She walked to her front door to the staccato sound of her own heels and realized she hadn’t put on any music. She opened the door and Dec stood there with his hair still damp at his collar, wearing a pair of khaki shorts and an open-necked shirt and deck shoes. He had on a pair of sunglasses, which he pushed up on the top of his head when she opened the door.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he said. “It seems like forever since I’ve seen you.”
“Me, too,” she said with a blush. She stepped back so he could enter. He handed her a bouquet of multi-colored flowers. The bouquet was large and she glanced down at it.
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t know which kind you liked so I settled on this bunch of gerbera daisies because they reminded me of you.”
She looked down at the yellow, pink and orange petals with their large brown centers. This was such a warm bouquet of flowers. “How do these remind you of me?”
“They make me smile,” he said.
She felt a giddy rush of joy shoot through her. She wanted to be cautious, to tell herself to slow down and not take everything he said as an undeclared admission of love for her. But it was hard. She saw him now in the new light of her emotions.
“Why are you smiling at me like that?” he asked.
“You can be very nice sometimes, Dec.”
“Sometimes? I thought I was nice all the time.”
She just shook her head and leaned over to kiss him. She meant for it to be a light thank-you sort of buss on the lips, but instead it turned into something more. She wrapped her free arm around his shoulders and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss him fully.
“Wow, if this is the reaction I get to a bunch of flowers, I’m going to give them to you every day,” he said.
She stepped back. The thought of him being with her every day filled her with that same bubbly feeling. She truly felt like nothing could spoil this night and that everything in her adult life had been leading to this moment. The timer started going off in the kitchen and DJ started to cry at the same time.
“DJ or kitchen?” he asked. “I don’t mind helping out with either.”
“Would you mind getting DJ?” she asked. She thought he’d rather spend time with his son then try to figure out what she needed him to do in the kitchen. Besides, she wanted her dinner and dessert to be perfect.
“Not at all,” he said with a grin. He seemed to smile more easily these days than he had six weeks ago, and she hoped that it was because of her.
“Do I need to do anything special to get DJ ready?”
“Um…change his diaper and I laid out a little outfit for him to wear. Can you get him dressed?”
Dec nodded. “I think I can manage.”
He walked down the hall and she hurried into the kitchen, setting the daisies on the counter while she opened the freezer to scrape her icy mixture. Then she got out a vase for the flowers and tried not to let the fact that he’d brought them to her mean as much as it did.
The fact was she didn’t get flowers that often. Her sisters had sent her a bouquet after she’d given birth to DJ, but before that it had been years since she’d received them. She trimmed the stems and arranged the flowers in the vase before setting it in the middle of the island in her kitchen.
Then she went back to getting dinner ready. She had assembled the ingredients for a fresh and simple sauce for the pasta with basil, cherry tomatoes and some minced garlic. She filled a large pot with water and put it on to boil, and then turned her attention to making the garlic bread.
Since she was watching her weight since she’d given birth—it was a lot harder to take off the baby weight than she’d expected it to be—she was making a low-cal version of garlic bread with thinly sliced French bread that she’d rub a piece of garlic on when it was all toasted.
She realized she was nervous about the food and the table setting and everything else, but what she really wanted was for dinner to be over and for her to talk to Dec. He’d said he had something important to discuss, too, and she hoped that after the way he’d been at the door a few minutes ago he’d tell her he cared for her as much as she did for him.
She felt the first twinge of doubt in her stomach as she realized that she desperately wanted him to love her.
* * *
Dec would have laughed in the face of anyone who six weeks ago would have said he’d be changing a diaper and getting ready to spend the night at home. It just wasn’t his scene—or it hadn’t been. But tonight with the homey smell of dinner wafting through the house and his ten-month-old son chattering at him as he dressed him, Dec felt like he was in the only place he should be.