Currant Creek Valley - By RaeAnne Thayne Page 0,100
better than her own place at Brazen, with all the very best culinary toys.
Just now, the kitchen was lushly redolent of delicious things cooking: her garlic smashed potatoes, her grandmother McKnight’s famous stuffing recipe, with her own twist of using venison sausage instead of pork, and of course the huge tom turkey resting on the sideboard, ready to be carved in a few moments.
“Well, everything looks and smells divine,” Mary Ella said, leaning in to kiss her cheek and tuck a stray blond strand of hair behind her ear. “But of course, you already knew that.”
“I did quite outdo myself, didn’t I?” she preened.
“The modesty of my daughters is always so heartwarming.”
She grinned. “Okay, okay. We both know I can’t take all the credit. This is a team effort, as always. I’m just the traffic cop, telling everybody what to do. Anyway, I have a feeling the pies Claire and Rose made last night are going to steal all my poor turkey’s thunder.”
She gestured to a nearby counter where pumpkin, blackberry and pecan pies waited in all their glory, golden crusts and all.
“The crowd is growing restless out there. How much longer, do you think?”
She added one more shake of coarse ground sea salt to her potatoes. “That does it for my part. The only thing left is the gravy.”
“I guess that’s my cue.”
Alex made a mean turkey gravy, but she was also honest enough to admit it couldn’t compare to her mother’s.
“I’ve already transferred the drippings for you.” She pointed to the Wolf range.
“Perfect. You’d probably like a minute to freshen up while I finish up here and then we can let everyone know we’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She took off her apron, hung it on a hook inside the pantry and headed for the powder room conveniently located just off the kitchen. Her dressy white blouse glimmered in the tasteful lighting of the bathroom, accented by a necklace she had made in one of Evie’s classes a few months earlier. It was made of semiprecious stones and Czech glass beads floating at intervals on a nearly invisible fragile silver wire.
Hidden beneath it, she pulled out another length of chain nestled between her breasts. Threaded along it was an exuberantly beautiful emerald ring, so lovely it stole her breath every time she saw it.
She couldn’t wait to wear the bling all the time— except when she was cooking, of course.
But not yet.
Three days from now, Harry and Mary Ella would be marrying in this very house. All her family was already in town for the big event, including Rose and her family and Lila from California.
As silly as it might seem, she figured her mother deserved to have these magical three days of attention without Alex intruding with her own news, stealing a little of her thunder. When things calmed down a little, maybe at Christmas, she and Sam would announce their engagement—though she doubted anyone in the family would be particularly surprised, since they had become inseparable these past months.
Since that far-distant summer night when she had hovered on the edge of despair and had yanked herself back to find a shining future waiting, everything with Sam and Ethan had come together perfectly. They were like a new recipe with disparate elements that somehow seemed to meld and complement each other to breathtaking effect.
Who would ever have guessed she could be so utterly, completely, outrageously happy?
She studied the ring for a moment more, then tucked it back against her heart and walked out into the great room of Harry’s estate. The room was vast and high-ceilinged but the McKnight brood still managed to fill the space.
Lila and Rose, the twins, were chattering in the corner while Sage seemed to be chiding her grandfather about something as Harry’s son, Jack, looked on with an amused smile. Her oldest sister, Angie, was deep in conversation with her two daughters and Maura, and several of the men were loudly protesting a ref’s call in the football game showing on Harry’s retractable big-screen television.
Sam was in the middle of the action, of course, on the sofa watching the game. He looked big, hard, tough—and completely adorable cradling a little pink-wrapped bundle in his arms.
By some unerring sense, he seemed to know when she started to head in his direction. He looked up from his game-related conversation and smiled at her over the head of three-month-old Emma, daughter to Claire and Riley, and the most beautiful little cherub around.