Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Do you have heavy cream?”
I blinked. “No.”
She sidled up to me where I was at the fridge and said, “Are those my groceries?”
I nodded. “Cody came out with a box of the stuff that was going to go bad in your fridge. But I can’t tell you what’s in there besides the chicken on top.”
She bent into the fridge and practically shoved her head between the top of the fridge and the box.
“Good news, I have heavy cream.” She came back out with it. “As long as you have self-rising flour.”
I frowned. “I have flour…I think. Everything that’s in my pantry is something my sister stocked. It’s all the basics, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between self-rising flour and regular flour…”
She snickered and pushed past me, giving me a whiff of my body wash wafting off of her.
Her hair was up high in a bun with small tendrils escaping the confines of the rubber band in her hair.
“Isn’t that going to be a bitch to get out of your hair?” I asked her, eyeing the rubber band with skepticism.
“Probably,” she admitted. “But I’m not a big fan of my hair touching my neck. Hence, putting it up.”
I walked to the kitchen drawer while she went into the walk-in pantry and searched through the junk drawer for the package of hair ties that Dru had left behind the last time that she was here.
I came up with one and turned to see her walking to the counter with her hands full.
“Okay, we can make two things now that I’m seeing all the ingredients you have.” She set her bounty down carefully. “One thing will take me two and a half hours to make, because the dough has to rise. The other will take me forty minutes max.”
“What takes two and a half hours?” I wondered, flabbergasted that anyone would take that long to make anything, whether it was good or not.
“Cinnamon rolls,” she answered, her eyes gleaming.
“Oh.” I licked my lips as the thought of having a homemade cinnamon roll sank into my soul. “I like cinnamon rolls.”
I hadn’t had a good cinnamon roll since I was a kid, and that was when I thought “good” was a McDonald’s pull-apart one that probably wouldn’t mold if I left it out for two years.
“The other option is biscuits,” she added. “They’re not as good, but still really great on their own.”
“Hmmm.” I tapped my bottom lip. “Is there any reason we can’t have both?”
Because both sounded great.
Her lips quirked up at the edge. “I mean, I guess not.” She looked out the window behind me. “Looks like we’re going to be here a while. No one should be driving in this.”
I looked behind me at the snow that was now being blown directly toward the kitchen window.
“I’ll help,” I offered. “I can measure ingredients with the best of them.”
She giggled. “Let’s do the cinnamon roll dough first,” she suggested. “Then we can do the biscuits and some eggs with bacon.”
I washed my hands because, despite having gloves on earlier, I had still shoveled out a ton of horse shit.
When I was done, I said, “Tell me where you want me.”
A gleam came into her eye that made my heart pick up speed, but she shook her head and put half of the ingredients to the side before saying, “Let’s get started. You can pour everything that I say.”
I expected her to pull up a recipe on her phone, but instead she started to list off everything that she needed measured out.
“You know all this by memory?” I asked as I poured some flour into a measuring cup.
“I know all my recipes by memory,” she said. “I learned to not leave anything in my room that I wanted because Birdee saw no problem going in there and taking it.” She gestured toward a big bowl that I’d pulled out on the counter. “Before you dump that flour in there, I need some really hot water from the sink measured into about eight ounces. Then we need to put the yeast in there.”
“I have yeast?”
She gestured toward a jar. “You sure do.”
“Huh.” I chuckled. “Imagine that.”
“You’ll have to thank your sister for preparing you for a Nor’easter.”
I would.
Maybe I’d send her a picture of my cinnamon roll later with a caption that read: Look what you being an overbearing prepper did for me.
Fourteen
Heat makes things expand. So I don’t have a weight problem. I’m just hot.
—Text from Mable to Cody
Mable
I’d been nervous when I first entered the kitchen.
Now, I was in my element, using Romeo’s state-of-the-art kitchen as my own personal playground.
I was rolling out cinnamon rolls on his huge island with the butcher block countertop.
I had biscuits resting in a cast-iron skillet ready for the oven that was preheating.
And the man that I couldn’t stop staring at was cutting slices of bacon into thick strips that we would be frying up in another cast-iron skillet once I got the biscuits in.