The Barn-Dance Read online

With a dry mouth, he said, “Never mind. I’ll just teach you what I know, and you can do what you want with it.”

  Leo walked to the pantry, noting that she still hadn’t moved. He thumbed past the all purpose flour, in search of the bread flour he knew was in there. His mother hadn’t taught him much in life, but she’d definitely taught him how to bake and cook, despite his father’s insistence that it was a woman’s job to be in the kitchen, not a man’s.

  “You have to start with bread flour,” he said from a crouch.

  “Mistake one.”

  He heard a scratching noise and craned over his shoulder to see her with a pencil in hand. “Are you making notes?”

  She scribbled a few words, then met his eyes and shot him a questioning look. “What? You’re not gonna be here everyday, Leo. If I don’t take notes, it’ll all go out of my head on Monday when I have to do this again.”

  “Bread flour.” He found the bag and passed it to her. “At least for what I’m gonna teach you to make. Sometimes you can use AP, and you’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll just do what you tell me.” More scratching on the pad.

  He stood and took a step toward her. “Now, what are you writing?”

  She drew her lips in, concentrating on whatever she wrote, then affected a half-smile. “Always. Listen. To. Leo.” She punctuated his name with a poke of the pencil.

  He couldn’t help laughing. This docile student thing wouldn’t last long. He should take advantage of it. Leo pulled a loose strand of hair across her forehead and tucked it behind her ear, letting his finger graze her skin. “I should tattoo that across your forehead.”

  For a moment, her hopeful gaze met his and she cocked her head toward him. Something flickered over her face and her smile disappeared. “Leo…”

  “Never mind. Forget I brought it up.” He withdrew his hand and stepped back into the pantry. Without conversation, he passed her the baking powder, salt, and yeast, hoping she could read the packages for herself. “First, we have to activate the yeast. Run the water between cold and hot for a minute. Try to get it to body temperature.”

  “Body temperature?”

  “Room temperature. Lukewarm.” No wonder her bread failed. The woman couldn’t even activate yeast. Either the previous bakery job had been a lie, or she’d been doing something other than baking. He imagined Mindy pressed up against a giant, silver door with her legs spread for another man. Leo could easily see how being trapped in a kitchen with Mindy might make a man forget to do his work.

  Her sultry voice interrupted his disturbing fantasy. “How do I know when it’s lukewarm?” She turned her head and fixed her blue eyes on him, her lips slightly parted, her short blonde hair falling over her shoulder.

  He laughed, remembering what his mom told him when he asked the same question. It had been her answer to a lot of his questions. “You’ll have to learn to tell the difference.”

  “But…”

  “Just run the water. I’ll help you figure it out.” He grabbed powdered milk, sugar, and oil, waiting for the sound of the water to tell him she was really listening.

  When he closed the pantry door, he found her in front of the sink with her arms crossed. “I don’t want to waste water.”

  Why he’d expected her to lock-step and obey was beyond him. Still, it chafed. “Just turn it on, Mindy.”

  When she didn’t respond, he put the ingredients on the counter and crossed the kitchen in two long strides, edging into her personal bubble. He faced her while he pulled on the long handle, creeping the heat level up to where he thought it should be.

  Before she could protest, he grabbed her hand and thrust it under the column of water. She caught her breath and breasts rose. That set his blood pumping. God, he wanted her.

  He took his hand away, but hers stayed under the water. “It needs to be a bit hotter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You learn to tell the difference.” He knocked the knob a bit toward the red heat zone and stuck his finger underneath. “Not hot enough.” He turned it again, and retested the temperature.

  This time, his finger connected with Mindy’s, who’d left her hand obediently under the water. He didn’t move it. This was the perfect temperature. The heat and cool finally hit the balance he needed.

  She looked like she might pull away, but he crooked his finger around hers, holding her in place. “Keep your hand there for a minute.”

  “Leo…”

  “Can you feel how my skin is the same temperature as the water?”

  Mindy leaned in toward him and fixed her blue eyes on his mouth. As she closed the distance between them, he could the sweet mix of mint and rosemary enveloped him. She still smelled the same. He’d wondered about that.

  “Uh-huh,” she whispered.

  The tickle of her breath on his cheek sent a thrill through his body, straight to his toes and the ends of his nerves. She still excited every part of him.

  “Leo.” This time, there was no finish to that sentence. She just whispered his name against his face. He knew where this was heading, and as much as he wanted her, she was not a good idea. She would leave again, and he couldn’t recover from another broken heart. The first one had taken him six years.

  “Now you’ll know the difference.” He pulled away from her, leaving her swaying in front of the sink, into where he’d been standing.

  That was the key, eh? Knowing the difference.

  She shouldn’t have leaned in. The tight draw of his eyebrows said more than he ever would. And now she stood with her hand under the faucet, berating herself for wanting to kiss him.

  “Now what?” she asked, hoping he would just kiss her already. Maybe if they got that over with, they could just stop this silly adolescent sexual push-and-pull and bake some freakin’ bread.

  “Pour the yeast package and a little sugar into a bowl.” Leo opened the cabinet and placed a bowl on the counter. “Then 1/3 cup of that water and proof your yeast.”

  “Proof?”

  “It’s like activating. You have to let it work on something, and the heat turns it on, the sugar gives it something to feast on, and it gets all frothy.”

  Okay, was he trying turn her on? She studied his face, but found the scrunchy sarcastic look missing from his features. He either didn’t know or didn’t care that he was using sexual language to describe this process.

  This was going to be a long afternoon.

  Mindy followed his instructions and watched the bowl. Leo laughed, that deep, rich laugh that made her think of chocolate.

  “You don’t watch it, Min. It’ll froth on its own. You need to get the wet ingredients ready right away.”

  Leo took her through the powdered milk and water, the oil, and the eggs. “Beat them. Hard. Until there are bubbles in the mixture.” He handed her a whisk. “There should be some room in the batter for the yeast to get in.”

  Mindy stared at the whisk before accepting it. “You’re not gonna do it? Y’know, show me how it’s done.”

  “That’s not part of the bargain.” His dark eyes settled on her; there was no heat or warmth there anymore. Just the critical eye of a teacher. That bothered her more than she liked. Her heartbeat still hadn’t recovered from that almost-kiss.

  She took the whisk and started beating. After about two minutes of whisking, her arm got tired and she switched to the other. Leo glanced over at the bowl of yeast, which had quadrupled in size, almost overflowing the bowl, and her eyes followed.

  “There, now put the sugar in and whisk it some more. Then we’ll fold the yeast in.” Leo stepped back and leaned against the counter.

  Fed up with his sudden switch in attitude, she put the whisk against the side of the big bowl and crossed her arms. “Why are you being so cold to me?”

  “You’d better keep whisking, girl. You’re gonna lose all that work you just did.”

  Mindy felt like pushing out her bottom lip like a school girl. There was nothing that frustrated her mor
e than being dismissed. “I won’t do one more stroke if you don’t answer my question.”

  Leo bolted to the bowl and picked up the whisk himself. Now it was Mindy’s turn to lean against the counter in a huff.

  “I don’t wanna talk about it, Min.”

  “You were all up in my face a minute ago, and now you’re acting like I have the plague or something. I just want to know what I did so I can make sure to keep doing it.”

  Leo’s laugh was dry and short, but at least he laughed. His broad shoulders relaxed, as though they’d been holding up something that he suddenly decided to release.

  “It’s still kinda hard to be around you.”

  His comment stung her, and it went deep. All the way down to the place that had been hoping he still thought about her, even as she tried to convince herself just how much of a Big Bad Idea he was.

  “Ditto,” she said.

  He laughed again. This time, a little bigger, and a little freer. “We’ve been avoiding this conversation since you showed up last week. I guess now’s as good a time as any, right? Maybe the last time we’ll be alone together.” He finished whisking and reached for the yeast.

  “I can do that,” she said.

  “Fine.” He stepped to his left and let her at the bowl.

  Mindy looked from the frothy bowl of yeast to the creamy batter in the silver mixing bowl, which was at least twice as high on the side of the bowl as it had been any other time she’d gotten to this step. What did she do wrong? “So I put all of this in here and then what?”

  “Fold it in.”

  She followed his instructions, letting him nod over her shoulder. “So you want me to tell you why I left, and then you’ll tell me I was wrong, and we’ll have a big fight and maybe spill this all over the kitchen and have double duty before your dad gets back.”

  “I’m not gonna tell you it was wrong.” He plucked the spatula from her hand and moved it slowly through the deep bowl. “Except you were doing that wrong.” Leo leaned away from her body. “Fold means fold.”

  Mindy imitated his movement with the spatula and bit her lip. He seemed so unaffected, like he could care less about anything but the perfect bread dough. But that wasn’t enough for her. “You don’t care why I left.”

  “I’ve been guessing your reasons for six years, Min.” Leo brought the flour from the other counter and placed it next to her bowl. “Now, add this real slow. A cup at a time, at most.”

  She started with one cup and started folding again. Had he really been thinking about her for six years? Every man she dated was a repeat of his broken promises. One after another, guys seemed to like her, but after the sex, they always ditched her. Just like Leo. No matter how much she thought they cared, all they really wanted was a piece of her ass. Why she thought it would ever be any different was beyond her.

  A familiar acrid smell tickled her nostrils. “This smells like beer.”

  He chuckled and took the measuring cup from the counter, filling it again from the flour sack. “It’s supposed to. That means the yeast is working.”

  “I got a job offer, Leo.” She stopped folding but kept her eyes on the batter. Mindy had been afraid to meet his gaze for so long. Now it seemed like such a small thing, but she was afraid of the judgment.

  She judged herself enough.

  She’d known he was over the moon for her back then. Everyone had. He turned down date after date, he stayed home from college, and made himself completely available to her. And when she finally took her head out of the sand long enough to see it, her time had run out.

  They’d had one night of beautiful, naïve sex. Her first, his first. But after all those years of pursuing her, he got her in the sack, and that was it. Like a stupid romantic, she’d said the magic words. I love you. And what had he said? Nothing. Just stared at her.

  And that was it. She wasn’t keeping her heart open anymore.

  But she’d been avoiding him for too long. His soft eyes always asked, but she never let them be alone together. Never gave him the chance to explain. But it was time. She needed to stop pretending she didn’t care. She was down on her luck. No skills, no job prospects in a bad economy, and the only job to call her back happened to be where Leo was. If she wanted to keep eating, she needed to keep this job. And if this unfinished business was going to keep coming up, she’d have to face it some time.

  Mindy finally looked up at him. He stood with an empty measuring cup, watching her. Waiting. Had he always been waiting? “I got a call the next morning, and they offered me this job that was…well, at the time, I thought it was my dream job. It wasn’t about you at all.”

  Leo poured the next cup of flour into the batter. The only sound in the kitchen was the plop of that flour. “You may not have left because of me.” He watched as she folded the flour in, the look on his face, indistinguishable. “But you didn’t stay because of me, either.”

  Chapter Three

  Those words hurt to say. Leo had been holding them in a long time. All six years since she left, and then this whole last week, not to mention the minutes that seemed like hours that they’d been having this conversation.

  Suddenly, it wasn’t as important for him to know as he’d thought. He wished she hadn’t come back at all.

  Indifference was worse than hatred, for sure.

  She kept stirring that bowl, just like he’d taught her, and kept a good steady pace. He put the last cup of flour in. “We slept together one night, Leo. It’s not like we were in a relationship.”

  But it had been a relationship for him. For Leo, it hadn’t been one night. It had been the first night of what he hoped were many nights. At the time, anyway. Now, it was all different. Completely. Totally. Different.

  “I get it. You weren’t in it for the long haul. Not a big deal.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t like you, Leo.”

  A tiny whisper of hope threatened his resolve. She did like him once. No, she loved him once but didn’t love him anymore. She’d made that painfully obvious when she left without a word. “Min, I got my answer. Let’s just not go there.”

  She lifted her elbow into his personal space as she stirred the last of the dough, the tough part. The silence built between them while she huffed against the dough, and he was grateful for it. She pulled it out of the bowl and onto the counter he’d floured.

  The sticky white ball clung to her fingers a bit, and he sprinkled a little flour over her hands while she worked it. Once it looked perfect, he put his hand on her arm.

  Now that the floodgate had opened between them, the heat of her skin felt at once welcoming and rejecting. She didn’t push him away this time.

  “It’s good there.” Leo grabbed a paper towel and cleaned the remnants of wet and dry ingredients out of the bowl. “Put the dough in here and we’ll cover it.”

  They put the bowl on the windowsill to rest in the sun, and Leo looked down at Mindy’s hands. She wore no rings, but the dough was starting to harden around her fingers, making it look like a crusted fistful of jewelry.

  He turned the water temperature to lukewarm and pulled her hand under the stream. “Can you still tell the difference?”

  She blushed. “You’re a good teacher.”

  “Think you’ll be able to do this on your own from now on?” Leo released her hand, the heat increasing under the pressure of her fingers. “I won’t be around anymore.”

  “We don’t have to avoid each other now, Leo. Now that we’ve talked about this.”

  Easy for her to say. She obviously never really cared, unlike Leo, who’d spent all six of these last years trying to forget Melinda Edwards. It felt like someone placed a stone on his chest. “I suppose now that we’ve talked.” Like that solved anything.

  “You don’t feel anything for me anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I don’t feel anything for you.”

  “Okay.” The stone was back, pressing down on his chest cavity like it might suffocate his hea
rt.

  “So we can be…y’know, whatever we want to be. And it won’t matter.”

  Leo’s voice dropped. “Whatever we want?”

  Her face colored again, from the base of her neck where the crimson disappeared into her shirt, all the way to the sharp angles of her cheeks, and back into her hairline.

  “Well, not that.”

  Leo took a moment to just stare at her. He was amazed at how little she’d changed. Other than the clothes, the hair, and the shoes—those idiotic shoes all the time—she was the same girl who’d left him all those years ago.

  Beautiful, graceful, and sexy as hell. She still made his heart jump into his throat whenever he looked at her. Only now, she made him hard, too. The memory of her flesh on his. So hard. So much for not feeling anything.

  How in the world he was gonna get through this afternoon without sporting wood again, he wasn’t quite sure.

  ***

  Leo had left after she washed her hands, promising to come back after the dough rose for an hour, and his eyes had been dark—almost black—as he stared at her.

  The heat radiating from his gaze made something curl up tight in her stomach. Mindy hadn’t felt this way about a guy in a long time. Like she wanted to lick him from head to toe, and then punch him straight in the nose.

  If he touched her hand one more time, she might forget that she didn’t date cowboys. She didn’t want to get stuck here, after all, and cowboys always wanted to stay where the cows were. She preferred to be where the leather was.

  But she knew this place, and if there was anywhere she could rebuild her life and re-launch, it was here. Thank God Cal Fortiss had given her a chance. This was just a stepping stone. Wasn’t it?

  While waiting for the bread to rise, she checked email, started laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and put away all the ingredients from their bread-making. But something felt undone, like she had an itch she couldn’t scratch somewhere.

  With the hour still not over, Mindy picked up her phone and dialed her best friend. When Hannah didn’t answer, she left a long, rambly voicemail that ended with, “You can call me back if you want. Or don’t. I mean, it’s no big deal. Just need to talk. Or not. Y’know, whatever. Love you.”