Page 23 of The Dreidl Disaster

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Artur stood upand walked the length of the dining room toward the place where their hosts had decided to set up the coffee and dessert before heading off to…

Prepare.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw them.

Blintzes.

Sweet dessert blintzes made parve without sour cream, placed just next to the babka.

His fingers twitched, reaching for the sour cream he usually carried with him. The worst time to reveal a culinary obsession was absolutely when someone you wanted to make a good professional impression on was watching you, so he shoved his fingers in his pocket, hoping nobody would notice.

Thankfully, there was no sour cream in his pocket; after learning the Cohens kept a kosher home, he’d left the tubes in his car, locked in that special fridge Jacob and Abe had gotten him.

And yet what he wouldn’t give for a mouthful.

“Hey.”

The mayor’s voice ripped through his concentration; suddenly his concerns about the food were gone, suddenly his focus was on her. And whether it was the light or the concern in her expression, he could barely gather enough words together to speak. “Yes?”

“Can we talk?”

There were a billion things she could possibly want to discuss, and hopefully none of them had to do with condiments or sports cars.

And other more personal items.

Business. Business.

“Sure,” he said. “But at the same time—” he gestured toward the hallway where their hosts had vanished earlier “—is it not a good time?”

“I think they’re prepping a bit longer for dessert to make sure we do, you know, talk.”

“Like they think we need help getting on the same page or something?”

She nodded, and he wondered why she was blushing. But all the same, he let her lead him to a closed porch area, then waited as she turned toward him. “You had a look on your face.”

Did she see his expression when he saw the dessert table? He shoved the concern down his throat, raising an eyebrow and going for as nonchalant as he could manage. “What look? It’s my face.”

“No,” she said, a tinge of laughter broadening her tone. “I’ve seen your face before. That was a look.”

Right. Okay. She saw something. He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

Confusion and a little bit of…not full surprise, butsomethinghe couldn’t define emerged from the depths of her eyes. “You went from denying it was a look to saying it was nothing. Can’t be nothing.”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said, hoping she’d forget it but knowing she’d be like a counter-surfing dog who just scented the dinner leftovers within her reach.

Chapter Eight

There was somethinggoing on with Artur; it was the expression on his face when Liv saw him standing in front of the dessert table, that tension in his shoulders she wasn’t ready to admit to herself that she recognized.

What about that dessert table made him so tense?

He’d refused to discuss it when she brought him outside, whatever compelled her to go in search of him to discuss gone completely. He gave her some random answer, but she’d been around enough people to know that he was actually engaging in the kind of ‘I don’t want to talk about this now’ conversation that really meant ‘I hope you forget we had this conversation.’

But whatever it was disappeared when they came back to dessert; the babka took center stage and the Cohens seemed…a bit more relaxed.

Of course once she got him in the car, there was another thing to talk about. Professionalism first. “So,” she said. “How do you think dinner went?”

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