She's Got a Way (Echo Lake #3) - Maggie McGinnis Page 0,44

cook while you’re here, so you don’t starve if the executive chef goes on vacation?”

“Very funny. I can actually cook enough to stay alive.”

“What’s your specialty?” He raised one eyebrow in challenge.

She shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know that I have a … specialty, so much.”

“All right. Say it’s a chilly Sunday night in the fall. You’ve had a long weekend, and you just want a nice dinner. What would you cook yourself?”

“Lucky Charms. Isn’t Sunday-night cereal a universal thing?”

“No, though I applaud your taste in breakfast-for-dinner.” With his foot, he opened a cupboard under the griddle and pointed at a giant box of the cereal.

She laughed. “No way.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?”

“Luke, you make your own granola.” She shook her head. “I did not peg you for colored marshmallows.”

“A guy’s gotta have his weakness.” He smiled, and her stomach did a flippy thing that scared her.

“Well, your coffee’s becoming my weakness.” Yes, coffee. “I had no idea camp coffee could taste so good.”

“Camp coffee?” He put a hand to his chest like she’d stabbed him. “You think this is camp coffee?”

“It’s not?”

“Oh, it hurts to hear you say that.” He flipped the last pancake to the platter and shut off the griddle. Then he opened a cupboard near his head and pointed to a canister of coffee grounds she was used to seeing at the little grocery store near Briarwood. “That is camp coffee.”

She nodded. “Does this mean you’re sharing your own personal stash with me?”

“I am, and it’s dwindling rapidly. You drink an impressive amount of coffee.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Job hazard of raising teenagers.”

He did that one-eyebrow-up thing. “Raising them?”

“These girls get dropped off on September first and picked up on June thirtieth, Luke. I don’t know how it is at other boarding schools, because I’ve never experienced them, but at Briarwood, most of the dropping off and picking up isn’t even done by the parents. Most of these girls go home for a week in December, but not all of them. They live at Briarwood. Twenty-four-seven, they live with me.”

“Huh.” He poured juice into two glasses and handed one to her. “I never really thought about it that way. Never pictured your population as particularly … needy.”

“They are, Luke. Just not in the traditional sense of the word.”

“Well”—Luke gathered his own plate and headed for the swinging door out to the dining area—“in my experience, money generally creates more problems than it solves.”

She followed him to a table and sat down. “What is your experience? Because I get the distinct sense that you might rather have seen your camp go up in flames than see it bought by a hoity-toity boarding school.”

He raised that damn eyebrow again. “Your words, not mine.”

“Never mind. I get it.”

He wasn’t talking, and Piper’d said not to push him. As dead curious as she was about his history, for now, she’d stop asking. She rolled her eyes, biting into a pancake. It was crazy-good, especially followed by a bite of spicy sausage. She might just have to take him up on his offer to teach her to cook, if his pancakes were any indication of his abilities in the kitchen.

And if his abilities in the kitchen were any indication of his abilities … elsewhere …

“Good?”

She looked up to find Luke watching her, an amused expression on his face. She put her fork down, wondering just how quickly she’d inhaled the second pancake. Also wondering how well he could read her thoughts.

She swallowed hard. “The pancakes are delicious, yes. Thank you for cooking for us.”

“Breakfast is my specialty.” He winked, but she couldn’t tell whether he’d intended a double entendre, or if she was just hearing one.

“So.” She wiped her lips with a paper napkin and set her plate aside. “You said work commences in thirty minutes. What’s your plan?”

“Showers.”

She smiled widely. “Showers? Really?”

He laughed, rolling his eyes. “If I’d known this was the way to your heart…” Then he looked away, like he hadn’t meant for those words to come out of his mouth.

“Actually, the way to my heart is a big cast-iron tub full of lavender-scented bubbles, but I’d happily make do with a camp shower at this point.”

“Yeah, no tubs here.” He pressed his lips together like he was trying to knock a vision out of his head. “And definitely no bubbles.”

“Does this mean you’re offering to keep supervising my monkeys?”

“God help me, but yes. I think I am.”

Gabi laughed at the expression on his face, then felt a