Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn
Chapter Forty-Five
Fiona
Ten minutes later, Fiona had stopped panicking about cooking—she was assigned salad duty for big family meals for a reason—and was trying not to drool over the forearm porn Dixon was delivering. While she was taking out the ingredients and putting them on the island, he had rolled up the sleeves of his navy button-up to right below his elbows. She almost dropped the small jar of beet juice when he stretched his fingers, making the corded muscles under the dusting of dark hair flex.
“Here, let me help.” Dixon took the jar from her.
She did her best not to jump at the electric shock that went through her at just that small touch and reached in for the last two items in the lockbox—two cylinders of rolled-up red fabric tied with a bow. She pulled the end of one loop, and the material unwound to reveal an apron with Dixon’s name embroidered in black thread across the bib. She unrolled the other apron, which had her name on it. Underneath each of their names, Kiss the Cook was sewn in a soft pink thread with a pair of lips in hot pink.
“Okay, this is pretty cute.” She pulled the apron over her head and then reached for the strings on the side to tie it.
“Here, let me.” Dixon’s fingers brushed hers as he grasped the material, wound it full circle around her waist, and then made a bow in the front. The move brought them so close together that his breath tickled her earlobe. “Perfect.”
He was talking about the apron, not her. She knew that, but damn, it was getting harder and harder to remember it—and, quite frankly, she didn’t want to.
“You ready to do this?” he asked.
Oh, she was ready to do things all right, but cooking sure wasn’t on her top-five list at the moment.
They hit their first hurdle after measuring out the flour into a bowl.
After reading the next step in the recipe twice, Fiona looked up at Dixon. “It says make a well.”
“What does that mean?”
Oh yeah. Like she knew. Her job every Thanksgiving was chopping lettuce for the salad. “You know”—she waved her hand at the bowl on the island—“a well, make one. It’s like folding in the cheese.”
He shot her a crooked grin. “Are you making a Schitt’s Creek reference?”
Damn. Caught as clearly as if she was wearing her Rose Apothecary hoodie. “When one of us shines…”
“All of us shines,” he finished.
“Exactly.” She laughed, cocking her head to the side and looking at Dixon with a fresh perspective. “I never pictured you liking the show.”
He shrugged and then folded the paper bag containing the flour closed before putting it back in the tin labeled whole wheat. “I binged it as my two in the morning, can’t sleep show.”
“Insomnia?” She’d always heard about the coaches who worked on four hours of sleep a night because they were so immersed in the job—maybe being the CEO of a billion-dollar company was like that, too.
His jaw squared and his grin melted into a glower. “Something like that.”
Fiona kept her eyebrow raise internal only. Obviously that was a sore spot for him. She’d never shied away from poking the bear, but that didn’t mean she attacked someone’s soft underbelly—at least not on purpose.
“We could call Griff to see if he knows what a well is,” she said, picking the one option she knew would distract him from whatever path she’d sent him down with her question.
Some of the tension seeped out of his broad shoulders. “No way.”
“YouTube to the rescue it is.” It took thirty seconds on her phone to feel like the biggest dumbass in the world. “Why didn’t they just say make a hole?”
“Because that would make sense,” he said as he cracked the eggs and added them into the mixture. “Are you sure it says to mix it with your hands?”
She double-checked the recipe card. “Yep.”
He grimaced and cut a sideways look at her. “I’ll flip you for it. Loser has to get all goopy.”
She waved the card in the air. “I’m in charge of reading the recipe steps.”
He whined some more, but he did it, giving her an excuse to watch the muscles in his porn-worthy forearms do their thing. Damn. The man gave good forearms.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“A little olive oil.” She measured it out and poured it in. “Now you knead it for five minutes.”
He dropped the ball of dough onto the countertop that was sprinkled with flour and went to work. It was filthy—not the countertop, the thoughts going through her head. She knew what he could do with those hands. Seeing him work the dough was activating her orgasmic muscle memory, and she was ready to go when the timer went off.
“Looks like we have half an hour to kill. Any ideas?” She did. She had lots of them.
“I do,” he said after taking off his apron and washing his hands—God, who knew kitchen soap could be erotic—and then walking backward toward his living room. “Follow me.”
