Not to spend the evening with Jace.
But she could hardly believe herself, knowing Willy would never notice that she’d showered and shampooed her hair for the second time today, reapplied blush, mascara and eyeliner, and carefully chosen her best cashmere turtleneck sweater to wear over her black slacks because the color made her skin look luminous.
She was there to see Willy. There to see Willy. There to see Willy…
“The door’s open,” Jace called from inside when she rang the bell.
Clair let herself in to Jace’s second call. “We’re in the kitchen.” She followed the sound of his voice instructing Willy. “Pat it out like a mud pie the way I showed you.”
From the living room she went into the dining room, then through the swinging door and into the kitchen, which she’d barely caught a glimpse of before. The walls were painted bright blue around the natural oak cupboards and white appliances. A large round table monopolized the center of the room, surrounded by four ladder-back chairs.
Jace was standing at the table, and Willy was beside him, kneeling on the seat of one of the chairs. There was a wooden pastry board in front of them both, and while Jace pressed dough into a round pizza pan at one end, Willy attempted to do the same with a considerably smaller piece on a cookie sheet at the other end of it.
“Hi,” Jace greeted her, glancing up from what he was doing to cast her a welcoming smile that seemed to make the kitchen even brighter.
“Hi,” Clair answered. Then she added, “Hi, Willy.”
Willy, of course, barely muttered a “Hi” in return, without so much as looking at her.
“He’s learnin’ to be a pizza man,” Jace said proudly.
“Pizza man,” the little boy repeated as if it were a title he was eager to have.
Clair watched the two of them pressing floured fingers into the soft dough to spread it ever wider. Willy put too much pressure into it most of the time and jammed his fingers all the way through, leaving holes here and there.
But Jace was more adept, and she marveled at how such powerful hands could be so agile. Agile enough, she supposed, to knead a woman’s flesh much the same way, with just the right amount of pressure, just the right amount of tenderness, just the right amount of firmness…
“Pull up a seat,” he said, interrupting her wandering thoughts none too soon. “We’re just about to put on all the trimmings.”
Clair straightened her posture, took a deep breath and once more reminded herself that she was only there to see Willy.
“Can I do something to help?” she asked.
“Pour yourself a glass of wine.”
So she hadn’t been the only one with that idea.
“There are three glasses near the bottle on the counter,” Jace said with a nod in the direction of the tiled countertop near the sink.
“Willy gets wine?”
Jace made a face at her. “He gets the grape juice next to it. But if you don’t put it in a wineglass he’ll only want what we’re having.”
“Oh,” Clair said, chagrined at overlooking the obvious.
She did the honors, surprised to find the wine he had breathing on the counter was a particularly good vintage.
He really was more than he appeared to be on the surface, she thought. Or maybe she was overlooking the obvious when it came to him, too.
She supposed it was easy enough to do. There he was, a big, rugged cowboy with an extremely handsome face and an amazing body, dressed pretty much the same each time she’d seen him—in blue jeans and, tonight, a plain tan-colored shirt.
It was difficult to look past those superficial things, and the stereotype that came with them, to think that he might be a chef who made his own pizza dough and canned his own sauce. Or that he might have the same kind of knowledge about wines that the last man she’d been involved with had after taking classes on the subject to impress his friends. Or that Jace would be as talented as he was with a small child.
But there it all was, making him a more interesting person than she had expected him to be. A more interesting person than she wanted him to be, because it made it so much harder not to be intrigued. And impressed. And affected by him.
When she had the wine and grape juice poured, she took the glasses to the table.
Jace and Willy were both spreading thick tomato sauce on their respective crusts. Willy kept an eagle eye on Jace’s every movement, mimicking him as best he could but still slopping some of the sauce over the edges of the dough, while Jace managed to spread an even layer, leaving just the right amount of plain crust around the perimeter.
On went pieces of fresh mozzarella, then sliced black olives. But Willy stopped there while Jace added roasted peppers, onions, fresh mushrooms and sausage to the main pie.
Willy occupied himself by putting olive rings on each of his fingers.
“Lookit,” he said to Jace, giggling at his innovation.
Jace laughed at him but said, “Don’t put those back in the bowl now.”
Willy didn’t. He ate each one off his fingers.
Then the pizzas went into the oven, and the two of them cleared the mess with Clair looking on.
“Have you ever thought of being a teacher?” she asked Jace when he dispatched Willy to set the table and the tiny child actually did it, apparently having been taught how before tonight.
“Now you want to coop me up in a building every day?” Jace joked, referring to their day care discussion on the drive home earlier.
“You’re pretty incredible with kids.”
He shrugged negligently as he put a salad together. “It doesn’t take more than a little time and patience. And likin’ ’em.”
“And you do like them, don’t you?”
“Yep. Maybe it comes from being the firstborn. My mom always said she taught me to walk and talk and I took over from there with all my brothers so she didn’t have to. Mainly I remember just wantin’ ’em to talk instead of cry all the time and to be able to get around on their own so we could play.”
“I was the oldest child, too. Well, obviously, since you knew Kristin, you knew she wasn’t the oldest. I think it always made me feel sort of parental toward her.”
Clair wasn’t sure why she’d told him that but she did know that she hadn’t meant to allow sadness in her voice. Yet it was there, anyway, and in response Jace seemed to sober some.
“There was just you and Kristin? No other brothers or sisters?” he asked as if he were genuinely interested.
“No, just us. I know it seems like there should have been some other kids between us—nearly ten years is quite an age span. But there weren’t any.”
“Be kind of hard not to mother a sister that much younger.”
“Mmm. Especially when there wasn’t a real mother in the picture.”
His eyebrows rose slightly. “I didn’t know that. Kristin didn’t talk much about her family. She just said that she’d shamed them and so she couldn’t have anything to do with them anymore.”
“Oh, that’s not true!” Clair lamented in pure reflex to the stab that statement unintentionally delivered.
The timer went off just then to let them know Willy’s pizza was finished baking.
Jace took it