Page 20 of Whisking It All

WhiskyBusiness: Haven’t been yet. But it’s on my list.

WhiskyBusiness: Oh! He’s gonna do it!

A smile slid across Tessa’s face as she watched Peter London extend his hand to the flustered home baker on the screen. Something about this show always soothed her when she was feeling on edge, and after her run in with Jamie that morning, she was seriously fighting the instinct to bolt. The woman on screen made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a strangled laugh as she accepted the coveted handshake.

DiceDiceBaby: Why do women lose their minds over this guy?

WhiskyBusiness: It’s the eyes.

WhiskyBusiness: And the confidence.

WhiskyBusiness: Peter London has BDE if I ever saw it.

DiceDiceBaby: BDE?

WhiskyBusiness: Big. Dick. Energy.

She bit her lip, her fingers hovering over the screen of her phone as she considered her next words. She shook her head, going with her first instinct. She and DDB had been messaging—and flirting—for months; there was no point in stopping now.

WhiskyBusiness: Know anything about that?

DiceDiceBaby: I know all about that.

“I’m off,” Ethan said, coming into his living room where Tessa sat in the armchair, her leg hooked over the overstuffed arm as she watched Brilliant British Bakes. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

“To bar trivia with your friends?” she asked, doing her best to look like someone who hadn’t just been on the verge of soliciting a dick pic from a stranger on the internet. “No thanks. I’m good.” The last thing she needed to do was spend any extra time around Jamie.

“Well, if you change your mind we’ll be at The Rookery. I’m sure the guys would love to see you.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “More like the town biddies would love to see me so they can have fresh gossip for church coffee hour.”

She was prepared to run into people throughout town who’d known her as a child, people she and her mother had worked hard to forget. They’d ask about her mother, unaware that she’d passed three years ago—somehow that bit of gossip hadn’t made its way around town—and throw out the same things she’d heard every day when she’d lived in Aster Bay as a child: “Look how you’ve grown,” or “You are the spitting image of your mother,” followed promptly by an assessing look as though she might actually be Stephanie Cordeiro, returned to the town that ran her off.

He chuckled and ran his hand over the back of his neck sheepishly. “That too. But Gav and Baz haven’t seen you since you were a kid. I don’t think Jamie even recognized you today.”

He most certainly did not, she thought, heat rising in her cheeks.

She was prepared for all those awkward encounters with the people who would never forgive her mother for the sin of being a teenage mother. She hadn’t been prepared for her one-night stand to turn out to be her father’s best friend, or for the way the hunger in his eyes would turn to disgust when he realized who she was. Yet even his anger sent need pulsing between her thighs. Somehow that fire in his eyes and the way he clearly got off on being called ‘Chef’ made him even harder to resist.

You cannot fuck your dad’s best friend…again.

“You’re sure I can’t convince you?” Ethan asked. “First round’s on me.”

He was so damn earnest and she wanted to spend time with him, to get to know the father she’d hardly seen for the last seventeen years. That was the main reason she’d come back to Aster Bay after all these years—that and her determination to earn the money her grandparents had left her. If her mother had taught her anything it was to earn what you took. But she didn’t know how to do this, how to be Ethan’s daughter or his friend, never mind both.

She’d long ago figured out that her father’s absence in her life was more her mom’s doing than his, and now that her mother was gone, it felt like time to go back to Aster Bay, even if the town made her itchy. She wouldn’t be staying for long. A few months to build a relationship with the man she couldn’t bring herself to call ‘dad’ and give her resume a boost along the way, and then she’d be out of Rhode Island and off on her next adventure, with enough cash to finally travel before she had to find a new place to land.

Her phone chimed again, and she glanced down to see a new message from DDB. “Get out of here,” she said to her father with a smile. “You don’t want to keep your friends waiting.”

“Next time then.” Ethan knocked on the door frame once and left the room, the rumble of his truck pulling out of the driveway following a few moments later.

DiceDiceBaby: So is that your type? Snarky British dudes who withhold affection and praise?

Tessa snorted.

WhiskyBusiness: Nah, too proper. I’d freak him out.

DiceDiceBaby: Why do you say that?

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