Reserved (24 page)

“I heard.” He moved toward her. “Are you still glad you put ‘it’ on the table last night?”

“Did you just use air quotes for what we . . . what happened last night?”

Travis nodded and she stepped into him.

“Looks good on you,” he said, touching her hair and pulling her in to close the last of the space between them.

“Oh, yeah? I’m still a little flushed and my lips are supremely well kissed, so even though I’m sure my hair is a mess, thank you. It feels good on me too.”

He kissed her neck and she felt him smile. “I was talking about my T-shirt, but the rest looks good on you too.”

Kenna blushed, which she honestly didn’t think was possible after last night, but her mouth had done it again. He meant the T-shirt and she blabbered on, but before she could analyze too much, he kissed her. Her hands traveled up his warm back and even though she wanted to be casual, cool, her knees weakened. When he pulled back from the kiss, Kenna was sure all of her feelings were right there. She’d shown up last night in an attempt to be daring, to get her man, but as often happened with Travis, the tables were turned and he’d gotten her too.

Travis sat on the counter of his kitchen and watched her make him breakfast. She’d insisted, and if he wasn’t halfway in love with her already, her scrambled eggs and diagonally cut toast with jam just about finished him off.

“I’m not sure a woman has ever cooked for me before.”

“Your mom,” Kenna said, biting into a triangle of toast as they sat across from each other at his small round dining room table.

He laughed. “Okay, yes, my mother has cooked for me, but I don’t usually put her in the woman category.”

“True.”

He reached out, wiped some strawberry off the corner of her mouth, and licked his finger. Her eyes fell to his lips and lit with a passion he now recognized.

“I like your place.” She crunched into her toast again. “It’s very . . . uniform.”

He laughed. “Nothing like your house?”

“No. There’s not much uniform in my house right now because there are clothes all over my bedroom. I might have had a hard time figuring out what to wear yesterday. I was nervous and before I knew it, you were at my door looking your usual calm, cool self.”

“You didn’t seem nervous.”

“Oh, trust me, I was. Still am, actually.”

He took her hand. “You don’t need to be.” He wasn’t sure why he said that because he was past nervous, but he supposed she didn’t need to know that. It was their first morning together; she was sitting at his breakfast table in his T-shirt. As far as fantasies went, this one just about topped his previous Makenna farm girl fantasy, so he didn’t want to spoil it.

“Don’t I? This is all so strange, don’t you think?”

“Not really. I think it’s been brewing for a while,” he said with a collected cool that surprised even him. “This was our next step, don’t you think?”

“I guess it was, but we’re sort of suspended here, you know, the rest of our worlds aren’t at the table.”

“You mean Paige isn’t at the table.”

She looked at him, her eyes uncertain, and then her shoulders rolled back as if she was preparing for something. “Yes, that’s what I mean. She’s my life and this feels strange. I mean it feels, it felt—”

Travis smiled and knew he wasn’t helping her find her words, so he took her hands across the table. “Let’s try this one step at a time. This is our first morning, I’d like another one sometime when it works for you, but again, Kenna, your world is still your world. I don’t want to mess with that.” He squeezed her hands and she was right, the whole thing was weird because his words sounded good, but he could see she wasn’t buying it. Her order was being toppled, he was shifting her normal and as much as he didn’t want to hurt her, the urge to love her was becoming too damn strong.

Chapter Twenty-Three

T
he next week flew by in a blur of last-minute catering details. As Kenna helped load the last of the prep work onto one of the trucks, she decided she would take the Depression glass and the punch bowl over in her car. In less than eight hours, Grady and Kate would be married, and Kenna was the one with butterflies.

She felt his now-familiar hand at her back and the warmth of Travis’s body as he stopped behind her and spoke into her neck. “In case today’s a complete disaster, I wanted to kiss you one last time as a successful and employed chef.” His lips touched her skin, and Kenna laughed.

“Yeah? Well, today better not be even a little disaster. We’ve triple checked everything and I can’t imagine anything—”

He pulled her over to the side of the truck and wrapped her in his arms. “It was a joke. A reason to touch you because it never seems to be enough.”

He kissed her, and Makenna almost dropped her clipboard. One touch of his tongue and somehow all the details could wait, and when his hands slid into her hair, the whole damn wedding could wait. She knew all about needing more and was so grateful Gracie was now almost a week past her due date. Paige had insisted on going up each night after school and last night, according to her Donk, she fell asleep in the barn. Kenna missed her daughter being home at night, but what was supposed to be one night with Travis had turned into four, and Kenna still wasn’t quite sure how she was going to introduce him into their life. It was good that Paige was still watching Gracie because it gave Kenna more time to try to sort things out.

The horn of one of the trucks sounded, and Travis pulled back from the kiss to touch her face, as he always did. It was kind of like he was checking to make sure she was real.

“All right. Showtime.” He kissed her gently again. “I’ll see you there.”

She was pretty sure she actually sighed as her mind returned to the clipboard now dangling from her hand.

“Right, I’ll be there in a couple of hours. I want to finish going over everything with Sage. Last time I checked, she was rolling her eyes at the fill-in bartender we got so she could do my job tonight.”

“Yeah, even though we spent last week with Larry going over the menu, I’m pretty sure he’s praying people only order pizza all day. At least Logan will be here through lunch.” He smiled. “I’m sure they’ll all be fine holding down the fort. It’s one night. I’ve got Todd with me, so we know the place won’t burn down.”

“Right. I’m trying not to think about it. I can only focus on this wedding right now. How are you always so calm?”

“It’s all an act, or it’s that I woke up with you in my bed again this morning, so not much else matters.”

She blushed. “Oh, really? Well, two hundred fifty guests aren’t going to care about that.” She laughed. “Get going.”

Travis pulled away and turned to leave but turned back. “Hey, by the way, about those heels. Any chance you have multiple pairs of those, too?”

His eyebrows wiggled up and down. Kenna realized he was happy. Sure, Travis was always casual and relaxed, but this was different. He seemed almost youthful and happy. She was part of that, and the thought almost knocked her over.

He was still standing waiting for an answer, so she shook her head and looked around to make sure the entire staff hadn’t just heard them. “You’re impossible. I have one pair of heels, well, one pair of black heels.”

Travis stood still, waiting.

“Fine, I have several pairs of heels. We’ll do a shoe tour later, much later.”

“Yeah, we will,” Travis said with an enthusiasm that had her already feeling naked.

She hit his back with the clipboard. “Now go or it’s Crocs and cotton unicorn underwear for you from now on.”

He laughed, leaned in to steal one more kiss, and was gone.

Kenna stood watching all three trucks pull out of the parking lot on their way to the Wayfarers Chapel grounds.
Sexy, that’s how he made her feel,
she thought, holding the clipboard to her chest as the truck disappeared into Saturday morning traffic. When she was younger, she was more insecure and not quite sure what to do with herself as a woman. But with Travis, she was almost flirty and that was fun, Kenna decided. Maybe she’d needed some fun for a while now. Smiling, still standing in the morning air, she brushed her hair off her face and turned to get back to work.

Travis was stupid happy. He should have known he would never stand a chance once he allowed himself to want her. She was more than he ever imagined, and he was certain she was going to bring him to his knees. But right now, he needed to focus.

He’d never seen anything quite like the Wayfarers Chapel or the two acres of incredible redwood forest he was now marveling at from under the tent of their temporary kitchen. So far, everything had gone smoothly: warmer drawers were working, hot things would be hot, and cold things would be cold. That was half the battle with cooking. Since the first moment he stepped into a kitchen in high school, Travis knew this was his thing, what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Everything since that moment had been an adventure, an ever-changing set of challenges and milestones he wouldn’t alter for anything in the world. Contrary to his family’s ignorant beliefs, being a chef was never boring and rarely involved a hair net. He was about to serve a wedding in a huge white tent under the stars. Travis recorded the moment in his mind and then got to work.

Chapter Twenty-Four

G
rady Malendar and Katherine Galloway were married just after sunset on Saturday evening at the Wayfarers Chapel on the edge of the California coast. Peter Everoad was Grady’s best man, as Grady had been for him several months before when Peter had married Samantha Cathner at the Huntington Library. Kate’s best friend Reagan, wearing a floral halter dress, was her maid of honor. The ceremony was by candlelight under the open-glass canopy of the chapel. Guests, only the one hundred that would fit in the small chapel, much to the chagrin of the senator and his wife, were tucked in among the grove of redwood trees. Kenna stood outside between the chapel and the huge billowing tent that had been set up for the reception to follow. The Wayfarers Chapel didn’t normally have wedding receptions on their adjacent grounds, but ever since the media revealed that Grady was the head of the Roads Foundation, which had provided funding for some much-needed repairs at the chapel a few years ago, they made an exception. Kate and Grady were careful to leave the smallest footprint on the grounds.

Makenna watched as the happy couple kissed and were presented with thundering applause from their closest friends and family. That was her cue; they had exactly ten minutes, according to Sloan, before the guests would start filing into the tent and forty-five before the wedding party would make their entrance. Everything was timed, which appealed to Makenna’s love of specifics, but the wedding was so whimsical, she found it difficult to turn away from the closest she’d ever come to a real-life fairy tale.

The warmth under the white sailcloth tent supported by wood beams stood in contrast to the chill of the night air. Rustic metal lamps hung throughout the hundreds of wooden seats padded with small cushions, casting a glow that Makenna had only ever seen in magazines. As she instructed their staff to begin lighting the table candles, she reviewed everything one last time before walking over to check on the two bartenders Sage had hired for the wedding. They weren’t Sage, but seemed to know what they were doing.

Makenna clasped her hands together, filled with nerves and excitement as she looked toward the parking area, which was beginning to fill with car headlights as guests who were not able to fit into the chapel began arriving for the reception. Senator and Mrs. Malendar, along with Police Chief and Mrs. Flanagan, Kate’s parents, had made their way to the end of a path that joined the parking area and the reception tent. Lit by tiny candles, from a distance, the path looked like hundreds of fireflies, flickering along a dark evening under a gorgeous full moon. Makenna couldn’t help but think that Paige would have definitely loved this magical forest.

Kenna had never really been one of those women who swooned over weddings, but she loved this one. It seemed like more than a wedding. Maybe that was the couple getting married, their energy, or maybe it was the location, she wasn’t sure, but she was aware that this was special.