an evil look. “I am not a girl.”
She made him feel about a thousand years old, that was sure. It was that brightness. That cheer. That brisk, stalwart sort of sense she had about her. Like a particularly bright-eyed rodent moving about industriously. She had that sense of someone who was uncrushable. At least, thought she was. Because she hadn’t been exposed to anything intense enough to crush her.
That thought brought him up short. Because she had said something about her mother the other day...
He shoved his sympathy to the side.
Losing your parents was normal enough.
Callous, maybe. But he’d given a lot of thought to the natural order of things. And there were losses a man expected to endure.
And the losses he didn’t.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t loss.
But there was a certain sense of unfairness when somebody young died. A certain amount of anger. Because it just wasn’t the way that life was supposed to work.
Of course, he lost any idea that the world was supposed to work any kind of certain way.
It had screwed him from every direction.
That’s nice. Little bit of self-pity. Wallow in it.
He gritted his teeth.
“What did you bring?”
“I brought breakfast. And baked goods. Because I started working on my menu. And I want to name a menu item after you. I’m doing it for my sisters and my brother. I wanted to give you something too because you’re giving me this chance.”
“I don’t want to be a menu item.”
“Why not?”
“Do I look like a cookie to you?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No. You have to be something sour.”
“Like a lemon?” He felt like a lemon half the time.
She tapped her chin. “No. Passion fruit,” she said.
That word sent a jolt down to his gut. Passion.
He couldn’t remember passion. And hearing it on her lips, spoken so innocently... It was a strange and terrible thing. That’s what it was.
He was angry at her then. In a futile way. That she could say that word without it carrying weight. That was soft and young and looking ahead in a way he never could. Not again.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, ignoring the tight band that stretched between them.
“Oh. Well. It’s just...” She opened up a Tupperware in her arms, then walked over to the counter and unloaded everything onto it. “I did make a few different things.”
He looked down into the Tupperware. There was an array of bright confections. Cookies, and other things. “This is like a pavlova cookie,” she said. “I love pavlova, and we don’t have it in the States that much. But I saw it on a British cooking show and I got obsessed with it. I did a lot of research and saw that in New Zealand they have it with passion fruit a lot. And I really love passion fruit. I did think... This could be yours.” She lifted the treat aloft. White and airy, with a bright yellow center.
“This is weird,” he said.
“Try it,” she said.
She shoved it toward him, and he took it, staring at her while he took a bite. It was amazing. Sweet and extremely sour when you got to the center, and just the strangest thing, just like her.
Because what the hell was she even doing. At his cabin, handing him baked goods.
His life had been turned upside down in the weirdest way in the past few days. Iris Daniels was a low-key force to be reckoned with, and she didn’t even seem to know it.
There were many a natural disaster that you could predict to an extent. You could try and figure out which way the wind would blow. You could predict where a hurricane might travel. Iris was more like an earthquake. You can know that a fault line was there, but you never know what might wake it up. It just hit one day.
With a plate of cookies.
And whatever the hell a pavlova was.
“It’s good,” he said.
She looked so hopeful that he didn’t want to crush that hope.
It was weird. Caring a little bit about how someone else felt.
But she was kind of undamaged and miraculous, and he didn’t want to be the one to harm her. No, he hadn’t asked for her to be in his path. Hadn’t asked for her to come here. None of it had been his idea at all. But he still didn’t...
He didn’t want to be the reason that she cried. That was for sure.
“Can I name it after you?” She deflated slightly then. “It won’t be an honor for