That was ridiculous. There was nothing sexy about cheesy potatoes. Or potatoes without cheese, for that matter.
But lust? Well, that was a possibility. Apparently.
Because watching Grant Lorre eat cheesy potatoes across her best friend’s mother’s dining room table was making Jocelyn Asher hot.
Of course, Maggie McCaffery’s cheesy potatoes were award-winning. Seriously. She’d taken home the purple ribbon four times from the Dubuque County Fair and twice from the Iowa State Fair. And Grant seemed to agree that they were delicious. He’d made a sexy groaning sound when he’d first taken a bite, and Josie had been mesmerized as his lips closed around the tines of his fork. Never mind how her heart rate had picked up when he’d turned the fork and licked it.
She was a mess. Purple ribbon or not, Josie was pretty sure that getting worked up over watching a man eat potatoes meant she was hard up.
She took a long drink of iced tea and tried to remember the last time she’d had sex. If she wasn’t forgetting anyone—and how sad would that be—the last time had been with Ben Davis. After Kara Davis’s, now Tibbin’s, wedding.
Last week Kara had been into Buttered Up, the bakery where Josie worked with her best friend Zoe, to order a miniature version of her wedding cake to celebrate their first anniversary.
Josie sighed. That had to explain the sexy potato thing going on across the table. It had to.
But then Grant laughed at something Aiden, his best friend and Zoe’s fiancé—yes, it was one big happy group at this table—said, and Josie felt her neglected lady parts clench. Yeah, it wasn’t the potatoes.
Thankfully.
Kind of.
As weird as getting turned on by potatoes might be, it might have been preferable to being turned on by the man who had been coming into the bakery nearly every morning for the past two weeks, but hadn’t so much as asked her to have a cup of coffee with him.
He’d asked her if the blueberries in the muffins were locally sourced. He’d asked her if they had any gluten-free cinnamon scones. He’d asked her for a lemon slice for his cup of hot water. But that was pretty much the extent of the things he’d asked her over the course of the time they’d known each other.
Oh, and he’d caught her when she’d fallen. Twice.
The first time she’d been up on the stool reaching for a bag of flour. Her shoulder pain, which was becoming more and more of an issue, had jabbed her hard, and she’d dropped the flour and slipped off the stool.
But Grant had been there. He’d caught her. In his arms. Very gallantly.
The second time, she’d been up on a ladder, dusting the bakery’s shelves, and he’d startled her. She’d twisted, and her foot had slipped off the rung—or something. She wasn’t totally clear on what had happened because she’d been all about Grant then too—and he’d, again, swept her up before she’d hit the floor. Like a freaking knight in shining armor.
But both times he’d simply set her on her feet and gone on with his day.
She, on the other hand, was now getting hot and bothered by side dishes.
Honestly, he’d probably even make green bean casserole sexy and that should truly be impossible.
Then he’d started coming into the bakery every day. He placed his order with Zoe some of the time. When he did order from Josie that was all he did. It wasn’t like they’d even been flirting. But every freaking time he came through that door, she felt herself get a little happier.
It was like when five-year-old Sammie had come in that afternoon and seen the unicorn cupcakes Josie had made. The little girl had lit up. Everything about her had gotten brighter.
Josie felt for Grant the way Sammie felt for unicorn cupcakes. For sure.
“Are you all right, honey?”
Josie pulled her gaze away from Grant’s fork—which was lying innocuously next to his plate—to look up at Maggie. “Oh yes. I’m fine.” She gave the other woman a mostly sincere smile. Maggie was lovely and Josie, and Jane, Zoe’s other closest friend, had dinner with the McCafferys almost once a week.
At least, it used to be that way. Before Aiden had moved back to Appleby and he and Zoe had fallen in love and he’d become a regular at the table. And before Jane had fallen in love with Aiden’s friend Dax, and he’d taken up the third seat on Maggie’s right.