“You don’t have to, but it would actually be amazing to have help. You wouldn’t think it would be a big deal, but the cake has to be really big, and I’m not very confident. I watched a YouTube video, though, so it’s probably a sure thing.”
“Well, then I’m sure you’d nail it.” He moved closer to me, that smile still working its magic on every female part of my body from my earlobes to my pinkie toes. I felt like I was humming. Inside. With my vagina.
“Great. Okay. Um… I made pasta for Gran tonight, is that okay?” I worried for a minute he might be on one of those Hollywood diets Juliet had told me about before. Keto or vegan or non-GMO or non-soy, or all kale all the time, or… something different than the stuff I made for Gran.
“I love pasta,” he said, and the words sounded genuine.
“Go ahead and sit,” I said, again finding it was easier to talk to him if I ignored the devastating smile. And the face that went with it. “I’ll just heat it up real quick. Do you want a beer or something?”
“Any chance of a glass of milk?”
I poured a glass of milk, barely able to handle how much that simple request had skyrocketed my attraction for no real explicable reason. Was it because it was just so American? So boyish? So…real?
I set his food in front of him with a slice of garlic bread, and slid into a chair across from him, worried the proximity might somehow send me into a hysterical fit. Or give me a case of the vapors or something, if those were an actual thing. Maryland was technically the South, after all.
“This is amazing,” he said through a mouthful. “And wait,” he took a bite of bread. “Did you bake this?” He narrowed his eyes as if he’d caught me in a lie about baking.
Oh how I wished I had in that moment. “Nope. I get it at the little local farmer’s market.”
He nodded knowingly, and for a minute neither of us said anything. There was a warm glow from the lights above and a faint buzzing pulse from the cicadas outside, and something about sitting in a quiet kitchen as Ryan ate felt homey and safe. I felt my nerves begin to calm.
“Never been to Maryland before?” I asked him.
He looked around, as if the kitchen might be representative of the whole state. “Nope. First time. You grew up here, right?”
I nodded. “You’d never know Juliet Manchester was from a place as far flung as this, right?”
He tilted his head and looked up at me, the dark lashes around the blue eyes striking. “Not surprising really,” he said. “There’s a lot of beauty here.” This was delivered looking straight into my eyes, and a shiver went through me at his words.
He was talking about Maryland. Which was definitely beautiful. Or maybe he was talking about Juliet. Who was also beautiful.
“Yeah, there’s so much water, and it’s just really green and lush…”
“That too. Tell me about the house,” he said, taking another bite.
I leaned back in my chair, thinking about how much I loved this old house, the stories it held. I decided to tell him one of my favorite things about the place. “Have you ever heard of a priest hole?” I asked.
The fork paused halfway to his mouth, and he shook his head lightly. “Sounds kinda dirty, Tess.”
I laughed at that, enjoying the intimacy of the joke and the way he said my name. “It’s not, I promise.”
“Darn. Okay, well tell me then.” Half his mouth lifted in a wry smile and then he took another bite. “Did I mention how good this is?”
The way he was looking at me was not helping my focus. My skin was heating and I had the urge to flex muscles I didn’t think of often. Deep, inside, neglected lady muscles.
Juliet’s boyfriend, I reminded myself.
“Okay, well, I get carried away with this stuff, so stop me if you know this. Maryland was settled in the 1600s by a guy they called Lord Baltimore, and he was a Catholic.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, encouraging me.
“His real name was Cecelius Calvert, and he was fleeing persecution of the Catholics in England.”
“Or he might have been fleeing persecution of people who named other people lame things like Cecelius,” Ryan pointed out.
“Very judgy,” I chastised.
He laughed. “Go on. Sorry. I’ll hold my judgment over dudes from the 1600s with chick names.”
“Okay. Good.” I was warming to the telling of my tale, encouraged by Ryan’s warm laugh and intent gaze. “So he settled Maryland, but it didn’t stay mostly Catholic for very long. When they figured out they could grow tobacco here, a lot of low-cost labor was brought in, along with businessmen to run operations, and soon the Catholics were a minority.
“So anyway, there were years of struggle between Catholics and Puritans, and eventually there was a Maryland Revolution that went on for two years. At the end of it, the colony was placed under royal control, and the Church of England was made the official church, so Catholics were being violently pursued, killed and run out.”
“Oh oh.”
“Yeah. So many of the original families down here were Catholic—descendants of the original settlers that came over with Calvert. And they were sympathetic to the priests who were being targeted directly, so they hid them in these secret hidey-holes called ‘priest holes.’”
Ryan looked mildly disappointed, his lips and eyebrows pulling slightly down. “Not dirty.”
I laughed. “No, but I think it’s cool. You want to see it?”
“I’ve never had a gorgeous woman offer to show me her priest hole before.”
I crossed my arms again and shot him a look. I’d offer to show him lots of things if he weren’t Juliet’s boyfriend. The words ‘gorgeous woman’ ricocheted around in my brain, but I kept them in a little cage up there to think about later.
He raised his hands. “Okay,
