The kitchen smelled like baking day back home and she felt suddenly homesick. Her forthcoming trip home couldn’t get here fast enough.
Jess pushed the biscuits aside and dragged the chocolate cake she’d cooked that morning closer. She’d just spooned a dollop of icing onto the cake when Adam sauntered into the kitchen.
‘Mmm. Something smells amazing,’ he said.
Jess looked up. He was lounging in the archway, one shoulder shoved against the jamb, a suit jacket hooked via his index finger over the other. His tie had been pulled askew. A hand buried deep in a trouser pocket pulled the fabric interestingly against a firm bulky quadriceps.
‘I’m baking,’ she said unnecessarily as her heart lifted a little. He hadn’t gone out last night in a suit so maybe he had come home after all?
She marvelled at the many faces of Adam—boardies, scrubs, birthday suit and now a business suit. They were all so tantalising she couldn’t decide which one she preferred.
‘So I see,’ he remarked, pushing off the jamb and prowling into the kitchen. His stomach rumbled and he realised his meeting had run over and he hadn’t eaten any lunch. He slung his jacket around the back of a chair and reached for a cooling biscuit.
‘Be careful,’ Jess said, blowing out of her eye a piece of fringe that had loosened from her ponytail. ‘They’re hot.’
Adam’s mouth watered. They weren’t the only things that were hot. Jess bouncing around the kitchen in a ponytail and an apron was pretty damn hot too.
He gave himself a mental shake as he picked up the closest biscuit. Since when had he ever thought domesticated women were hot? Where had it ever got his mother?
He bit into the biscuit gingerly to hide his confusion.
‘Wow!’ he said as golden syrup and melted brown sugar infused his taste buds with glorious sensation. ‘This is a damn good biscuit.’
Jess felt her heart fill with joy at his enthusiastic compliment. His look of bliss as he’d savoured that first bite would be duly categorised in her memory banks as one of her best Adam moments. ‘You wait till you taste the birthday cake.’
‘You’re making your own birthday cake?’
Jess laughed. ‘Of course. You can’t have a birthday party without cake.’
‘We could have bought you a cake. You shouldn’t have had to make your own.’
Jess waved her hand at him, dismissing his suggestion outright. ‘Why buy one when I can make something much better?’
Adam eyed the cake. ‘It’s that good, huh?’
Jess pulled the spoon out of the icing and they both watched as its glossy texture slid off the back like treacle. For good measure she licked the back of the spoon and sighed. ‘Hell, yeah.’
Adam, who had followed every single second of Jess’s pink tongue gliding across the metal surface, temporarily lost his train of thought as a bolt of desire ignited his loins. In any other woman he would have said it was a deliberate come-on but Jess just looked at him with the same openness she always did.
No hint of coyness or agenda.
‘I didn’t know you baked,’ he said, changing the subject.
Jess nodded. ‘Always. I love to bake. Which is just as well seeing as how I have a terrible sweet tooth.’
With the image of Jess licking the spoon fresh in his mind, Adam had to admit there was something about a woman who loved to eat. Too many of the women he dated barely ate a thing. It was a revelation to see one embrace the whole process with such enthusiasm.
‘Well, these biscuits are winners.’
‘They most definitely are,’ Jess said with pride. ‘They’re my grandmother’s recipe. She’s known throughout the district for them. They’ve won her the blue ribbon at the Edwinburra Show for the last thirty-eight years.’
Adam chuckled. He took in the whole scene. A country song played in the background. The kitchen smelled like an old-fashioned bakehouse. Jess was dressed in a gingham apron with ‘Bless This House’ embroidered across the yoke.
He eyed her speculatively. ‘You really are a country girl, aren’t you?’
Jess wasn’t sure if admitting it was a good thing or a bad thing. But she refused to pretend to be something she wasn’t. Even for Adam. ‘Through and through.’
A look of contentment infused her features into a mask of pure serenity and kicked him hard in the chest. Had he ever felt the way she looked?
The urge to know more surprised him.
‘Tell me about home,’ he said, pulling up a kitchen chair.
Jess looked at him uncertainly. ‘The farm?’
‘Is that where you grew up?’ She nodded. ‘Tell me about the farm.’
Jess paused for a moment as a hundred images crowded her mind. She shrugged. ‘It’s … beautiful out there. The sky is so … blue … not like it is here. Like this giant glass dome that seems to stretch on for ever, and the smells … they’re so different to the city. Dirt and eucalypt, campfires and horses. And at nighttime the stars … they take your breath away.’
Adam stilled as the far-away look in her eyes seemed to reach deep inside him and squeeze. ‘The sunsets are stunning—ochres and reds and then … scarlet skies full of cockatoos. The billabongs are surrounded by gum trees and in the late afternoon hundreds of pink galahs feed on the banks …’
Jess felt her earlier sense of homesickness return with a vengeance and she became aware of Adam watching her intently. She blushed as she realised she’d been prattling on and on.
She looked down into the depths of warm, sludgy icing. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured as she absently stirred it again. ‘I get a little carried away.’
Adam dismissed her apology with a wave of his hand. He’d liked hearing her voice soften and watch her eyes follow invisible flocks of cockatoos as she’d painted her outback picture for him.
‘It must have been hard to leave.’
Jess nodded, feeling the wrench of leaving all over again. ‘It felt like I’d lost my best friend.’ She’d cried for the entire seven-hour bus trip. ‘But …’ Jess shrugged and looked at him ‘ … it’s a means to an end.’
‘Oh?’
‘Once I’ve got city experience under my belt I can go back home to where I’m really needed. There’s a chronic nursing shortage in the bush—too many people have to go to the city, leave all that’s dear to them, to get medical care. It’s not right.’
Adam felt relief flood his system, knowing Jess was planning on heading back out west. That alone should be enough to kill any ridiculous notions that had filled his head since she’d cluelessly licked that spoon and put his body on high alert.
‘Is
