Winning His Heart: The Millionaire's Homecoming / The Maverick Millionaire

“I’m trying out recipes in an effort to keep busy and keep my mind off Bastigal. Would you like to try some homemade ice cream?”

He thought of the congealed porridge at his house. He thought he had to say no to this. He was in a weakened state. This could not go anywhere good.

But suddenly none of that mattered. He had carried his burdens in solitude for so long and it felt, ridiculously, as if they could be eased by this kitchen, by her, by the appeal of homemade ice cream.

He could not have said no to her invitation if he wanted to.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TO ADMIT KAYLA’S KITCHEN, and her invitation, and Kayla herself, were proving impossible to say no to felt as if it would be some kind of defeat, so instead of saying yes, David just lifted a shoulder as if he could care less whether he ate her ice cream or not.

Kayla did not seem to be fooled, and her eyes were gentle as they lingered on his face. Then she acted just as if she had heard the yes that he had not spoken.

“It’s not quite ready. Give me a second.”

“I hope it’s not rose petal,” he said, needing her to know he had not surrendered to her charms or the charms of her kitchen completely.

“Oh, way better than that.”

“But what could be?” he said drily.

“I bought this at a yard sale,” she said, turning away from him and back to her crowded countertop. She lifted off her counter a bowl big enough to bathe a baby in.

At first he thought she meant she had purchased the bowl at a yard sale but then she trundled over to a stainless-steel apparatus that squatted on her floor with a certain inexplicable air of malevolence. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed it before since it took up a whole corner of the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asked warily, and gratefully, as something in him shifted away from that awful picture of porridge dripping down the wall in his house next door.

“It’s called a batch freezer!” Kayla said triumphantly. “What are the chances I would find one just as I’m contemplating buying an ice cream store?”

“Cosmically ordained,” he said.

She either missed his sarcasm or refused to acknowledge it. “Exactly.”

“It reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“That’s ridiculous. If I remember correctly, HAL was not nice.”

“You slept through ninety percent of that movie. And you were the one who insisted we rent it.”

“I was in my all-things-space stage.” She sniffed. “It disappointed.”

But what David remembered was not disappointment, but that there had been a bunch of them in somebody’s basement rec room gamely watching the vintage sixties movie Kayla had rented.

Somehow she’d ended up crammed next to him on a crowded couch. And partway through—after gobbling down buttered popcorn and licking the extra butter off her fingers—he realized she had gone to sleep and her head was lolling against his shoulder, and the cutest little pool of drool was making a warm puddle on his shirt.

And that he hadn’t embarrassed her by mentioning it when she woke up.

“How much did you pay for this contraption?” he asked gruffly, moving over to inspect it.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said happily. “That’s a steal. New ones, of commercial grade, start at ten grand. This size of machine is eighteen thousand dollars.”

He realized, uncomfortably—and yet still grateful to have his focus shifting—that Kayla was way more invested in the idea of owning the ice cream parlor than she had originally let on.

“Presumably,” he said carefully, “More-moo already has one.”

“They don’t,” she crowed triumphantly. “They buy their ice cream from Rolling Hills Dairy, the same as you can buy for yourself at the grocery store. There is nothing special about that. Why go out for ice cream when you can have the same thing at home for a fraction of the price?”

“Exactly. Why?”

“That’s how I plan to be different. Homemade ice cream, in exotic flavors that people have never had before.”

She frowned at his silence, glanced back at him. “And, of course, I’ll offer the old standbys for boring people. Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. But still homemade.”

“So what flavor is this that you’re experimenting with?” he asked, curious despite himself.

“Dandelion!”

“And that’s better than rose petal?” he asked doubtfully.

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Have you done any kind of market research at all?”

“Don’t take the fun out of it,” she warned him.

“Look, fun is playing volleyball on the beach, or riding a motorcycle flat out, or skinny-dipping under a full moon.”

Something darkened in her eyes when he said that, and he wished he hadn’t because a strange, heated tension leaped in the air between them.

“Fun is fun, and business is business,” he said sternly.

And he was here on business. To return a sweater. But ever since he had walked in the door and felt almost swamped with a sensation of homecoming, his mission had felt blurry.

“That’s not what you said in the article for Lakeside Life,” she told him stubbornly. “You said if a man does what he loves he will never work a day in his life.”

What did it mean that she had read that so closely? Nothing, he told himself.

“I’d play with the name,” she said, ignoring his stern note altogether. “That’s part of the reason I like it better than rose petal, well, that and the fact it would be cheaper to produce. I’d call this flavor Dandy Lion.”

His look must have been blank, because she spelled it out for him. “D-A-N-D-Y L-I-O-N.”

“Oh.”

“Cute, huh?”

“Not to be a wet blanket but in my experience, cute is rarely a moneymaker. Look, Kayla, if ever there was a time to worry, this would be it. I don’t think people are going to line up to eat dandelion ice cream, no matter how you spell it.”

“Oh, what do you know?” she said, and her chin had a stubborn tilt to it. “They drink dandelion wine.”

“They do? I can’t imagine why.”

“Well, maybe not the people you hang out with.”

“I haven’t seen any of the good wineries with dandelion wine,” he said, keeping his tone calm, trying to reason with her. “And you can bet they do their homework. In fact, Blaze Enterprises is invested in Painted Pony Wineries and—”

But she turned her back to him, and turned on the machine and it drowned out his advice. He was pretty sure it was deliberate. She freed one arm to open a lid on the top of the stainless-steel machine, then tried to heft the huge bowl up high enough to pour the contents in a spout at the top.

At her grunt of exertion, he stepped up behind her and took the bowl. He gazed down into the bright yellow contents.

“Hell, Kayla, it looks like pee,” he said over the loudness of the machine.

Her face scrunched up in the cutest expression of disapproval. “It doesn’t! It looks bright and lemony.”

“Which, if you think about it, is what—”

She held up her hand, not wanting to hear it. He shrugged. “Whatever. In here?”

She nodded and he dumped the contents of the bowl in the machine through an opening she would have had to stand on a chair to reach.

Unlocked doors. Precarious balancing on chairs. And no phone to call anyone if she found herself in an emergency. Plus, spending fifteen hundred dollars on an idea that seemed hare-brained, and that should still be in the research stages, not the investing-in stages.

Why did he feel so protective of her? Why did he feel like she needed him? She had made it this far without his help, after all.

Though good choices were obviously not her forte.

It occurred to David that he felt helpless to do anything for his mother. And he hated that out-of-control feeling.

Not that Kayla would appreciate his trying to control her. But if he could help her a little bit—find her dog, pour her recipe for her so she didn’t risk life and limb climbing on one of her rickety chairs with this huge bowl, save her from throwing away any more money on ice-cream-themed machinery—those could only be good things.

Right?

The machine gobbled up the contents of the bowl with a huge sucking sound. David had to stand on his tiptoes to look inside. The mustard-yellow cream was being vigorously swished and swirled, and the machine was growling like a vintage motorcycle that he owned.

“How long?” he called over the deafening rumble.

“It’s going to come out here!” She showed him a wide stainless-steel spigot and handle. “It will be six to twelve minutes, depending on how hard I want the ice cream. We’ll try a sample after six.”

He peered back in the hole where he had dumped the cream. “Is this thing supposed to close?”

“I’m not sure all the parts were there. I need to look up the manual online. It didn’t come with the manual. I saved over sixteen thousand dollars—I can live with that.”

The stickler in him felt like now might be a really good time to point out to her that she hadn’t actually saved sixteen thousand dollars. She had spent fifteen hundred dollars.

He had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the half-empty perspective.

That was one of the glaring differences between them. That and the fact he would have looked up the manual before pouring several gallons of pricey cream into the vat.

“You can turn up the beater speed here,” she said proudly, and touched a button.

The growl turned into a banshee wail and then the yellow mixture was vomited out of the top of the machine through the same opening he had put it in. It came out in an explosive gush.

He yanked back his head from the opening just in time to avoid having his eyes taken out. A fountain of yellow slush sprayed out with the velocity of Old Faithful erupting. It hit the ceiling and rained down on them and every other surface in the kitchen.

He scrambled for the off switch on the ice cream maker and hit it hard.

The room was cast into silence.

Kayla stood there wide-eyed, covered from head to toe in yellow splotches. One dripped down from the roof and landed on David’s cheek.

She began to giggle. He was enchanted by her laughter, and it made him realize there was something somber in her and that she had not been like that before. Not just somber. And not quite hard.

Serious and studious, but not so...well, worried, weighed down by life. As if she had built a wall around herself to protect herself from life.

Suddenly, her laughter felt like a wave that was lifting him and carrying him away from his own troubles. He found himself laughing with her. It felt so good to stand there in the middle of her kitchen and see the hilarity in the situation, to let go of all the dark worry that had plagued him since he arrived home.

Then the laughter died between them.

And then she stepped up to him, and ran her finger across his cheek. She held the yellow smudge up for his inspection, and then, still smiling, she touched it to his lips.

The substance on her finger was already surprisingly chilled, and not quite liquid anymore, but like a frothy, cold mousse.

He hesitated, and then touched his tongue to the yellow glob. In an act of startling intimacy, he licked the substance off the tip of her offered finger.

Was it possible he had wanted to taste her finger ever since she had licked the butter off it all those years ago?

No. That was not even remotely possible.

Still, he was aware that the mess all around him had evaporated. It didn’t matter that he was covered in pee-colored mousse, or that it dripped from the ceiling, and spotted the walls and the countertops. It didn’t matter that it was splashed all across Kayla’s apron and clinging in clumps to her hair.

The flavor on his tongue made him feel as if he was about to die of sheer delight.

Or was the delight because his tongue had touched her finger?

“Well?” she demanded.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he confessed, “but Kayla, I think you may be onto something. Don’t call it Dandelion. Or Dandy Lion. Call it Ambrosia.”

Her smile put the very sun to shame.

So he didn’t bother to tell her that her finger was probably a very important ingredient in the ambrosia he had just experienced.

CHAPTER TWELVE

HIS LIPS WERE still way too close to her finger! Kayla wondered whatever had possessed her to touch his cheek, to hold her finger out to him, to invite his tongue to touch her. Something shivered along her spine—an electric awareness of him that was like nothing she had ever felt before.

She could feel her smile dissolving, her pleasure at his approval giving way to something else altogether.

She wasn’t an innocent young girl anymore, but the power of her hunger astounded her. She wanted him.

It felt like a kind of crime to want someone who had hurt her husband so badly. But had he really? Or had Kevin hurt himself over and over again, and then blamed the whole world in general and David in particular?

She shivered at the thought, and then thankfully, any kind of decision—to lean toward him, to touch his lips with her lips instead of her finger—was taken from her.

He, too, sensed the sudden sizzle of chemistry between them, but he had the good sense to back abruptly away from it.

He turned from her quickly, grabbed a dishcloth from the sink and began to clean up the mess.

That was David. All the time she had known him he had always stepped up to the plate, done what needed to be done.

Especially after the danger of having her finger nibbled, Kayla knew she needed to send him on his way, even if he hadn’t received any of the promised ice cream—unless you counted that one taste.

“According to what I read in Lakeside Life,” Kayla said, “you have better things to do than help me with my messes.”

“Don’t believe everything you read.”

He got a chair and climbed up on it and began to tackle the mess on her ceiling. She saw his shirt lifted and she saw the hard line of his naked tummy.

That hunger unfolded in her, even more powerful than before.

“You should go home.” It was self-protection and it was desperately needed!

“I’ll just give you a hand with this first.”

Kayla wanted to refuse and found that she couldn’t. It had been so long since she had had help with anything. Someone to share a burden with was as least as seductive as the sight of his naked skin. For so long she had carried every burden, large and small, all by herself.

An hour later her kitchen had been restored to order. Every surface shone. David had even ferreted out yellow cream in the toaster and wiped it from the inside of the light fixture.

But if the kitchen shone, they were a mess!

“I hope that isn’t a Slugs and Snails shirt,” Kayla said, but now that she was looking, she could see the distinctive small snail over the left breast.

“Of course it is,” he said, glancing down at the yellow blotches that she was fairly certain had already set on his very expensive shirt and shorts. “My company was their start-up investor. I always use the products of the companies we invest in.”

A reminder that the man standing here, in her kitchen, covered in yellow stains, was the CEO of a very prestigious company!

He misread her distressed expression. “I’m sure the stains will come out.”

“You don’t know the first thing about dandelions, do you?” she said, sadly. “When you do your laundry, that stain is not an easy fix.”

“I don’t do my own laundry,” he said, a little sheepishly.

It was a further reminder of who she was sharing her kitchen with. “Well, you could tell whoever does it to try lemon juice.”

“Is that why you smell like lemons?” he asked. “Because this is not your first experiment with dandelions?”

He had noticed her scent. Somehow it was headier than dandelion wine.

So when he said what he said next, she should have resisted with all her might. But she didn’t have a single bit of might left in her.

“I was on my way down to the lake to swim. Why don’t we just go jump in? Like the old days?”

A small smile was playing across the sensuous line of the mouth she had been foolish enough to touch.

She knew exactly what he was talking about. The last day of school, every year, all the kids in Blossom Valley went and jumped in the lake, fully clothed.

And suddenly he did not seem like the CEO of one of Canada’s most successful companies. David seemed like what she needed most in the world and had tried, pathetically perhaps, to find in a dog.

He seemed like a friend, and nothing in the world could have kept her from going and revisiting the most carefree time of her life by jumping in the lake with him!

“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll grab my lemon juice.”

They didn’t go to the public beach, but snuck down a much closer, but little-known lake access, between two very posh houses.

He stood patiently while she doused the stains on both their clothes with lemon juice. She set down the empty bottle and then rubbed the lemon into the stains. His skin beneath the fabric struck her as velvet over steel.

She heard his sharp intake of breath and looked up. He was watching her, his lips twitching with amusement but his eyes dark with something else.

Kayla gulped, let go of his shirt and backed away from him, spinning.

“Race you,” she cried over her shoulder, kicking off her flip-flops and already running. With a shout he came up behind her, and they hit the cold water hard. He cut the water in a perfect dive, and she followed. The day was already so hot that the cold water felt exquisite and cooling.

The water had been her second home since she had moved here. Beaches and this lake were the backdrop to everything good about growing up in a resort town.

It seemed the water washed away the bad parts of their shared past, and gave them back the happy-go-lucky days of their youth. They gave themselves over to play, splashing and racing, dunking each other, engaging in an impromptu game of tag, which he won handily, of course. He tormented her by letting her think she could catch him, and then in one or two powerful strokes he was out of her reach.

Kayla had known, when she had seen David run the other night, that he had lost none of his athleticism. But the water had always been his element.

His absolute strength and grace in it were awe-inspiring.

That and the fact his wet shirt had molded to the perfect lines of his chest. His hair was flattened and shiny with water, and the beads ran down the perfect plane of his face.

But the light in his eyes was warmer than the sun. That awareness of him that she had been feeling all morning—that had been pushed to the breaking point when she had scrubbed at his lemony shirt—was kept from igniting only by the coldness of the water.

Finally, gasping from exertion and laughter, they rolled over and floated side by side, completely effortless on their backs, looking up at a cloudless sky, the silence compatible between them. Even the awareness that had sizzled seemed to have morphed into something else, like the rain after the electrical storm, calm and cooling.

Finally, she broke the silence.

“I know you didn’t lie about him,” she said quietly. “David, I’m sorry I called you a liar.”

It felt so good that he said nothing at all, rolled his head slightly to look at her then rolled it back and contemplated the blueness of the sky.

The cold of the water finally forced them out. On the shore, she inspected his dripping clothes. The dandelion stains were unfazed by her lemon treatment.

“That will have to be your paint shirt,” she said, just as if he was a normal person who actually painted his own home when it needed it.

“Good idea,” he said, going along with her. Then, “For two relatively intelligent people, one of us could have remembered towels.”

“Watch who you’re calling relatively intelligent,” Kayla said, and shook her wet hair at him.

“This is a private beach,” a voice called.

They looked up to see a woman glaring at them from her deck.

In their youth, they would have challenged her. They would have told her there was no such thing as a private beach. That the entire lake and everything surrounding it to the high water mark—which would take them up to about where her lawn furniture was artfully displayed—belonged to the public. In their youth, they might have eaten their sandwiches on her manicured lawn.

But David just gave the sour-faced woman a good-natured wave, took Kayla’s hand, scooped up the empty lemon juice bottle and walked her back out between the houses.

They began the walk home, dripping puddles as they went. Somehow, David didn’t let go of her hand. They laughed when her flip-flops made slurping sounds with every step.

She tried to remember the last time she had felt so invigorated, so alive, so free. Oh, yeah. It had been just the other night, lying beside him in the cool grass, looking at the stars.

A siren gave a single wail behind them and then shut off.

They both whirled.

“Oh, no,” Kayla said. “It’s the same guy.”

“She called the police because we were on her beach?” David said incredulously.

Kayla could feel the laughter bubbling within her. “You and I have become a regular two-person crime wave,” she said. “Who would have thought that?”

The policeman got out of his car and looked at them. And then he reached back inside.

Kayla squealed.

“Bastigal!”

She raced forward and the dog wriggled out of the policeman’s arms and into her own. Her face was being covered with kisses and she realized she was crying and laughing at the same time.

But even in her joy it occurred to her that her dog had been returned to her only when she had learned the lesson: Bastigal was no kind of replacement for human company, for a real friend.

“Did your daughter find him?” David asked. Kayla glanced at him. He was watching her with a smile tickling the edges of that damnably sexy mouth.

“Yeah.”

“I guess she’s going to be getting that new bike,” David said.

“She’ll have to find another way to get her new bike.”

“What? Why?”

“I told her she can’t take the reward. You do good things for people because it’s right, not because there’s something in it for you. To me, teaching her that is more important than a new bike. Though at the moment, she hates me for it.”

“I’m going to buy an ice cream parlor,” Kayla said, the tears sliding even faster down her face.

“Maybe you’re going to buy an ice cream parlor,” David growled in an undertone.

Kayla ignored him. “Tell your daughter she gets free ice cream for life.”

The policeman lifted a shoulder, clearly trying to decide if that was still accepting a reward. Finally, he said, with a faint smile, “Sure. Whatever. Hey, by the way, you were called in for trespassing.”

“Really?” She shouldn’t be delighted, but what had happened to her life? It had surprises in it!

“As soon as I heard two fully clothed people swimming, I somehow knew it was you,” he said wryly. “I told the complainant she only owns to the high water line.”

And then all of them were laughing and the dog was licking her face and Kayla wondered if she had ever had a more perfect morning.

The policeman left and they continued on their way, Bastigal content in her arms.

David reached over and scratched his ears. “He’s so ugly he’s cute,” he said.

“I prefer to think that he’s so cute, he’s ugly,” she retorted. “I think that nice policeman should let his daughter have the reward.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. That kind of stand reminded me of what my dad was like,” David said quietly.

“I never met your dad,” Kayla said.

“No. I think he died a year or two before your family moved here. Completely unexpected. He seemed in every way like a big, strong guy. He had a heart attack. It was instant. He was sitting there having his supper, joking around, and he got a surprised look on his face and keeled over.”