The Rancher and the Event Planner - By Cheryl Gorman Page 0,47
she’d arrived back in town. And now it seemed that Rafe no longer blamed her for what had happened at the barbecue and he shouldn’t because it totally wasn’t her fault or his for that matter. Now here he was at her side helping her. She knew deep inside her heart that they belonged together. Was he beginning to see it now, too? “I’ll get started on the vegetables.” She grabbed a red bell pepper and began chopping. She might not be a crust buff, but she knew how to chop.
“Whoa!” Rafe said eyeing the growing pile of diced peppers on the cutting board. “Size matters, Jennifer. Here, let me show you.”
“Whatever,” she said and handed him the knife with a smile.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“First it’s my crust and now it’s my chopping technique.”
“It isn’t your technique. Did you know the average human has approximately ten thousand taste buds?” He bit into a green olive and chewed.
She loved olives. She loved them even more watching Rafe eat one. How would an olive taste on his lips?
“I can taste this olive on the entire surface of my mouth, under the tongue, inside my cheeks and even the roof of my mouth.” He licked his lips and looked at her. “The taste buds on the lips are extra sensitive to salty foods.”
His tongue swept over his lips causing her lust factor to shoot off the scale. She needed to stop thinking about Rafe in terms of sex, otherwise she was going to become as soft and pliable as the mounds of dough lying on the table waiting to be made into crusts. And the last thing she wanted to be was soft and pliable. She needed to keep herself strong because this job and her future depended on it. “Where did you learn so much about taste buds?”
He grinned. “High school biology and the kissing booth at the school carnival.”
Thinking about the last time Rafe kissed her by the stream at the barbecue made her heart rate jump. She remembered a young Rafe McCord flashing his pearly whites and giving the girls a come-hither look from his startling blue eyes. She tilted her head and laid the tip of her index finger on her chin. “I remember the kissing booth at the school carnival but it was manned or I should say “womaned” by the girls and I was one of them. Come to think of it I remember tasting a lot of flavors back then like cotton candy, soda pop and fried cinnamon tortillas.”
Rafe gave her a long, simmering look and said, “Yeah, the boys were lining up.” His voice was deep, husky and caused a shiver to dance over her skin. Her pulse ka-boomed through her veins and her breath grew shallow. They were lining up all right but not for her. Rona and her drum beaters were the lip lock queens in the kissing booth. She focused her attention back to the pepper to regain her composure and said, “So, you were saying something about size?” She almost glanced again at his crotch but was able to control herself.
“Right. When someone takes their first bite you want the flavors, the juices to explode on their tongue and the way to make it happen is to chop the vegetables into slightly larger chunks. Like this.”
Rafe held the pepper cutting it into long, chunky strips. He picked up two pieces of the pepper, the smaller size she had chopped and one of the bigger strips and held it in front of her lips so she could take a bite. He looked into her eyes then shifted his gaze to her mouth. Her lips tingled. “Open up.” He placed the smaller piece of pepper on her tongue. “Now chew and tell me what you taste.”
She wondered if some of the flavor of the pepper was mixed with the flavor of his skin and found herself wanting more. She swallowed and said, “It tastes sweet and crunchy but not that juicy.”
His lips curved and his eyes darkened slightly. “Yeah…juicy is essential.” He held up a larger piece of pepper and said, “Okay, this time close your eyes while I place it on your tongue.”
She closed her eyes with her heart pounding and opened her mouth. Rafe placed the pepper on her tongue, his fingertips lightly grazing her tongue and the surface of her lower lip. She nearly groaned. Closing her mouth, she chewed trying to focus on the flavor of the pepper