Sounds good! Paige sent a GIF of a girl fanning her face. Then she added And then I can hear all about you and Cam.
Oh.
Well… if Paige was going to spill about this guy and whatever happened, then Whitney probably had to tell her something too. She just didn’t have much to tell. Well, nothing physical anyway. She had a whole lot of emotional stuff she could spill.
And suddenly having someone to bounce all of that off of sounded kind of great. She could use some advice.
Okay.
She sent the response, feeling like she was making a huge commitment.
The heart emoji she got back from Paige made her feel good though and she put her phone down smiling.
A second later though, she blew out a breath as she looked at her especially clean desk. She really was done for the day.
Well… fuck. She’d finally gotten her nerve up to reach out to potential new friends and they both, of course, already had plans. Normal people probably did make plans ahead of time. Whitney never really made plans because she worked all the time. But if she were going to do something other than work, she probably wouldn’t be able to plan it too far ahead. She never knew how long she’d be at the office.
But she sighed as she thought that.
It wasn’t entirely true.
She was in control, to an extent at least, of how long she stayed at the office. She worked a lot, yes, but she did it intentionally.
And she’d been realizing more and more over the past few days that it was, in part, because she’d been trying to prove herself. First to her family. Then to the Fluke guys. But it was also because she hadn’t really liked going home. Because she’d felt pretty damned useless there.
She wasn’t a cook or a baker. She didn’t enjoy keeping house. Not that anyone probably loved cleaning toilets, but she knew people liked decorating their homes for different holidays and changing up the little touches like throw pillows and centerpieces. She got the impression that Maggie McCaffery enjoyed things like making the little sachets Whitney had found in her drawer the other day. There was no way Cam had made those and she would bet half her salary he’d gotten them from his mother. Just like he’d surely gotten the hand soaps in the powder room on the first floor from Maggie.
Some people enjoyed that stuff. Cam even, clearly, enjoyed baking.
That wasn’t Whitney.
And she hadn’t known what to do for Didi, to make her happy and to help her. She’d struggled with things like the little parties at 3 a.m. and knowing if it was right or wrong. She’d struggled with juggling those things with work. She’d struggled with feeling that she was really doing a good job with any of it.
At work, at least she’d known what she was doing. Her dad and grandfather hadn’t let her do much, but she understood what was going on and enjoyed the atmosphere at Hot Cakes. It was more familiar. Her grandmother and mom had always had people cooking and cleaning for them, so she hadn’t seen that as a nurturing, happy thing people did.
Until Cam.
Cam had been raised with a mother who clearly loved to cook and have her family and their friends around in big groups, feeding and taking care of them.
It made Whitney wonder about Letty. Had she been like that too? She’d certainly been a baker. And she’d apparently staunchly stood by the idea that fresh-baked, homemade baked goods were superior to mass-produced snack cakes.
And that made Whitney wonder if Didi had missed that part of Letty too. Cam had told her that Didi said she missed Letty’s baked goods. But Whitney wondered if Letty had had that nurturing spirit too and if Didi missed that as well. Or more. She was certainly soaking that up from Cam. And his family.
Which gave her an idea.
A crazy, maybe-I-shouldn’t-do-this idea.
But as she pushed away from her desk, she felt a little flip in her stomach that told her she was going to do it.
And she couldn’t wait to see how Cam reacted.
17
Wanting to tell his parents and friends and little brother that they needed to get the hell out of the house so he could put Whitney Lancaster up on his mother’s kitchen counter and do very, very dirty things to her where he’d just helped make a chicken and ham casserole was probably not appropriate.
That was still his reaction when his mother came back into the kitchen with Whitney in tow.
Maggie had gone to answer the doorbell because Steve had been taking corn on the cob out of the pot on the stove, Grant, Aiden and Dax were setting the table, Zoe, Jane and Josie were out on the back patio, and Henry and Didi were in the middle of a quest in Warriors of Easton and couldn’t stop according to Henry’s shout from the family room.
No one came to the front door anyway, so they’d all assumed it wasn’t anyone all that important.
They’d been wrong.
Cam was literally standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding a hot casserole dish, his mouth hanging open, staring at Whitney.
She looked shy and unsure and completely gorgeous.
Her hair was down, falling in loose waves around her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing any of her usual “office” makeup. No eye shadow or lipstick. She also, thank you Lord, was not wearing one of her office skirts. She wore a pink sundress and cock-hardening scuffed brown boots. She looked every bit the girl next door in a small Iowa town and he wanted her with every fiber of his being.
“I knew better than to bring food, and especially dessert,” she said with a little smile. “So I brought liquor.” She held up a bottle of lemon vodka in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other.
Maggie laughed and took both bottles. “Brilliant girl,” she praised. Then she nudged Whitney toward Cam.
