Page 27 of A Taste of Christmas Magic

“I feel like I’ve dined on the smell.”

“Foreplay,” Rustin said softly, and her tummy flipped.

Was he flirting with her? No. She was being her usual impulsive leap-before-looking self.

“Besides.” She rolled her eyes, remembering the directions—allof the directions. “The book says that the man must sample first.”

“Who am I to argue with tradition?”

Chloe barely refrained from snorting. “You fence with tradition daily,” she said. “Probably since birth. It’s your superpower.”

“A compliment from a Maye.” He picked up his fork.

“You don’t like the Mayes much,” she noted.

“You don’t consider yourself a Maye?”

She nibbled on her lip, her hands clasped together. She should. Grandma Millie had once taken her by the shoulders when she’d been seven or eight and sobbing over some holiday slight at the big table with all of the family, and her green eyes had been fierce.

You are a Maye! You are every inch a Maye, and I don’t want you to ever doubt it, not for one second more!

“I am,” Chloe said slowly. “But somedays, a lot of days, I feel only part Maye. And a lot of days, I don’t really fit in, and I wonder…” She shut her mouth before she verbally jumped off the ledge and overshared her curiosity about her birth family. Grandma Millie would be so hurt.

Rustin’s gaze drilled into her. “I know how it feels to not fully belong,” he said softly.

Chloe felt everything still inside her as if she’d stepped to the edge of the tall diving board at the YMCA.

Jump.

“I wonder if my birth family would have understood me better,” she blurted.

Rustin stilled. “I feel blessed that I have nothing in common with the previous generations of Wildish men.”

Chloe felt as if she were in church at the end of a prayer.

“Bon appetit,” Rustin said and took a bite.

Chloe held her breath.

*

The flavors andtextures melded like magic in his mouth, and shock infused him as if he’d jumped into ice-cold water. Chloe had created this? Exquisite. He couldn’t even praise her—yes, he was exacting with his crew, but also unstinting with deserved praise—because his mouth was full of the divine.

Mutely, Rustin picked up the other quarter piece of the pulled-pork biscuit and held it out to her. Chloe looked nervous, yet her bow-shaped lips closed over the offering, brushing his fingers. A jolt speared through his chest harder than the time he’d been in a head-on when a small truck had jumped its lane on a mountain road in Turkey. The airbag had felt like a gunshot, and his sternum had been bruised and ached for a month.

Rustin stared into Chloe’s slightly mismatched eyes like he’d never seen her before. Her blue and slightly purple gaze held stars and questions he was just beginning to ask, and then as she chewed, her pale cheeks pinked, and she smiled, the hint of a sunrise swallowing the night.

“This is amazing. Delicious,” she said in wonder. “I did it! We did it!”

How could she speak? Rustin had no words. He could barely form a thought. It was like he’d walked up to a wall that became a door opening into a different universe.

Chloe Maye Cramer. Pixie adorable. Fairy smart. Creative, giving, funny, ethereal beauty, and so far out of his league.

Rustin felt dizzy, upended as if he were on the deck of a ship that was pulling theTitanic. But instead of drowning in icy water, a warm wave washed over him, pulling him somewhere he didn’t want to go.

What’s happening?

He gripped the edge of the table as if to hold himself in place, though he wasn’t sure he could move if he wanted to.

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