they were few and far between. But he had to admit that he’d plateaued in his recovery. He’d just been waiting for something to push him. Something like a kick in the butt from his no-nonsense mom.
It didn’t slip his notice that if he was going to preach to Rachel to stop avoiding, then he better walk the walk himself. Maybe if he faked it for long enough, he could get through the rest of his reentry relatively unscathed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“TELL ME AGAIN—what part of this is relaxing?” Rachel asked her mom.
“You need to use a fork to cream that together,” her mom said, pointing at the bowl of sugar and butter on the counter in front of Rachel. Jackie surreptitiously licked a dab of brown-sugar-nut topping off her finger as she directed their Saturday-morning undertaking.
“I saw that,” Rachel said. “Even a kitchen-phobe like me knows you aren’t supposed to lick your fingers till you’re done.”
“This stuff is to-die-for. The girls are going to demolish these cupcakes at the dinner tomorrow. That looks good.”
“You know there’s a cupcake shop on the mainland about a mile from the hospital, don’t you?”
“Take a deep breath, honey. Enjoy the time away from work. Cupcakes are about the journey.”
“You’ve lost your mind. I need to be catching up on my reading,” Rachel said.
“Now, the bananas you mashed? Add those and the vanilla. Mush it all together and mix it with the hand mixer.”
Rachel used a spatula to dump the fruit into the bowl and then measured out the vanilla. “This looks like baby puke.”
She put the two beaters on the mixer, stuck them in the goop and switched the appliance on to Medium. The doorbell sounded over the noise of the mixer, and her mom sent her a questioning look and then, after licking her fingers clean, headed toward the living room to see who it was.
When the glop was thoroughly combined, Rachel turned off the mixer, not even remotely tempted to lick her own fingers. Then the visitor’s voice coming from the living room caused her heart to speed up without her permission.
Crap. What was Cale doing here? And why couldn’t she handle even the sound of his voice without getting all messed up inside?
Ignore, ignore, ignore. He’ll be gone momentarily.
Unless, of course, it was her he wanted to talk to, she amended, as their footsteps and chatter moved toward the kitchen.
“Rachel, look who’s here,” her mom said, cheery as can be.
“Hi, Cale,” she managed to say without taking her eyes from the eggs she cracked into the mixture.
“Hey, Rachel.” He leaned against the counter several feet from her. “How’s it going?”
“My mom’s putting me through a round of torture.”
Jackie resumed her spot on the other side of the sink and started spooning the sugar-nut topping into each section of the cupcake pan. “You’d enjoy it if you’d let yourself.”
“What are you making?” Cale asked, eyeing the baby-puke-with-eggs-on-top mixture.
“Banana-walnut cupcakes,” Rachel’s mom said. “With brown-sugar-walnut topping and a banana-cream filling. We’ll save one for you when they’re done.”
“Which, at this rate, should be early fall,” Rachel said.
“She’s always been such a go-getter, but slap an ounce of domesticity in front of her and she goes all tachycardic,” her mom said.
The baking had nothing to do with Rachel’s rapid heartbeat. More accurately, having her twin sister’s fiancé, whom she had frequent naughty dreams about, show up made Rachel go all tachycardic.
Cale laughed and Rachel threw the eggshells in the sink.
“I came by to see if you would go to a small get-together with me,” Cale said to Rachel. “Evan Drake is one of the guys I work with and he and his wife are taking their trawler yacht out in about half an hour. Sorry the invitation is so last-minute, but I hadn’t planned to go until my mom recently made a very emphatic point that I needed to go out and have fun more often.”
The two sides within her warred—the one that longed to spend the day with him and the one that acknowledged it was much smarter to stay home and read her medical journals. Or even bake.
“I’m kind of up to my elbows in torture right now,” she said. “And then I have a good twenty hours of reading to catch up on.”
“Oh, no,” her mom said authoritatively. “No, you don’t. I’ve got the cupcakes covered, and you can read later. You need to get out just as much as Cale does. Probably more.”
Rachel opened her mouth to argue but closed it