boys here for a pizza making party one night.”
“Pizza sounds delicious,” she said absently, the rustle of paper still evident in the background.
Instantly, I was transported back to that day a month and a half ago, making pizza for her while she made those danishes that burned because we’d been too lost in each other to care. I doubted the dessert could’ve competed withhertaste anyway. The tang of her arousal bursting like fireworks on my tongue with each new swipe through her pussy. How easily she’d fallen apart for me—how quickly she’d given me everything I asked for.
Fuck, I’d gotten myself off to memories of her sounds more times than I could count.
I wanted her again, badly, but I couldn’t let myself go there, not when there was so much at stake for me. Not when the livelihood of my son rode on me keeping my dick to myself.
And, of course, there was the Shannon of it all—the relationship that wrecked me so thoroughly that, in the end, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to come back from it.
“What’re you flipping through?” I asked in an attempt to distract myself from the situation in my pants.
“My recipe book. Well, not mine exactly. It was my grandma’s, but as the only baker in the family, it’s mine now.”
“Is that where you got your danish recipe from?” I asked, once again bridging the present to the past.
“It is,” she said slowly, as though timid about broaching this subject. Surprising, given she was the one who’d brought it up in our previous phone conversation.
“Is that when you got serious about baking?” I asked. “When you discovered that recipe book?”
“Oh, no,” Brie said with a laugh. “I’ve been obsessed with baking for as long as I can remember. I used to have an Easy-Bake Oven I’d routinely use to make the family grossly raw little treats. As I got older, with Mom and Dad’s supervision, I started experimenting in an actual kitchen. It was…” She trailed off, clearly searching for the right words. “It was quite the learning curve at first, but we figured it out, especially with Roscoe’s help.”
“Plus, they reaped the benefits.”
She chuckled again. “I’m not sure any of us would’ve said that in those early days, but they certainly do now. But no, I actually didn’t get Granny’s cookbook until I graduated high school. Tanya, who owns Granny Smith’s Tavern, found it when she wascleaning out the attic one day and gave it to me as a graduation present. It’s…my prized possession.”
A moment after her words, my phone let out the distinct trill of an incoming FaceTime call, and I quickly, greedily accepted.
Brie was…resplendent. Neither my memory nor the grainy phone screen did her justice. Her hair was braided, the end tossed over her shoulder in the way I was coming to recognize as her signature style. I couldn’t begrudge her, knowing it was more functional than anything, but I secretly wished I could see it loose and wavy down her back.
At her side, she held the recipe book, which was leather-bound and stamped with a massive S in the center. At the edges, I could see numerous tabs of various colors. The edges were worn, the clasp cracked with age. Clearly, it had been well loved.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
“I didn’t really know her,” she admitted. “She passed when I was a baby, but my dad has shared numerous stories about her with us over the years. Back in the seventies, she decided she was tired of being a housewife—my dad and his siblings, who are now flung across the world, were grown past the stage of needing constant supervision—and asked my grandfather if she could help out at the winery. He knew they’d likely kill each other if they worked together, so he sent her into town with a blank check and told her to buy whatever she wanted to entertain herself.”
“That seems…dangerous,” I said with a chuckle.
“Oh, it was. Granny Smith ended up buying an entire block’s worth of empty storefronts. Apple Blossom Bay had been experiencing a decrease in population at that point, and a lot ofthose businesses had shuttered as the owners left. So, Granny purchased the buildings on Main Street, opened the Tavern, and leased the other storefronts for pennies to anyone willing to put down roots in town.”
I pulled up a mental image of Main Street, orienting myself around Granny Smith’s Tavern and trying to imagine a day when the lively area was basically a ghost town.
“So your family used to own the Tavern, Penny’s gift shop, that ATV rental place by the bay, the candle shop,andBrubaker’s place?”
“Yep,” she said, popping thep. “My dad obviously sold all of it, including the Tavern to Tanya Geralt back in the nineties, before any of us girls were born. Thanks to a lot of sweat equity from him and my mom, the winery was booming, and he just didn’t have any interest in being a landlord or running a restaurant outside of the one at the winery.”
“That’s…crazy. Knowing the history, it must be painful to see the Brubaker place go down the way it did.”
