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“I bake when I’m anxious?” I replied, though I wasn’t sure how he would take the answer.
He nodded slowly.
“Also, I noticed there are paths through the woods,” I said, changing the subject away from what we had started with. “Perhaps, once the sun actually is up all the way, we could go on a hike in the snow?”
“Has the storm stopped?”
“Yeah. It stopped while I was making the cake this morning,” I said.
He glanced out the door. There were some footprints that I had obviously left outside the kitchen door, but it was a beautiful day out. The sun was starting to shine, and I suspected it would be a beautiful day to trek through the woods.
“Well, I’ll be. I thought that storm was going to rage on at least one more day,” he muttered.
Then, he turned to face me and saw the muffins too.
“…if you cook when you get anxious, then I think this lodge will do just fine with you as the chef this season,” he remarked. “Those smell delicious. Both the muffins and the cake.”
“Thank you.”
I couldn’t help a small blush on my cheeks.
Chapter eighteen
Luke
I could not ignore the way Laurel’s eyes refused to stay open for more than ten seconds. She looked exhausted. However, I could feel the lingering soft tension in the room as we both avoided talking about last night. I was nervous about taking her on a hike in the woods. It was a tricky question to answer. After last night, I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to give her that experience. If she was liable to start yelling at me, believing me to be her ex-fiancé, I didn’t want to be alone with her.
But my heart ached to soothe the hurt she experienced when Mark had refused to be faithful to her. I wasn’t entirely sure why. Nor did I want to reveal that to her. Not immediately.
Instead, I grabbed a muffin from the pan. They were still warm. Perhaps they had only just come out of the oven when I arrived in the kitchen to eat, and she hadn’t had a chance to stop me from grabbing one.
“How about I work on shoveling some snow off the front steps and then we can explore the trails in the woods?” I finally said. “However, after we’re done eating breakfast, I think you need to go get some sleep. You can hardly hold your eyes open for longer than ten seconds.”
She snorted a little as she opened her eyes, somewhat proving my point. I sat down at one of the many tables in the dining room as she struggled to come to grips with this knowledge.
“Do you think we can go on all the trails?”
“Not in one day,” I replied.
I was careful to set expectations low. There was a lot of snow on the ground.
“Oh.”
Laurel’s face fell as she sat down across the table from me with a couple of muffins of her own. Neither of us had touched the cake.
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way the snow has fallen,” I said.
She snickered. I smiled a little. At least she was snickering at the lame joke I made. It meant she was going to be goodhearted about the whole thing.
We ate quietly. Before she went to bed, she unloaded the dishwasher and put the cake in the fridge. Then, she turned to me. I had plans to load the dishwasher up again and get it running while I was shoveling the snow outside.
“I’ll handle the dishes when I get up from my nap,” she said. “And tomorrow – today? – if we can’t go hiking, I think we ought to do something else together.”
“That sounds like a plan.”
With that, Laurel left me alone in the kitchen. I heeded her wishes to do the dishes when she got up but decided that I would at least help her along a little bit. I rinsed off any dishes that still had visible batter or frosting from her cakemaking the night before and gave our plates a good rinse to get the muffin crumbs off them.
Then, I suited up for the weather. As I was about to put on my gloves and grab the shovel, my phone buzzed at me. I sighed softly. Then, I pulled my phone out of the pocket I had put it in for safekeeping.
