“That good, huh?” He chuckled and flashed that bright smile at me again.
“Well, I made all my favorites today. You can’t ask me to choose between them.”
“Then I won’t.” Grabbing one of each, he set them all out in a row in front of him and pulled another chair toward him. “All right, let’s do this.”
I laughed out loud and grabbed a knife before moving to take the seat next to him. “Trust me, you’d regret it if you ate all of them.” My cupcakes weren’t exactly small, and they were rich—he would go into a sugar coma in about half an hour if he finished those off. I grabbed the triple chocolate and cut it into fourths before handing him a piece and cleaning off the knife.
“Oh, damn,” he said with a groan. He kept chewing until it was gone. “Was that—” He looked at the rest of the cupcake. “Is that pudding in the center?” I smiled and started cutting the chocolate peanut butter one. “You put pudding in a cupcake?”
“Yeah, my ma—Um, my aunt Barbara and I wanted something different than the normal crème or custard that usually goes in the center.” I looked back into his brown eyes and shrugged. “It’s messier, but it works for that one. And that’s the only cupcake I do that with. All right, try this one. It doesn’t have a filling.”
He tasted the next two cupcakes, and after groaning or grunting his appreciation for each one, he kept pointing back to the “pudding cupcake,” saying it was still his favorite. But the red velvet was next, and it was a customer favorite, so . . .
“I thought you were going to be eating these with me. If I’m picking my favorite out of the bunch, you need to pick your favorite too—or at least your favorite for today.”
I laughed uneasily. “Uh, no, I’m good.”
Aiden nudged my side and pointed at the banana nut cupcake he’d just tried. “You’re this incredible baker and you don’t even eat your own food?”
“Oh, no, she does,” Kinlee spoke up for me. “She just doesn’t when other people are around. Well, people other than me.”
Aiden’s face fell. “You’re not one of those girls who won’t eat in front of guys, are you?”
“She’ll eat all right, just not sweets.”
“I’m really critical of myself—” I began, but Kinlee cut me off.
“Pfft, no you’re not. She just looks like she’s having an orgasm every time she eats something sweet.”
My breath came out in a huff and I couldn’t help but laugh as my elbow hit the table and my forehead fell into my hand.
Jace, Craig, and Aiden all burst out laughing, and Aiden tried to speak through his hysterics. “Oh, God, I have to see this now.”
“No, you really don’t!” I leaned back in my chair, eyes wide.
Aiden was still laughing so hard he could barely keep his arm up as he teased me. “I’ll even feed it to you—we’ll call it foreplay.”
A shot of desire hit my stomach hearing his deep voice say that, but I was able to maintain my sanity for the time being and dodged the piece of cake in his hands. “Kinlee! We are not friends for the rest of the day and no free cupcakes all next week.”
She gasped. “What? That is beyond rude! Jace, hold her arms down!”
I slipped out of the chair, darted past Jace, and took off for the living room. It was just like Kinlee to say something like that in front of guys I’d just met—one of whom she was trying to set me up with—but they didn’t understand, it was really embarrassing the way I reacted to my sweets. No way in hell I was gonna allow them to feed me!
I’d just rounded the corner leading out of the living room when I ran into a brick wall. The wall’s hands shot out and grabbed my upper arms to steady me at the same time I reached out and grabbed broad shoulders in an attempt to keep myself upright and looked up. I inhaled audibly, and his gray eyes widened as his lips separated. My chest was rising and falling quicker than normal, and it had absolutely nothing to do with running away from Jace or running into the most incredible-looking man I’d ever seen, but damn if it didn’t have everything to do with the man himself.
He was looking at me as if he’d just found what he’d been looking for—and the look was so open, so intense, it sent a shiver running down my spine. It should have scared me, but it somehow felt like what I was looking at was a reflection of what I was feeling.
And that just made no sense. I wasn’t looking for anyone. But this man? Yeah, I’d found everything I’d never even known I’d been looking for . . . in him. I could feel it in the way I felt like I needed to be closer to him than I already was, the way the tips of my fingers were tingling with a need to explore his body, the way I was physically aching to know everything about him. And yet, I felt like I knew everything there was to know about him, and we still hadn’t said a word. It felt like hours had passed before Jace’s voice sounded behind me.
“Kace, sooner you eat a bite, sooner this is all over!”
Eat a bite . . . what? I couldn’t remember why I’d even ended up in the entryway of Jace and Kinlee’s house, let alone make sense of his words right now. All I knew was that Jace had brought me back to reality, that I felt like I was home, like I was where I was meant to be for the first time in my life . . . and it was in a stranger’s arms. That thought—that realization—was scaring the ever-living hell out of me.
The stranger holding me blinked rapidly, and his hands tightened before he let go and took a step away from me. Even then, we still couldn’t tear our eyes away from each other . . .
“KC, you can’t hi—What the hell, you’re not even trying to hide. Oh, hey, Brody!” Jace said loudly, stepping between us to hug him.
. . . until Jace’s last word. I dropped my head to stare at the floor, my eyes wide with horror.