Unwrapping Liam: A Good Girls Don't Novella Read Free Page B

pies.
    “Sure!” Setting the bowl down, I bounded to the fridge, but after a few minutes of rifling through its contents turned up nothing.
    “What are you looking for?” he asked as he peeled apples.
    “The pie crusts.”
    “You have to make them,” he said slowly.
    “But where’s the box?”
    “Box?” His eyebrow ratcheted up another degree. 
    “Of pie crusts.”
    “You need to make them,” he repeated. “With flour and water and butter.”
    “That’s going to be a problem,” I said. I hadn’t been welcomed in the kitchen when I was a kid. I was too loud, too messy, too annoying.  I’d managed to avoid Tara and the kitchen since I’d left for college after I’d dropped one of her favorite porcelain bowls during an episode. She’d made it clear that I was useless at cooking, and the few pleasant memories I had associated with a stove all had Liam as a main character. But now he was staring at me like I’d grown two heads.
    “You don’t know how to make a pie crust?” he guessed. To his credit, he managed not to sound condescending.
    I shook my head, knowing the red on my cheeks had nothing to do with the preheating oven. 
    Liam smiled and set down his knife. “Let me show you.” 
    As he reached for the flour bag, I caught his arm. “No, I want to do it. Tell me how.”
    There was something more than pride on the line. Liam liked to cook, which meant he spent a lot of time in the kitchen. That meant that if I learned how to cook, I could be with him in the kitchen. Plus, I wanted to know how to do things. I’d spent too long feeling like there was no point in learning new things. I’d spent too long believing the lie that I was useless. He’d shown me differently and now I had a chance to put my fledgling confidence to the test.
    Liam pushed the flour bag toward me and nodded toward the mixing bowl. “You’ll need those measuring cups.”
    As I had asked he didn’t reach for anything else, he only gave instructions over my shoulder. By the time I’d chopped the butter into small pieces, he was hovering behind me so closely that if I shifted in the least my ass would brush against him. But I forced myself not think about that. Instead, I focused on the task at hand.
    “Okay, now you need to mix it together.” He was so close to me that the instruction tickled across my ear and down my neck. 
    “With a mixer?” I asked.
    “No, like this.” His arms circled my waist as he reached into the bowl and started working the ingredients together with his hands. Without hesitation, I followed suit, but Liam didn’t step away; instead his hands shifted until they were over my own, his fingers threaded through mine kneading the silky flour into the slippery butter. His breath was hot on my neck as we worked. I could no longer resist pushing back against him a little. He responded by moving closer to me until I was pressed into him like a mold. His lips had found their way to the spot behind my ear that he knew drove me crazy, and he whispered more instructions against my skin, his mouth brushing softly across my ear lobe as he spoke. He wasn’t kissing me. No, he was teasing me, reminding me that even fully clothed, in a kitchen, he could make my body tremble.
    “You did it,” he said after I dumped a round ball of dough onto the counter. I could feel his lips twitch into a smile, but he didn’t step away from me as he reached for a nearby rolling pin. He placed it in front of me. “Ever used one of these?”
    I couldn’t help myself as I picked it up. “It feels so powerful in my hands.”
    “That’s what she said.”
    “I know something else that feels powerful in my hands.”
    Liam groaned, but he didn’t step away. “Eyes on the pies, chicken.”
    I made a clumsy attempt at pushing the rolling pin across the dough, but my wrists betrayed me and I lost my grip on the handles. Without missing a beat, I picked it back up hoping Liam had written it off as novice dough making and