Winning His Heart: The Millionaire's Homecoming / The Maverick Millionaire. Melissa McClone

wouldn’t appreciate the half-empty perspective.

      That was one of the glaring differences between them. That and the fact he would have looked up the manual before pouring several gallons of pricey cream into the vat.

      “You can turn up the beater speed here,” she said proudly, and touched a button.

      The growl turned into a banshee wail and then the yellow mixture was vomited out of the top of the machine through the same opening he had put it in. It came out in an explosive gush.

      He yanked back his head from the opening just in time to avoid having his eyes taken out. A fountain of yellow slush sprayed out with the velocity of Old Faithful erupting. It hit the ceiling and rained down on them and every other surface in the kitchen.

      He scrambled for the off switch on the ice cream maker and hit it hard.

      The room was cast into silence.

      Kayla stood there wide-eyed, covered from head to toe in yellow splotches. One dripped down from the roof and landed on David’s cheek.

      She began to giggle. He was enchanted by her laughter, and it made him realize there was something somber in her and that she had not been like that before. Not just somber. And not quite hard.

      Serious and studious, but not so...well, worried, weighed down by life. As if she had built a wall around herself to protect herself from life.

      Suddenly, her laughter felt like a wave that was lifting him and carrying him away from his own troubles. He found himself laughing with her. It felt so good to stand there in the middle of her kitchen and see the hilarity in the situation, to let go of all the dark worry that had plagued him since he arrived home.

      Then the laughter died between them.

      And then she stepped up to him, and ran her finger across his cheek. She held the yellow smudge up for his inspection, and then, still smiling, she touched it to his lips.

      The substance on her finger was already surprisingly chilled, and not quite liquid anymore, but like a frothy, cold mousse.

      He hesitated, and then touched his tongue to the yellow glob. In an act of startling intimacy, he licked the substance off the tip of her offered finger.

      Was it possible he had wanted to taste her finger ever since she had licked the butter off it all those years ago?

      No. That was not even remotely possible.

      Still, he was aware that the mess all around him had evaporated. It didn’t matter that he was covered in pee-colored mousse, or that it dripped from the ceiling, and spotted the walls and the countertops. It didn’t matter that it was splashed all across Kayla’s apron and clinging in clumps to her hair.

      The flavor on his tongue made him feel as if he was about to die of sheer delight.

      Or was the delight because his tongue had touched her finger?

      “Well?” she demanded.

      “I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he confessed, “but Kayla, I think you may be onto something. Don’t call it Dandelion. Or Dandy Lion. Call it Ambrosia.”

      Her smile put the very sun to shame.

      So he didn’t bother to tell her that her finger was probably a very important ingredient in the ambrosia he had just experienced.

       CHAPTER TWELVE

      HIS LIPS WERE still way too close to her finger! Kayla wondered whatever had possessed her to touch his cheek, to hold her finger out to him, to invite his tongue to touch her. Something shivered along her spine—an electric awareness of him that was like nothing she had ever felt before.

      She could feel her smile dissolving, her pleasure at his approval giving way to something else altogether.

      She wasn’t an innocent young girl anymore, but the power of her hunger astounded her. She wanted him.

      It felt like a kind of crime to want someone who had hurt her husband so badly. But had he really? Or had Kevin hurt himself over and over again, and then blamed the whole world in general and David in particular?

      She shivered at the thought, and then thankfully, any kind of decision—to lean toward him, to touch his lips with her lips instead of her finger—was taken from her.

      He, too, sensed the sudden sizzle of chemistry between them, but he had the good sense to back abruptly away from it.

      He turned from her quickly, grabbed a dishcloth from the sink and began to clean up the mess.

      That was David. All the time she had known him he had always stepped up to the plate, done what needed to be done.

      Especially after the danger of having her finger nibbled, Kayla knew she needed to send him on his way, even if he hadn’t received any of the promised ice cream—unless you counted that one taste.

      “According to what I read in Lakeside Life,” Kayla said, “you have better things to do than help me with my messes.”

      “Don’t believe everything you read.”

      He got a chair and climbed up on it and began to tackle the mess on her ceiling. She saw his shirt lifted and she saw the hard line of his naked tummy.

      That hunger unfolded in her, even more powerful than before.

      “You should go home.” It was self-protection and it was desperately needed!

      “I’ll just give you a hand with this first.”

      Kayla wanted to refuse and found that she couldn’t. It had been so long since she had had help with anything. Someone to share a burden with was as least as seductive as the sight of his naked skin. For so long she had carried every burden, large and small, all by herself.

      An hour later her kitchen had been restored to order. Every surface shone. David had even ferreted out yellow cream in the toaster and wiped it from the inside of the light fixture.

      But if the kitchen shone, they were a mess!

      “I hope that isn’t a Slugs and Snails shirt,” Kayla said, but now that she was looking, she could see the distinctive small snail over the left breast.

      “Of course it is,” he said, glancing down at the yellow blotches that she was fairly certain had already set on his very expensive shirt and shorts. “My company was their start-up investor. I always use the products of the companies we invest in.”

      A reminder that the man standing here, in her kitchen, covered in yellow stains, was the CEO of a very prestigious company!

      He misread her distressed expression. “I’m sure the stains will come out.”

      “You don’t know the first thing about dandelions, do you?” she said, sadly. “When you do your laundry, that stain is not an easy fix.”

      “I don’t do my own laundry,” he said, a little sheepishly.

      It was a further reminder of who she was sharing her kitchen with. “Well, you could tell whoever does it to try lemon juice.”

      “Is that why you smell like lemons?” he asked. “Because this is not your first experiment with dandelions?”

      He had noticed her scent. Somehow it was headier than dandelion wine.

      So when he said what he said next, she should have resisted with all her might. But she didn’t have a single bit of might left in her.

      “I was on my way down to the lake to swim. Why don’t we just go jump in? Like the old days?”

      A small smile was playing across the sensuous line of the mouth she had been foolish enough to touch.

      She knew exactly what he was talking about. The last day of school, every year, all the kids in Blossom