Page 13 of Reindeer Flames
"Under the counter." I took the box and walked with him to pick up his order. "See you tomorrow." I still couldn't believe my luck.
As he walked away, I already knew tomorrow's answer, if only I had the guts to tell him.
The next morning,after Hart placed his order with Gold and I grabbed the card game from the shelf beneath the counter, I blurted my answer to yesterday's question before we even sat down. "Friday night, when I saw you at the Halloween party."
"Hmm?"
Ugh. I'd been too eager, and he'd forgotten all about it. Unlike me, he was a normal person who didn't fixate on future conversations, most of which never happened.
"Oh, the question." He grinned. "That's my answer, too. It felt like fate, seeing you there. Donner invited our whole team, but I was the only one who showed up."
"Oh. Is that bad?" I asked. "Would you rather have hung out with them?"
"Dude, I don't even know if that was a true statement. The team may have arrived later, but all I saw was you."
I nodded. "It's because I'm so big."
He barked a laugh, and then he covered his mouth with his hands to hold it in. "That's not what I meant!" he choked out between his hands.
"It's all right," I said. "Everyone laughs at my size."
His eyes widened, and he dropped his hands to the table, gripping so hard his knuckles turned white. "Not me. I love your size." He sighed. "Let me try again. Even if my entire team hadarrived to congratulate me on my time trial win, I wouldn't have cared. I wanted to spend time with you."
He looked so earnest. I wanted to trust him, but the moment passed in awkward silence.
Hart grinned and nudged the card box closer to my hand. "Pick one." He grabbed the frosted gingerbread cookie with a licorice gumdrop nose and red and white icing around its neck and bit into an antler.
"Okay." I took a card and read the first question. "If you had four more hours in each day, how would you spend them?"
Hart dropped his half-eaten cookie onto the plate and reached for my hand. Instead of telling me his answer, he sang the Jim Croce ballad from 1972, "Time in a Bottle."
"Oh my goddess," Gold shouted from behind the counter. "What is that racket? New rule. No singing allowed!"
"You knew I was singing!" Hart grinned at her. "My cousins say I sound like a cat yowling."
Gold hugged her apron to her chest. "They're not wrong."
"I loved it," I said. "Did you mean it?"
"Every word." He squeezed my hand before letting go to grab the rest of his cookie and shove it in his mouth. Before he could start choking on the crumbs, I ran to the refrigerator and poured him a glass of milk.
"Ooh. Milk and cookies," he said once he'd washed it down. "My favorite." He smacked his lips. "What about you? What would you do with four extra hours?"
I shook my head. "That's not fair. I would love to spend them with you, but?—"
"But you have a business to run." Hart nodded and patted my hand again. "It's all right. I'll be here, watching you work." His smile faded to something more like alarm. "I mean … not stalking you, or anything. Only if you wanted me to be here."
"Order up!" Gold shouted. Once again, we'd both forgotten she was there. Hart jumped a few inches in his seat, and I turned toward the sound of her voice before the words registered.
"I do want you to be here," I said as I walked him back to the counter. I wrapped the untouched reindeer cookie in wax paper and tucked it on top of the rest of the order. "The game is fun. I like playing it with you."
He grinned. "Me, too. See you tomorrow?"
I nodded.
"Thursdays are our slow mornings," Gold said, tapping my calf with the toe of her work boot. "You could take a longer break, if you wanted. Get out of here for an hour."
I couldn't hide my astonishment. Gold liked to visit the other bakeries around town on our slow days. Someone was stealing our Thursday morning business, and she considered herself quite the sleuth. She even wore her houndstooth coat and fedora when she investigated.
