Chapter 51
Amy hummed as she tidied up the last few things at the cabin, getting ready to run HQ errands, then to meet Nathan later. Prince roamed around her feet, in his age-old quest for something to eat. “You’ve already had three treats and half my breakfast, dog. And that you never get. So just be glad I got some last night, and…it was good.” She tornadoed around the room, grabbing thing, tossing them in place. She stopped and eyed the dog. “Oh. And did I say it was good? Hellaciously good, if you please. Just about makes a gal want to be a poster child for regular, hot sex with a big, bad old Canadian Delta Norther. Guy was JTF2, too. Or SEAL. Take your pick.”
Prince watched her, blinked. Motionless except for the one blink.
“Fine.” She slapped her hands on her waist. “Ex-SEAL. But really, does that even matter?”
Prince kept up the stare.
“Well, all I know was, it was good. And I want more. With him. So there!” She threw the small pink Nerf football at the dog. “Fetch, bite, or do whatever it is you do when you remember you’re neutered, and I’m not. Ha!”
Prince grabbed the ball, and she continued to motor around the room. Babette meowed, irritated, as she scooped up a throw pillow off the pink shag, threw it on the small couch and it dinged her paws.
“Sorry, Babette! But…oh, damn. The pizza!”
She ran to the kitchen, grabbed her oven mitt, and opened the door of the oven set in the wall at eye-level. “Uhmm.” Steam billowed from the cavern, and the scent of homemade pizza thickened the air. “Oh god, it smells good.”
“Well, what of it?” She demanded at a solemn Prince who now sat in the kitchen, the pink football stuffed between his jaws. “We both get a bit of white, if we want it, don’t we?”
She couldn’t resist grabbing the pizza cutter and cutting herself a thin wedge. Pale cheese gooed around the spatula as she lifted it from her marble slab. Tomato chunks from her garden, peppers from the clay pots out back, and bits of Bob’s homemade sausages—this batch had actually been good, nothing like the last forty some odd batches she’d sampled politely over the last few years—lay around the circle in thick slices.
She tasted it, sighed. “And it was good. Hell of a lot of meaning there, eh, guys?” Cleo had joined her now, attentively watching for cheese. “Too hot cat, deal with it.” But she turned quickly to the fridge, her eye still on her steaming pie and nipped a bit of mozzarella off, tossed a bit to each of the animals, Cleo first, because she loved it the most.
Placing a big plastic vented cover over it all and weighting it down with a cast iron trivet, she admonished the troops with the all-important word, the one that worked sometimes, often didn’t, but better work today. “No.”
Then she ran upstairs to get dressed. Her gaze lit again on his duffel bag, the brown throw. The vase he’d brought her, all pink flowers, because she loved pink, already starting to drop a couple of petals on the sideboard.
What did it matter? Pink flowers were always growing. He said he’d get her more.
And the sweetness of what had happened in her life flowed through her.
Nathan loved her. Nathan Hero, the man whose family was the farthest from heroic, loved her.
Her big old SEAL loved her. Had decided to stay, and craft a life, together. With her.
Apparently, they were a team now.
And hell’s breath and baby’s breath.
She loved him. God. She loved him.