Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(18)

“Sure. I’ll follow you in my truck. You and Sophie fight most of the time, huh?”

“Not most of the time. All of the time,” Eli said as they walked out together.

Hart clapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll get better.”

“I’m not so sure I want it to. I’d just as soon she stay mad at me. Maybe then she’ll decide that she can’t live in the same house I do and sell me her half of the ranch,” Eli said.

“Keep dreaming. That ranch is like a Texan’s gun to Sophie. It’s what kept her sane after her rascal of a husband died. The only way you’ll get that ranch out of her hands is to pry it out of her cold dead fingers,” Hart said seriously.



Sophie nosed her truck close to the fence, got out, and slammed the door. She didn’t waste a lot of time getting from the truck into the house. If she was going to buy refrigerated air, then by golly she would enjoy it.

She smelled something good in the kitchen and followed her nose. Elijah was standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of red sauce. He didn’t even look up when she sniffed the air.

“What is that?” she asked.

“My famous spaghetti sauce.”

“Is that supper?”

“It’s my supper. Don’t know what you are having,” he said.

“You’re not sharing?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“OK then, but remember it works both ways. What’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.”

She picked a bibbed apron from the hook beside the door and tied it around her neck. Then she went to work. In half an hour, with very little effort, she had bread dough doing a fast rise in the warm oven and a lasagna ready to bake. She removed the dough, turned the oven up to 350 degrees, and flopped the dough out onto a flour-covered cabinet as far away from Elijah as she could get. She quickly made it up into a dozen yeasty rolls and rolled the remaining dough out onto the cabinet until it was a little more than an inch thick and oblong in shape. She cut up a whole stick of butter on top of that, setting the pats just right, and covered them with brown sugar and cinnamon. In a few more minutes, there was a pan of fresh cinnamon rolls on the back of the stove rising for the final baking step.

Elijah pretended he didn’t care and didn’t even know what she was preparing, but the first waft of that bread dough sitting near the warm oven made his mouth water. He dearly loved home-baked bread, and cinnamon rolls were his favorite dessert. But he would eat sawdust and wash it down with sewer water before he admitted that to her.

He boiled spaghetti and continued to stir his sauce.

She picked up one of those fat romance books with a woman draped over a bed and a bare-chested man merely inches from her lips pictured on the front. She propped her legs up on a chair and read while she waited for the lasagna to cook.

He’d tried to watch what she whipped up to go in her dish but had almost burned his sauce, so he didn’t see what she’d added to the cream cheese, sour cream, and cottage cheese for the third layer. She’d put down several spoons of a sauce she’d made in ten minutes by browning hamburger with onions and peppers and adding a jar of prepared spaghetti sauce. Then she’d layered lasagna noodles on top of that. Uncooked ones. He’d never seen it done that way and wondered what the finished product would taste like. After that it was the white mixture. He thought he heard her cracking eggs, but surely not.

The timer sounded loudly. He drained the spaghetti noodles and poured them into a dish. He loaded up a plate and topped them off with a healthy serving of the sauce and carried the whole thing to the den where he put it on a wooden folding tray. A trip back to the kitchen netted a Dr Pepper from the refrigerator.

She looked up when he walked past. “Where’d you get that?’

“Bought it.”

“Where?”

“At the store?”

“When did you go to the store? I had a list started of things we need for the house,” she said.

“You need something. You pick it up. I needed Dr Pepper.”

“Be careful there…” She bit back the word “chief” before it was out in the room. “I bought the last toilet paper. I could take it all to my bedroom and carry a roll with me to the bathroom. I don’t have to share it.”

“I don’t plan to go into your bathroom. You stay out of mine. I’ll buy my own paper.”

“Good. I’ll be nice enough to leave what’s left on the roll for you. After that don’t you dare steal a single roll out of my bathroom. Better get to that famous spaghetti. It’s going to get cold,” she said.

It took a healthy dose of his willpower to let her have the last word, but he managed to do it without choking on the unsaid words. He ate slowly and enjoyed every bite. When he finished, he washed his dishes, put the sauce in jars, stored them in the refrigerator for later, and meandered out the back door as slowly as he could.

She watched from the kitchen window and waited until he was halfway to the barn before she took out a jar of his sauce and dipped a spoon into it.

When it hit her mouth she moaned. “Mercy, that’s the best sauce I’ve ever eaten. Why does he have to be such a rat and not share with me?” She ate two more bites and then put the lid on the jar with a long sigh.

Her bread turned out perfect. Light. Fluffy. Browned to perfection. She buttered the tops and turned the cinnamon rolls upside down on a serving tray before topping them off with a thin butter cream glaze. Then she turned on every ceiling fan in the house and opened his bedroom door. If he hated yeast dough, he’d have to live with the odor. If he loved it, she hoped he couldn’t think about anything else.