Millie clapped her hands. “Oh, yes! We can do that. Right, Daddy?”
“We’ll talk,” was all he said as he stepped inside and shrugged free of his jacket, hanging it from the wall pegs already sporting a bright red parka and a tiny blue snowsuit. He looked from the suit to Millie and shook his head.
“Hard to believe she was ever that small.”
“And Casey’s a big guy. Right, squirt?”
Casey nodded slowly. Big blue eyes checked Hank out from head to toe. Apparently satisfied, he patted Brynn’s cheek.
“Casey blocks. Pease.”
“Good manners, bud. Millie, there’s a bunch of toys in the bedroom. Could you take Casey in there and show him around?”
The smile on Millie’s face was bright enough to ease his worries, at least for the moment. “Oh, yes! Come on, Casey!” She held out her hand. Miracle of miracles, Casey grabbed hold and followed her down the hall while Millie talked about the rooms, the work and whether they might be able to make something explode that night.
As her voice faded, Hank realized that, thanks to his own weakness, he was now alone with Brynn and would have to make conversation. Dammit. Ian could talk about anything, Carter and Cash put Millie to shame, but the small-talk gene had skipped him.
Still, he needed to say something.
“This, uh, really is nice of you,” Hank said as Brynn headed back to the kitchen area.
“My pleasure. And, like I said, army quantities.” She lifted the lid of a slow cooker and gave a stir. He caught sight of deep red sauce, inhaled the warmth and felt like he’d walked into a sixties sitcom. “Without help, I’d be eating this three meals a day for a week. No hardship, but my jeans wouldn’t be too happy about it.”
He couldn’t help it. That was a comment that begged a man to check out the curve of her hips. She might not be wearing jeans at the moment, but he remembered the way they’d fit her on move-in day, the way they had hugged as she lifted and hauled, and he had to agree that any action that spoiled that view would indeed be a sin.
“So are you settling in okay? Have everything you need?” He glanced around the space, which already felt cozier. “You’re kind of our test case for this cabin-rental thing, so if I messed up anything, let me know. Don’t be shy.”
Oh, that was rich—him telling her to not be shy. Pot, meet kettle.
She laughed as she opened the refrigerator. “My brothers would tell you that shyness is the least of my issues. Everything is great so far. This place really is adorable—not just my cabin, but all of it. How long have you been here?”
“A few months. My sort-of uncle Lou finally admitted he couldn’t keep up with things anymore and let me buy it off him.”
“So it’s been in the family a while.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so cool. We moved a lot when I was little, and my brothers were more into taking things apart and destroying them than preserving them.” She pulled grated cheese and salad ingredients from the shelves and handed them to him. He took them automatically. “It’s nice to see things being passed down through a family. Traditions, heirlooms. Things that last.”
He couldn’t hold back the snort. “The only things that were lasting around here were the river, the rocks and the foundations. Lou should have admitted defeat years ago. I still don’t know if I’ll have everything up and running by May.”
“Given what I’ve seen of your work thus far, I have no doubt that you’ll do just fine.”
“Thanks.”
“Total truth.” She held out a bottle. “I need a beer. Care to join me?”
He meant to say no—after all, he still had a full night ahead—but what kind of host would he be to refuse? Or, for that matter, what kind of guest?
The bottle was halfway to his lips when she made a small sound.
“Crap! I always forget. Would you like a glass?”
“No, thanks. This is fine.”
“You’re sure? I’m a horrible hostess—sorry. I never remember the gracious touches when I’m off-duty.”
It was so unexpected—the organizational queen forgetting something—that he felt himself relaxing. Maybe even grinning. “You’re feeding me and you made my kid happy. I can’t think of anything more gracious than that.”
A slight hint of pink rose in her cheeks, spreading down her neck to the creamy bit of skin visible in the vee of her jersey. It was an intriguing sight, for sure. He could swear there was a little freckle at the point of the vee. Or maybe it was a fleck of sauce. He couldn’t tell. Neither could he pull his gaze away. Because even though he couldn’t see it, he was suddenly very aware that the opening of the jersey was a few tiny millimeters above the sweet line of cleavage, a part of the female anatomy he had always found highly alluring.
She turned slightly to grab a bubbling pot from the stove, breaking his concentration and making him realize, with embarrassment, that he’d been staring a bit too intently for a little too long at a particularly dangerous zone.
And he’d been worried about Millie overstepping her bounds.
“Did your brother play for the Leafs?” Okay, lame line, but it sort of excused his blatant perusal.
The slight quirk to her eyebrows told him how much she bought it. But instead of giving him the lecture he deserved, she simply dumped pasta into the colander in the sink.
“No,” she said. “He was all over the place for a while, but didn’t really hit his stride until he landed in Detroit.”
“So you wear that to harass him?”
She turned back, her face twisted in a mix of humor and chagrin. “I wear it for me. Because try as I might, I can’t stop rooting for them.”
A feeling he knew well. “A sucker for the underdog, huh?”
“It’s pathetic. If they’re playing lousy and I try to cheer for another team, I feel like a traitor, but if they actually do a good job, I can’t walk away because this might be the year they turn it around.”
“I’m sorry.”
She laughed and gave the colander a shake before swishing her hands at him, a motion he recognized as a request to step back. “Sometimes I think about forming a support group—Diehard Leafs Fans Anonymous—but then I wonder if anyone would be willing to admit to it.”
“Well, winters can get pretty long around here. Time it right and it could be the biggest excitement to hit town in years.”
She laughed again, dumped the drained pasta back into the pot and added a heaping ladle of the sauce. The smell of all that beef and garlic was getting to him. It was the only way to account for the slight light-headedness that was taking him over. It had to be the food. Maybe the beer on a mostly empty stomach.
God help him if it was the woman.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRYNN HAD ALWAYS felt that Sunday afternoons in winter were meant for curling up with a good book and a bottomless cup of peppermint tea, but she could count on one hand the number of times that life had decided she’d earned that reward. Which was undoubtedly why she was spending this particular Sunday talking about work and men—not necessarily in that order—with Taylor.
“I stopped at the park on my way over,” she