Page 34 of 500 First Editions (The Romantics #3)

RYAN

PERFECT TEN

“ H ow’s it going, bookworm?” I asked as I came up behind Willow and laid my hands on her shoulders.

She had been parked at the kitchen table for most of the morning, working on a new book. But for the last hour, she had been staring out the window at the willow tree.

“It’s going,” she said as she stretched her arms and rolled her wrists. “Starting a new project is always a little bumpy.”

“It probably helps to actually look at the document instead of out the window.”

“I was thinking,” she bristled. “I have to do a lot of that to write a book. Staring out the window is an important part of my workday.” She closed her laptop with a little more attitude than necessary. “What about you? Did you finish masterminding today’s batch of relationships?”

Okay. So she was a little testy today. I could work with that. Testy was better than the state of melancholy she had been in since her friends left Kansas. Apathy was the antithesis of progress. And I needed to make a lot of progress with Willow Winslet.

“Three client coaching sessions, edited next week’s podcast episode, scheduled some social media content for the next two weeks, and told a company to stop being cheap if they wanted me to accept their brand deal.”

“Geez,” she muttered under her breath. “How long have I been sitting here?”

“It’s three in the afternoon.” Since I kept my coaching sessions confidential, I had worked from the bedroom with the door closed so Willow could move about the rest of the house.

She groaned and raked her hands through her hair. “I thought it was still before lunch.”

“Do you have anything pressing going on for the rest of the day? Meetings or calls or anything?”

Willow shook her head.

“Good.” I turned to get a pair of shoes. “We’re going out.”

Willow spun in her seat, eyes tracking me as I moved around the room. “Why?”

“Because you’ve barely left the house in two weeks.”

“I’m a novelist. Barely leaving the house is a necessary personality trait.”

“Shoes on, cupcake,” I hollered as I jogged into the bedroom. “We’re going out whether you like it or not. It’s a holiday.”

I heard her laugh as I stuffed my wallet and phone in my pocket.

“Unless you celebrate different holidays than I do, there’s no holiday on August fourth,” Willow grumbled as she slid on her trusty Chucks. She was in the short overalls and the cropped tee she had been in the day we met up for pierogies and hot chocolate.

Those overalls made her ass look fucking phenomenal.

I watched as Willow pulled her hair out of the two French braids she had put it in yesterday, letting it down in waves. The pale pink curls were shadowed with dark roots since she hadn’t taken time to color her hair.

I wasn’t entirely sure how long people went between coloring their hair, but given that we were going on our seventh week together, I guessed Willow would be touching it up soon.

She swiped on a pink gloss that matched her hair, then headed for the door. “What do you have up your sleeve, Ford?” she said as she grabbed her purse. “Whatever it is, there better be food. I didn’t realize I skipped lunch.”

“Of course there’s going to be food. It’s like you don’t even know me,” I said as I locked up the house and opened the passenger door of the car for her.

“It’s National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.

” I hopped behind the wheel and buckled my seatbelt as she did the same. “We’re going on a bakery crawl.”

I wasn’t even shy about the way I kept my hand on Willow’s thigh as we drove out of the outskirts community and headed into Manhattan.

For it being on the smaller side of cities, Manhattan, Kansas had a surprising number of bakeries. I parked on the street at the first stop and reached into my pocket, pulling out the notecards and golf pencils I had found at the rental house.

“What’s this?” Willow said as she took the card and pencil I handed her and scanned the hand-written columns.

“Scorecards. How else are we going to figure out where the best cookie in the city comes from?”

Her eyebrows lifted, then a laugh broke free. “I’m guessing you also have a bakery crawl map for most efficient cookie consumption?”

I flashed my phone screen and showed her the red map dots that were connected by a blue line. If I was being honest, the travel loop kind of looked like a dick.

A lopsided dick, but a dick nonetheless.

“And when, pray tell, did you have time to come up with all of this?” she asked as she hopped out of the car and wiggled her overalls down from where they had ridden up.

“You’ve been staring at that tree for weeks,” I said as I locked the car and took her hand. “I had plenty of time.”

Willow’s gentle features fell. “I miss him.”

I cradled the back of her neck in my palm and kissed her forehead. “I know.”

We walked into the first bakery, hand in hand. Frosted Fantasy was drenched in pink-painted walls with hand-painted sprinkles. The gleaming bakery case was chock full of cupcakes, cookies, and brownies. Each sported a decadent layer of frosting.

Chewy cookies were sandwiched together with a thick helping of buttercream in the middle. Vanilla frosting for the sugar cookies, cream cheese frosting for the oatmeal raisin, salted caramel for the snickerdoodles, and fudge for the chocolate chip.

Each cookie sandwich was approximately the size of my head.

Willow’s eyes went wide as she surveyed the options. “We’re going to have to pace ourselves.”

We reconvened at a small table with two bottles of water and one chocolate chip cookie sandwich. Willow made a neat little plate out of the white waxed bakery bag and laid the cookie on top.

“Wait,” I said as she reached to break it in half. I pulled out my phone. “We have to document our findings.”

“Ah. The good ol’ scientific method. Do what you must,” she said as she sat back so I could get a shot of the cookie.

I handed it to her instead. “I want you in it.”

“But we agreed that you wouldn’t post?—”

“This is just for me, Wills,” I said.

She held the cookie next to her face and smiled. I showed her the photo for her approval, and watched as a myriad of emotions flitted across her eyes.

“You’re cookie testing too,” she said. “You have to be part of the evidence.”

I scooted closer and took another picture of the two of us and the cookie.

Willow’s eyes lingered on the screen for a moment, then averted as she broke the cookie in two and handed me my half. “Will you text that picture to me?”

I sent it immediately, then tapped my cookie to hers. “Cheers.”

The first bite was heaven. Willow closed her eyes and let out the most erotic moan I’d ever heard. “Oh my God,” she groaned. “There’s no topping this. Best cookie. Ten out of ten.”

I had to agree. The competition was going to be steep if this was where we were starting.

The cookie was still warm and gooey. The chocolate frosting in the middle was bittersweet enough to keep it from tasting like a sugar bomb.

There was a little bite of flecked salt on top of each cookie that balanced the chocolate.

It was perfection.

I wanted to go back up to the counter and buy a dozen more, but we had more bakeries to hit.

Willow wiped her fingers and mouth with a napkin, but missed a streak of chocolate on the corner of her lips. I cupped her chin and smoothed my thumb over the spot. I held her gaze as I licked the icing from the pad of my finger.

“What’d you think?” I asked as our eyes stayed locked.

Dark lashes lowered from my eyes to my mouth. “I liked it,” she whispered, tilting her chin up and angling her mouth with mine.

I could feel her short, nervous breaths against my mouth, and dammit—I wanted every single one of them. It took everything in me not to kiss her. “I meant the cookie, Willow,” I murmured, just a hair away from her lips.

Her eyes went wide and her cheeks matched the pink-painted walls. “It was good,” she clipped.

I lifted an eyebrow. “Just good?”

Willow brushed her wavy hair away from her face and grabbed her pencil and scorecard. “It tasted really good. But as far as chocolate chip cookies go, it might have been too much with the frosting.”

Next to the name of the bakery, she wrote a description of the cookie, with a respectable seven out of ten.

I gave it an eight.

The next two bakeries had classic chocolate chip cookies—one with dark chocolate chunks, and the other with mini chocolate chips. They got sixes from both of us.

The fourth bakery put oats and molasses in their chocolate chip cookies. Willow gave it an eight, while I dubbed it worthy of a three.

The fifth had peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. They were thick and soft. Willow and I both gave them eights.

At each stop, I took a picture of her with the cookie, and then one of us together. I hadn’t bothered to take any discreet photos that didn’t show her face to post on my social media accounts.

Frankly, I hadn’t posted anything about the two of us in a while.

The comment section was irate about it. The small pieces of my non-curated life that I shared publicly were of my own free will.

There was no way in hell that complaints behind anonymous profiles would make me feel the least bit guilty about keeping Willow all to myself.

I had a faint idea that Willow still believed I was in this to prove a point. Adding the grief of losing Shep to that, I had a long way to go. I had her in proximity to me, but I didn’t have her.

We made our way across town, skirting the Kansas State University traffic as earlybird students milled about, exploring the campus, and found ourselves at Penelope’s Bakehouse.

It was a hole in the wall joint that mainly offered artisan bread and bagels, but had a respectable selection of sweets.

The kid behind the counter—Benicio, according to his name tag—filled a little bag with two small cookies and rang us up at the counter.

The bakehouse didn’t have any seating, so we opted for a park bench across the street.