Page 44 of Single Dad Dilemma
I blinked out of my stupor, wiping my hands on the towel slung over my shoulder. Joining her by the oven, I set my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Perfect. See that tiny little bit of browning on the edges?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll show you when I take them out. That’s how you know they’re done. We still want them to be soft.” I slipped my hands into oven mitts and nudged her backward. “Careful.”
With the first dozen settled on the top of the stove, I found myself smiling when Maggie took a deep, appreciative whiff. “Those smell so good.”
A pang of nostalgia almost took my legs out from underneath me, the reverberations seeming to go on and on, only weakening when I closed my eyes and took a deep breath too.
“I haven’t made this recipe in a long time,” I told her.
She looked up at me. “How do you know it so well, then?”
I turned and found a spatula in one of the drawers, setting it beside a cooling rack next to the finished cookies. “It was my mom’s recipe. She swore these were the best sugar cookies in the world.”
“Did the two of you bake these every year at Christmas?”
The pressure on my chest was overwhelming, the squeeze of it on my bones making it hard to keep my face even while I slid the next batch of dough into the waiting oven. “No, we didn’t,” I answered quietly.
It was impossible not to think about all the years I’d sat in the next room and not asked if I could help. Hadn’t asked what she could teach me. It was the kind of thing that haunted me if I wasn’t careful, and I made it a firm point not to be haunted over things I couldn’t change.
Maggie handed me the spatula, then watched carefully while I tested the bottom of the cookies still on the pan. They needed to cool just a bit longer before coming off.
“Does your mom still make them?” she asked cautiously.
Even though a Christmas movie was playing in the background—one of the versions ofThe Grinch—it felt like everyone went quiet waiting for me to answer.
I kept my eyes down on the cookies, then gave her a tiny smile. “No, honey. She doesn’t.”
When I turned to do ... something, anything, to keep my hands busy until I could move the cookies from the baking sheet to the cooling rack, my eyes shifted up and over.
Barrett was staring right at me, a thoughtful expression on his face that scared the absolute shit out of me. After a beat, I tore my gaze away.
“Okay,” I said before clearing my throat. “Let’s get these cookies moved.”
Chapter Eleven
Lily
“I think you’re cheating.”
“I would never.”
Barrett scoffed. “If it meant winning, of course you would. I’m starting to think you have a weird addiction to humbling me.”
I laughed, and Barrett’s eyes dipped briefly down to my mouth. Well, since he was already there, I picked up another cookie—I’d lost count at this point—and pointedly bit the head off a gingerbread man. I finished chewing the bite, then licked the crumbs from the corner of my lips.
“Sore loser?” I asked when he stared down at the board with a slow shake of his head.
“That’snota word,” he insisted.
The kids watched us with wide eyes, because the game of Scrabble after the Monopoly round where Barrett wiped out his son had gotten much more competitive than anyone could’ve foreseen.
“Itisa word, you just don’t know it,” I told him. “I told you I was good at this game.”
“She did,” Bryce whispered loudly. “And we looked it up; it counts.”
Barrett sat back in his chair and pinned me with a fiery look. I merely smiled, settling my folded hands on the table in front of us. “Qis on the triple-word score too.” I sighed. “Brutal.”
