Page 55 of Cakewalk

“I should get started on dinner,” she said. Standing up from the couch and stretching, she realized she was still in Holden’s too-big-for-her clothes and immediately felt self-conscious. His family hadn’t batted an eye at any of the outward displays of affection between them, so maybe the lack of her own clothes wasn’t an issue in their minds.

“Would you like help?” Catherine asked. “I don’t want to step on toes.”

“I’d love it,” Gigi said, meaning it wholeheartedly. Catherine struck her as the kind of woman who knew all sorts of secrets about cooking, something that Gigi was still lacking herself. Gigi also really liked the idea of some alone time with her, to get to know her better, without the men ragging each other about something in the background.

Holden grabbed her around the waist, tugging her into his lap and placing a sloppy wet kiss on her cheek, before leaning into her ear and whispering, “Before you go, I just wanted to let you know how fucking sexy you look in my sweats. I think we need to make that a regular thing.”

“For you…anything.”

* * *

Holden

“Heath, you mind if I steal the boy for some one-on-one time in the loft?” Caulfield asked after they’d all showered and gotten dressed.

“Go for it. Keep you two out of my hair while I start this book,” Heathcliff responded, holding up the new autobiography he’d unwrapped that morning.

“We’ll take the long way. Best not to disturb the pretty ladies in the kitchen.”

“Lead the way, old man,” Holden responded, gesturing toward the stairs.

Making their way down the hall and past the bedrooms, Holden couldn’t hold back a smile as he listened to the voices of Gigi and his mother waft up from the kitchen. The two were talking and laughing like old friends, just as he had hoped they would. Truth be told, Gigi had so seamlessly slipped into his family—along with the rest of his life—it was hard to believe that three months ago she hadn’t been a part of his life. That three months ago he was alone in this big house, an empty shell of a human being, just tolerating life. Now, he woke up each morning happier than the last, and he was actually passionately writing again.

“So…your muse is back,” Caulfield commented as he sat down in the leather desk chair. “Or should I say, she’s taken on a new form. Perhaps one that is blonde and southern?”

Holden smirked, unable to deny the accusation. He collapsed into the old couch that was up against one of the walls, sighing as he tried to formulate the perfect response.

“I can’t deny that certainly something has changed.”

“Something has changed? That’s what you’re going with? Three months ago you were walking around like a zombie. You had all the personality of a stale ham sandwich.”

“Wow, that’s an analogy.”

“Do you have a better way to describe yourself?” Caulfield asked, looking at him scoldingly. Holden shook his head and raised his hands in surrender—he knew when to shut up. This was one of those moments. “The Holden I have seen since I got here is the Holden I helped raise. You’re the little boy who loved to laugh and joke around. The teenager who would go toe-to-toe with his dad and me, jab after jab, taking it as well as he dished it out. The man who loves with his whole heart and isn’t afraid to show it. The author who has wild ideas inside his head, whose words bring to life a world that readers are never going to want to leave.”

“So you did like it?” Holden asked, unable to hold back the question. His curiosity had been gnawing at him since Caulfield had emerged from the loft yesterday afternoon. He was dying to know what the man thought of his manuscript.

“It’s rough, but so is every first draft,” he said. “You have the makings of a fantastic ghost story. Where’d the idea come from?”

“Gigi,” Holden sighed, thinking about the moment the idea had come to him. “She showed me her old, tattered copy of At Midnight, and it has all these notes in the margins. You know she wrote her senior paper in college about that book. About the use of the color green in it. She had all these passages underlined in it, every time you mention the color. She was so, so sure that it was Anaura. That it was all somehow tied to the necklace, and it got me thinking.” The idea of writing something similar to Caulfield’s work had never interested him until now. He knew it would have to be different enough to stand on its own, but for the first time in a long time he was confident that he could do it.

“Smart girl.”

“She’s brilliant. She doesn't think so, because that asshole she was married to spent years tearing her down, but she really is brilliant. She’d never baked anything in her life prior to arriving in Vermont, and now she’s making her own recipes. She’s shy and sweet, but man, the fire inside her is something else.”

“Though she be but little, she is fierce,” Caulfield quoted. “Does she know that you love her?”

Love? Was the old man crazy? He liked Gigi…he more than liked her, just as they had expressed the other day. But love? No, it was too soon.

“And just what makes you think—”

“I have ears, boy, and a bedroom right next to yours,” Caulfield chided, cutting him off.

Oh shit, so much for being quiet…

“And more than that, I have eyes. I see the way you look at her. The way you watch her when she doesn’t know you’re looking. It’s the same way I looked at your Aunt Viv. The way your dad does your mom.”

Holden leaned forward on the couch, letting Caulfield’s words settle around him. He loved Gigi. He wanted a future with her. One filled with cupcakes, sticky buns, and whatever else she created. A future full of reading by the fire, of nights snuggled up watching movies, of sitting out in the gazebo watching the snow fall. He wanted her to help him come up with story ideas and travel the country with him as he put those stories into people’s hands. He wanted to explore the idea of a family with her.