Page 19 of Binding Their Hearts

But she peered around the corner into an empty kitchen, with no Henry or Jay to be amused by her teasing. “Guys?”

The dinner table hadn’t even been set, although an origami figure waited in front of her chair. She picked up the orange-and-white paper cat. Jay had gotten really good at folding these things; she kept them lined up on the dresser in their shared room. “Are we playing a game?”

A click sounded behind her, and she spun. “Jay?”

“Alice?” Backing into the hallway naked, he yanked the door to Henry’s studio shut. “Hey. Hi. Is it six already?” He ran both hands through his hair; the ends still had the wet shine from his shower. “Do you like the cat?”

“I do. It’s adorable.” She set it down blindly, Jay’s presence in the studio a far larger mystery. “Is Henry in there?”

“Nope. No. Haven’t seen him yet—weird, right? He had that appointment this afternoon with the new client.” Jay trotted in her direction and waved at the table. “I’m kinda in a holding pattern. I could do plates, but maybe we need bowls instead, and then there’s the silverware choices—”

“Hey, stud.” Redirection worked now that she recognized the signs of an anxiety loop. Taking his arm didn’t hurt, either. The solid connection, skin to skin, started draining her tension, and hopefully his. “While we’re waiting on those instructions, how about a welcome home kiss?”

He surrendered with enthusiasm, letting her entangle their tongues in a slow, rolling rhythm as she pressed their bodies together. She dotted his lips with tiny kisses before she pulled away. “Better?”

A smile crept across his face. “Much.”

“Same.” She tipped her head toward the hallway. “Did you need something from Henry’s studio?”

“Oh.” The smile vanished. “No, not—” Glancing over his shoulder, he shook his head. “My papers—” He shuffled his feet and ducked his head. “It’s a therapy thing. Just for me. For now. Is that okay?”

“Of course, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push.” She shoved away the unexpected hurt—Jay, keeping secrets? Sharing things with his therapist that he wouldn’t share with her?—and cradled his face in her hands. “It’s important stuff you’re doing, and you need to do it the way that’s best for you, okay?” Even if that left her out in the cold. She tugged his earlobes and scrunched her nose at him. “Have you investigated the kitchen yet? Maybe he’s left us a clue.”

“There’s a recipe in the stand.” He led her to the island. “See?”

Sure enough, an index card stood pinned by a magnet to the metal sunflower that could’ve been a cousin to the hibiscus on her desk at work. Same artist, probably.

The clock on the stove read 6:03, and the recipe called for roasting something for forty-five minutes. If Henry didn’t get home in the next twelve minutes, they’d be pushing dinner prep into playtime. She pulled her phone from her pocket and set it on the breakfast bar. “If he’s consulting with a client, I don’t want to interrupt him.”

Jay hunched beside her, elbows on the starry granite, and fiddled with the grip ridges on her phone case. “He wouldn’t text while he’s driving, so if he’s stuck in the car ’cause rush hour…”

“We should start dinner.” The work avalanche had only begun, and since her boss’s baby just had to be an early bird, she’d be trying to manage the chaos without any advance training. Two days of the admin headaches already had her begging for a relaxing weekend—and that was supposed to start with playtime, dammit. At seven o’clock precisely, dammit.

“We should?” Jay didn’t quite say the people who never, ever cook, but his skeptical tone conveyed it all the same. “Us?”

“Sure.” She lifted the recipe card from the stand and replaced the magnet. Better to do something than sit and do nothing but wonder whether work would get easier once she’d figured out the routines and whether Jay would be keeping more and more secrets from her. “We’ll just follow the directions, and he can demote us back to sous chefs and take over when he gets home.”

Jay kissed her cheek. “You’re the boss, bosslady.”

He opened the fridge and ducked inside. He had to be a furnace to ignore the chilly gust wafting out of there onto his naked body. Correction: delightfully naked body. But still. They called it an icebox for a reason.

“Focus, Alice,” she muttered. The recipe card, not Jay’s trim round ass.

“There’s chicken in here.” His arm hung across the fridge door, and he gazed back at her from beneath it, a half-upside-down pretzel. “Does it say what we do with it?”

She ran her finger down the ingredients, deciphering the neat script. “It’s not listed on the recipe. Maybe it’s for tomorrow. Do you see a delicate squash?”

“Uhhh…” Jay snort-laughed. “I don’t want to hurt its delicate feelings, but I don’t know what that is.”

“Me neither. Hang on.” Her phone search pointed out her error immediately. “Oh. Delicata, I guess?”

A full-throated laugh came back this time. “That doesn’t help me. Is that French or Italian for delicate? Because I don’t speak either.”

“That one letter wasn’t the crucial clue?” She might have overestimated their ability to put dinner together. Image search, image—aha. “I think it’s English for tall, narrow, stripey pumpkin thing.”

“Checking.” Jay backed out of the fridge, sadly not hoisting a pumpkin over his head in triumph. “I don’t see—”

Staring past her shoulder, he gently spun her around. There, on the counter beside the stove:

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