A Mountie and A Banana Bread Picnic
— Chapter 2 —
The Answer
A PIN DROP COULD be heard in Elizabeth's small kitchen.
She fought to breathe, but the band wrapped about her lungs cinched tighter.
"Sometimes what appears ruined. . . isn't."
"The loaf is as good now as it would've been had we gotten the timing right."
Hope had fired in her—hope that there might be a chance, hope that he could forgive. . .
Hope that he would say yes to her invitation to dinner.
There was a crushing weight on her soul as she waited to hear how Nathan Grant would answer her question, the perfect mirror of his own to her from the annals of their history. Even her heart held its breath.
A muscle ticced in Nathan's taut jaw.
Ocean blue, a wave of emotions scudded through his eyes, turning them to tidal pools threatening to suck her under. A woman could lose herself in eyes like that. She should know.
His answer, when it came, was simple and clear.
"Yes." There was no levity on his face. His gaze was heavy, voice thick with gravity. She was a trapped butterfly, drowning at the weighted portent of his eyes.
Her heart lurched rawly. She tried to inhale—a tiny, painful breath. "Yes?"
"Yes."
Her legs puddled under her. A hundred butterflies took flight in her stomach.
Weak with relief, a wild sound bubbled up in her tight throat. Thank you, Lord. I don't deserve this mercy from Nathan, but perhaps in time, after I apolo—
Nathan went on though, quiet steel entering his level tone. "But. . . we have to talk, Elizabeth."
A mouse sneeze would have sounded like a gunshot in the deafening silence.
And there it was. The elephant in the room they'd avoided for two years.
Her lungs squeezed. A flush of shame crawled up her neck. She wanted desperately to look away, but she was defenseless against his steady gaze.
"I kn-know." Voice cracking, she barely managed to get the fraught, humbled words out.
"Maybe not tonight, but soon. There are things we need to—"
"I know." Oh, how she knew. "Nathan, I—"
I have so much to say. But is this it? Is this really the moment? Standing here in my kitchen; you in that blue-checkered shirt that stirs up so many memories, both painful and sweet, and me with my burned loaf of banana bread?
"Not now," he ordered softly, taking the decision out of her hands, but the sweet intensity of his eyes belied any harshness.
They were making her feel a little lightheaded. Or maybe that was the relief.
She gripped the edge of the kitchen counter, praying he couldn't see her knuckles turning bloodless with the force of her hold. Those Mountie eyes had been her undoing more than once.
They saw too much. They saw her.
Saw through her. Always had. Even when no one else did.
Dinner. Dinner. She latched onto it. Surely, that would be a safe subject.
"Umm, about d-dinner." She stammered, tripping over her tongue as heat crawled over her cheeks. "How would you feel about a-a—"
She cast about frantically. What could she offer him for dinner—this dinner of a lifetime? She hadn't yet been to the mercantile for her weekly shopping, her food supply was running low, and—
"—a banana bread picnic?" she squeaked out before clapping horrified hands over her face, burying her flaming red features. "I did not just say that."
A soft chuckle. "Ohh, yes, you did, Elizabeth Thornton."
She had.
Wait. "I DID?!" She yanked her hands off her face. "You heard that?! You heard me say—"
"'I did not just say that'?" His mouth widened as he quoted her words. The smile did funny things to her stomach despite her current mortified fluster. "I have two key witnesses"—he tapped a finger to each ear—"that will attest to the fact that you did."
There was a maddening twinkle in the eyes that drifted over her flushed cheeks, taking in the hectic red dabbed high along her cheekbones, deepening under his attention.
"And yes." A teasing grin flashed. "I would love to get a banana bread picnic with you."
She bit her lip. "A banana bread picnic-dinner," she clarified in defense.
"Of course," he said blandly. "Everyone knows that banana bread makes the best dinners." She choked. Wickedly teasing, a gleam danced in his eyes. "I mean, picnic-dinners."
A laugh burbled in her throat. How did he always make her smile? "It's just that I—oh, this is so embarrassing, but I haven't been to the market yet this week and my cupboards are pretty bare, and I should have thought of this before I invited you, but—"
"Elizabeth. Elizabeth."
She stumbled to a stop. "Yes?"
"Allie and I have made-do on cupboard leftovers more than once in our lives. With my schedule, I don't always get my weekly grocery shopping in either. We're rather good at rummaging together something tasty out of remnants. Some of our best meals come about that way."
She loved that he intuitively understood that her dinner invitation tacitly included Allie, but her heart pinched. She'd never really thought about Nathan not being able to attend to certain basic necessities due to his long days as a law enforcement officer. She should have. After all, she'd been married to a Mountie and knew the selfless sacrifices they made on behalf of the people they served, but she'd been so focused on herself for so long, many things, it seemed, had eluded her. . .
But the image of Nathan and his young niece sweetly bent over a small table, thoroughly enjoying cobbled-together plates of culinary eclecticism, made her heart heat in an odd manner. Was it warm in here? She fidgeted with the dainty neckline of her modest blouse. Maybe it was time to open a window.
"Well, if you're certain you don't mind. . ." she said uncertainly, trying to discreetly fan herself.
Nathan eyed the flapping corner of her apron. "Is someone a bit warm?" he inquired mildly.
She dropped the apron like it had burned her. "I'm fine, it's just the, umm, the air is a bit close in here."
He straightened the lines of his humored, disbelieving mouth. "Uh-huh." Moving to the window he unlatched it, hoisted it a hands-span up in a squawk of wood and metal in its aged tracks, no wasted movements in his capable course of action.
A cool blast of air breezed through the room. Elizabeth sighed with relief as she instantly began to cool. God bless the man.
He glanced back. "Better?"
She nodded. "I'm cooled down now, thank you."
He closed the window, mouth turning in a soft smile as he waved at the two cavorting children in the back yard. He turned around to her, hanging loose hands on his hips. "Shall we get started?"
Flustered by his homey familiarity, the casual, blatant masculinity of his pose, framed as it was by her window, she pushed hair off her face, the movement a mimicry of his gesture only moments earlier—the remembrance of which only served to deepen her fluster.
"Started?" she murmured distractedly.
One dark eyebrow cocked. "With. . . dinner?"
"Oh! Yes!" She scrambled to compose herself. "Dinner should definitely be started."
"We've got the banana bread part of the picnic covered." Was she imagining it or was that a yearning glance he directed at the loaves, quickly masked? "So the main course is done. Let's see what else we've got to work with."
It was definitely a yearning look. He gave another one as he left the window and moved across the room with purpose, heading for her cupboards. The sweet vulnerability of this proof of his weakness for the sweetbread gave her back a measure of composure—and rather melted her heart.
"Mountie Nathan!" A little boy's voice interrupted the moment. Elizabeth glanced at the back door, a smile forming on her lips as her small son tore into the house in a whirlwind of energy and bits of crushed leaves, Allie on his heels.
Nathan's face creased in that smile which always seemed to hold a special tenderness for her son. "Hey there, Jack. Did you manage to elude Allie?"
"Uh-huh." The boy's wavy blond head nodded, picking up Nathan's meaning even if not understanding the exact word.
Elizabeth liked it. It was a great way to expand Jack's vocabulary, and he was definitely at an age where he was learning and absorbing knowledge at a rate which sometimes, if she was honest, exhausted her. It hadn't taken long for her to realize that teaching your own child through the lens of the ins-and-outs of daily home life had key differences from teaching children in a classroom.
Jack was babbling on. "I 'luded her real fast, Mountie Nathan. You shoulda seen me!"
Nathan laughed. "I just did out the window, remember? You were flying like the wind. You've got a good running stride."
Personally, Elizabeth thought her little son's running style was cute, a little awkward, and not at all professional, but he and the tall Mountie seemed to have an unspoken male understanding on the matter as her son nodded matter-of-factly.
"That's right," he said, and sounded so adult she suddenly wanted to cry. "You were wavin' at us when I was flyin' like the wind." His sweet and unconscious instant copying of Nathan's phrase had the threatening tears becoming reality. "What's a stride?"
Nathan demonstrated. "See? This is my stride. Let's see yours."
Jack scampered over to him, then stared up at him, past the long legs and the torso. "You're tall," he marveled, quite serious suddenly.
Nathan's laugh was genuine. "It helps me reach things." He hunkered down to the boy's level. "Like things at the back of high shelves, for instance. Your mama invited Allie and I to have a picnic with you tonight, and we need to scrounge up what's left in the cupboards. Want to help me with the stuff way at the back?"
The boy's eyes grew big. "Really? I can help?" Nathan nodded, and Jack looked at the high cabinets quite seriously. "But I can't reach them. Mama doesn't like me standing on the coun'ertops."
"I'll lift you." Nathan solved the problem after a flashing look at Elizabeth that asked and received wordless permission.
"Wow," Jack breathed, stars in his eyes. Then he came down to earth with a thud. His nose wrinkled. "What's that smell, mama?"
Elizabeth laughed. "That, my beautiful boy, is the smell of your mama burning the top of her last loaf of banana bread for the day." Her eyes found Nathan's. "But Mountie Nathan showed me that it can be saved."
Up from the ashes. A salvage from a ruin.
Everything about Nathan's slow response was soft; his eyes, his face, his voice. "Sometimes the thing thought ruined just needed a second chance. Turns out, that burned loaf wasn't ruined after all."
She tried not to let herself get lightheaded. But her nails were digging sharp half-moons into the edge of her countertop, liberally crumbed with banana bread shavings. This man. . .
For someone self-defined as sparing with words, he sure had a way with them when it mattered.
He always had. She just hadn't always allowed her heart to listen.
She could feel Allie's quiet eyes moving between them, picking up what she was certain was more than she would be comfortable with. She knew how hurt and upset Allie had been two years ago when—
A stab of pain went through her at the memory, and Elizabeth shied away.
But then Allie, through sheer will and selfless kindness—because heaven knew it wasn't through any apology or contrition on Elizabeth's part—had found a way to be around her again, to befriend her, even come to her with problems.
Truly, she did not deserve the friendship of the Grants. Something she'd never been more aware of than she was now, at this new and refreshingly humbled period in her life.
"Hi, dad." Allie moved to Nathan's side, gave him a little hug of greeting.
"Hey, honey." Immediately reciprocal, he wrapped her in an enveloping, one-armed side-hug, leaning to rest his cheek atop her head.
Elizabeth felt her knees weaken a little. Watching Nathan with Allie had left her feeling this way many a time over the years. Something about daddies and daughters. . .
What had he been like with little four-year old Allie?
What. . . would he be like with a baby girl in his arms, one with dainty rosebud lips, her daddy's dark, waved hair, and tiny cheeks that Elizabeth knew he'd never stop kissing?
Stop. Stop!
Lord, have mercy. These thoughts. . .
Struggling to reign herself in, she whirled to the cupboards and began blindly to tug them open, one after another. Clearing her throat, she tried to speak past the catch in her voice. "Allie, do you think you could you check the larder and see if we have anything fit for human consumption in there?"
She didn't turn around, didn't trust herself to. She felt ridiculously weepy—and all over a sudden vision of Nathan with a baby daughter in his arms.
Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous, she chided herself, but the soggy feeling in her heart wasn't listening.
"Of course." Allie sounded thoughtful after a pregnant pause, but soon enough, Elizabeth heard sounds of her feet moving off in the direction of the food pantry.
A hand grazed her elbow. Nathan. "You alright?" he asked under his breath, quiet concern roughening his tone. Astute, always too astute, those keen Mountie eyes searched her face.
She pretended to laugh it off, a little unsteadily. "I'm fine. I just"—she flapped her hands airily, like it was nothing—"get like this once in a while."
His eyes gave him away—he didn't believe her. But he was too much of a gentleman to make a scene over it. He gave her a crooked little half-smile that only slightly reached his eyes. "We're all allowed those." His hand was a steadying warmth at her elbow.
"I'm good now." She smiled too brightly, praying he would just let it drop. She couldn't, just couldn't tell him it was a baby vision that had shaken her.
He let it drop. But his gaze lingered on her face for a beat too long for mere concern before he turned back to Jack, now drawing doodles on the floor in a dusting of spilled flour. "Ready for our mission, Jack?"
The boy smiled up in excitement, flour-painting forgotten in an instant. "Ready, Mountie Nathan!"
Elizabeth's heart forgot its proper function at the way Jack immediately, trustingly raised his hands for a lift up from the floor. Nathan grinned down at the little boy. Without hesitation, he caught the two small hands and gently tugged Jack to his feet.
In an instant, a flash blinded Elizabeth's eyes, shooting through her mind. The way Jack's hands disappeared into Nathan's much larger ones sent an immediate and tender image jolting across the poignant spheres of her too-aware consciousness.
Tiny newborn hands. Translucent skin. Delicate fingernails the size of a teardrop. Fingers, unmistakably feminine in their tiny, tapered lengths, just barely wrapped around one of Nathan's, clutching it like an anchor as blue eyes—so alike the ones staring back at her from her mirror every morning, it punched the air from Elizabeth's lungs—fascinatedly gazed up at Nathan like he was the sole mystery of marvel in her little world. . .
Elizabeth bit down on the inside of her cheek. Hard.
This will never do. These flights of fancy had to stop.
But her logic, her grand attempt at discipline, were still no match for the explosion of melting in the center of her chest.
Thoroughly unnerved, she smoothed unsteady hands down the front of her apron, lifted her head, and started examining the lower shelves of the now exposed shelves. Food. Think of nothing but food, she agitatedly directed her thoughts. But one eye kept straying to watch Nathan.
Having assisted Jack up from the floury floor, Nathan caught the giggling boy beneath his arms and boosted him into the air, strong-arming him over his head so Jack could see into the recesses of the uppermost kitchen shelves.
"What do you see up there, Runs-Like-the-Wind Thornton?" he called up like they were on a ship and Jack high above in the lookout, spy glass to his patch-free eye as he swept the seas. "Any food we could call dinner?"
"Not yet, Mountie Nathan." Far from disappointed, Jack sounded like he was on an adventure. In a way, she supposed he was: a treasure hunt for anything even passably edible.
A moment later, no real food yet found, Elizabeth heaved a sigh and turned to Nathan, biting her lip. "I don't suppose you might have any—"
He set Jack down and forestalled her with a teasing hand held up. "Oh, no, Mrs. Thornton; you invited us, you feed us."
"Fine. You asked for it." But she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling at his cheeky retort.
"I did indeed." He unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed his sleeves to his elbows, revealing thickly corded forearms, still burnished from the summer sun, which looked more than capable of scavenging her cupboards from very highest to very lowest. "Now, let's try this again and see what we can find to work with."
Chortling with laughter, up little Jack went in Nathan's capable hands, happy as a lark to be hoisted high in the air again.
"Try the very back, and in the corners," Nathan suggested.
Jack's little legs wiggled gleefully in the air. "I found something!" He withdrew his arm from deep within the shelf and triumphantly waved a small brown sack, looking to Nathan for an approval that made Elizabeth feel like a watering pot all over again.
"Good man, Jack," Nathan praised. Jack's ears pinked with shy pleasure.
"I've got these." Something rustled and thunked on the countertop behind them. Elizabeth turned to find Allie releasing an armful of burnished red apples, rolling down to join a big glass bottle of—
"Apple cider!" Elizabeth exclaimed happily. "Oh, Allie, bless you! I'd completely forgotten we had that. That's perfect."
Eyes crinkling in a sweet smirk, Allie scooped up the final apple and pertly bit into the shiny vermilion skin, mumbling around her bite. "You're welcome, Mrs. Thornton."
Laughter in her voice, Elizabeth pointed at the bite-marked apple. "That's your apple now."
With a cheekiness that reminded Elizabeth all too much of Nathan, Allie took another bite, her cheeks, slimmed from girlhood as womanhood crept in, nearly disappearing on either side of the plump autumn fruit. "Oh, yes, Mrs. Thornton," she laughed.
The air was filled with the scent of apples and cinnamon, a playful Nathan had managed to get swatted with Elizabeth's apron, and Jack had poked his finger into more than one food item by the time they had scrounged up the final few items and readied their picnic basket.
Nathan was lowering the last item into the basket and tucking cocoa brown-and-white checked fabric around it when he reversed course, pulling the block of cheese back out, and giving her a sassy twinkle over it. "You know," he smart-alecked her, "I think maybe I'm so hungry I'll just take a bite out of this here and now."
"Don't. You. Dare." Elizabeth flapped her apron at him, feeling a sense of satisfaction when it walloped him square in the chest.
He caught it before it could come back for round two and gave it a little tug, pulling her closer. "Time for you to hang up this apron and get out of the kitchen, woman."
Allie's giggle bubbled around them as Elizabeth smiled at Nathan, helpless against the tide of pink rising in her cheeks. He'd never called her woman before and certainly not in this teasing way, and there was something about that whole sentence and his little tug. . .
"Nathan Grant, you better put that cheese back." Trying to distract herself, she wagged a finger at him in warning.
"Yes, ma'am." But he sounded entirely unrepentant as he popped the cheese back into place with one finger, holding her eyes merrily the whole while.
She drew closer. "You are such a brat, Nathan," she whispered for his ears only, making sure to lower her voice.
He tugged the trailing apron strings out of her hands with a slow smile, and whispered back, "I have my moments."
Didn't she know it.
"The least I can do—y'know, to make up for my bad behavior—is hang this up for you." Without waiting, he reached out and hung her half-apron on the hook, right next to the full-length one she wore for more involved meals. He seemed caught by the soft femininity of the tiny hearts she'd embroidered across the thick white ties of her half-apron, rubbing his finger over them, lost in thought before glancing at her. "You make these?" he questioned lowly.
Curious about his reaction but chalking it up to a man appreciating a womanly art, she moved to a tall round basket by the door and stooped to gather an armful of blankets from it, tossing an affirmative murmur over her shoulder at him. He dropped the topic and a part of her felt the tiniest bit disappointed.
"Let me help you with those." He caught the picnic basket handle in one hand and, materializing by her side, relieved her of her burden, tucking the blankets into a roll under his free arm.
"Nathan, that's too much," she protested. "Let me carry something."
"I wanna help!" Jack popped up by Nathan's leg. "I'll help Mountie Nathan carry them, mama."
The blanket roll was bigger than Jack's whole little body. "How about you carry this for me?" Nathan dug into the picnic basket and pulled out the thermos of warmed apple cider. "That would be a big help. Deal?"
"I got it, Mountie Nathan," Jack said manfully, hooking one arm around it and proudly walking back to where Allie was getting her coat on after having helped him into his. Elizabeth could have sworn his little chest puffed up to twice its normal size.
Grateful for Nathan's sensitive tact, she shot him a warming glance in the small hall mirror as she slipped into a coat and paused to fix the tendrils of hair still loose around her face, smooth her rather disheveled coiffure.
A hand touched her arm. "Don't," Nathan said softly, breath warm across her hair, his eyes a tender, petitioning drift over her features.
Their eyes locked in the mirror. Nathan loosened his modest touch on her arm, but the spellbinding connection swirled around them like ribbons of gold shimmer, so intensely tender it drove all sense of time and space from her heart.
"We're ready to go," Allie chirruped. A sweet autumn breeze brushed over them as she opened the front door and Jack bounded outdoors, carefully snuggling his precious cargo. Calling after him to watch his step, Allie stepped onto the front porch to wait for them.
Elizabeth's lashes dropped as she looked away from the mirror, trying to shield her vulnerability from Nathan, but she could feel him at her shoulder. "We're. . . coming, Allie." She dared to look back in the mirror.
Nathan's eyes were there, never having left her. "Thank you," he said simply, huskily.
Elizabeth had never known a few loose hair strands and the unsophisticatedness of a messy bun could make a man's eyes soften like hot wax under a wick. Melted blue with a courtly gratitude understood only between them, his eyes were masculinely yet genteelly appreciative. "It's lovely this way."
Elizabeth wasn't sure she had ever felt more beautiful than she did in that moment.
That he preferred her hair uncontrived, allowing it to freely show the effect of her labor in the kitchen, as they readied to embark on an event as momentous as their first date—this autumnal picnic of banana bread and scavenged accompaniments—was something she didn't quite know what to do with except acknowledge that it silently affirmed what she'd always known deep in the bowels of her buried realizations.
Nathan Grant was a keeper.
And it was her deepest, most terrifyingly honest prayer that he would keep her now that she was finally waking up from her sleep, finally realizing that their paths had always been marked out side by side. Ahead lay only one merged path, wide enough for four to walk, to dance, to live through life. Hand in hand. United.
Grant us a family.
The unconscious thought snagged her heartbeat unsteadily. I'm losing my marbles, I really am.
But the heart-piercing appeal of the wayward thought—prayer? wish?—settled into her bones with a slow, sweet ache.
"Comin', mama?" Jack hollered from the road in front of their little covered porch, impatiently swaying side to side as he peered into the house.
"Yes, baby, we're coming." Baby? She hadn't called him that in forever. It's these crazy baby daydreams! They had decidedly thrown off her equilibrium. Or maybe it was Nathan's eyes making her dizzy.
"Shall we?" Nathan caught the door with his toe, nudged it open wider for their passage, and held it there with a foot while he waited.
She tried to smile at him, but didn't trust herself to hold his eyes for more than a quick glance as she passed through the doorway, the house keys in her coat pocket jingling softly as she moved across the threshold.
Nathan reached around the door as he stepped outside to join her, his rugged-soled boots quiet on the boards, and she heard the lock click into place as he locked the front door.
She cast her mind back and remembered how he had lingered at the back door a smidge longer than necessary to close it earlier, and knew without asking he had made sure both her doors were locked for the evening and her house was now secure to his standards. Far from feeling affronted, it made her feel cared for, looked after. It made her feel. . .
Safe. It made her feel safe.
He made her feel safe.
Nathan Grant was a cocoon of watchful protection—loose enough to let the heart fly, but close enough to keep the wolves at bay. She knew first-hand the rapidity and completeness with which he reacted to any threat of danger to the safety of those that mattered to him.
She knew she was among that number. "You matter to me."
The unmasked vulnerability of that quiet confession still haunted her.
But it was another confession, full of passionate intensity—"I'm in love with you. Elizabeth, I LOVE you."—that tore slumber from her elusive grasp on more dawns that she cared to admit.
And in her nightmares, where honesty reigned without consideration for her sensibilities, it was the pain—silent and darkly anguished in his raw eyes as she speared lie after icy lie rejecting his love straight into his heart—that tossed and turned her in her darkened bedroom in the midnight hours. He'd absorbed her words that day like physical blows, the truth in his eyes, silently calling out the lie of her words, still not enough to alter her from the coldness of her chosen path, from the lie she'd embraced as her new truth.
Now she knew the difference between the false safety of a wrong but nonthreatening choice and real safety. She only prayed she wasn't too late.
Nathan had paused at the door, watching her with a whiteness growing under his skin. She knew she had gone deathly pale. She couldn't stop the cold chill trembling through her as memories that now devastated her surged across the horrified landscape of her being, leaving her sick at heart.
Grave awareness clouded the air above them. He knew.
She knew he knew. She could see it laid bare on his face.
How he knew where her memories had taken her, she would never know. But she knew that he did with the same certitude that she knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west. A shiver took her at the realization, a clammy cold seeping through the hair at her temples.
Nathan was the first to recover—a thick, graveled breath. "We'll talk," he said roughly, and it was a promise, a benediction, and a premature, merciful reassurance all in one. It made her hot and cold all over, and she knew until the end of her days she'd never find another man like Nathan Grant.
His eyes were ragged with years of pent-up emotion, and she knew hers were worse.
"Ma-ma," Jack complained, his blessedly innocent little person leaning against Allie as he shook the thermos impatiently. "We gotta go. The cider's gonna get cold."
"Picnics wait for no Mountie-and-teacher," Allie said with such sweet mildness that Elizabeth's eyes swung to her, only to find a steady weighing in the girl as she watched them with content eyes far wiser than her years.
"That's enough of your sass now, Allie-girl," Nathan warned with faux sternness, earning him a grin from Jack. But there was no heat in his tone, and Allie smiled at him with gentle love as he went down the steps.
He turned back at the bottom and Elizabeth found a hand being proffered to her—over the rolled blankets wedged under his arm—with the quiet directness that was so much a part of him.
It wasn't about her needing a hand down her front steps. She didn't.
It was about them.
She took it. And for the brief moment they were connected as she descended the steps, skirts a cotton rustle behind her, it was as though Nathan held her heart instead of her hand. When he released her, the loss was sharp.
The air held the crispness of autumn, but mellow warmth lingered from the gentling sun and brightened it with gold, bringing with it the scents of loamy earth and aging leaves. Overhead, the sky was still a blue blanket, but she knew at this time of year, light disappeared into dusk quicker than a cat after a mouse.
Gravel and leaves crunched underfoot as they headed down the path into the woods. They were nearly at its entrance before she realized she has no idea where they were going, where she was supposed to be leading them.
Impulsively, she turned to Nathan, strolling beside her. "I-I didn't think this far ahead—where do you want to have our picnic? Do you have any particular spot in mind?"
From the other side of him, Allie leaned forward and shook her head with a sparkle of pixie humor. "You're the hostess, Mrs. Thornton." Jack reached up to put his hand in hers, and Allie looked away from Elizabeth to smile down at him. He grinned back.
Elizabeth looked to Nathan for help.
Oh, no, you don't, his eyes seemed to laugh at her. Then Nathan, loyal father that he was, slung a forearm around Allie's shoulders. His upper arm was engaged in holding the blankets close. "Nope. Your invitation, your location."
"Yes, but—" The flare of a dare from under his thick, dark lashes stopped her words in their tracks. Fine. Her chin lifted. Challenge accepted, her eyes transmitted back to him in a flash of answering spirit.
She knew exactly where she was taking them.
·oOo·
A/N: Intended to upload Ch. 2 last night, but there was a site mishap affecting the first chapter (which some of you may have seen.) And then Ch. 2 demanded another six hours of editing and writing today, which delayed again. At this rate—and at twice the length of the first chapter—maybe it'll make for some bedtime reading. LOL!
We got Nathan's answer to Elizabeth's "Would you like to get dinner with me?" Not that there was ever much doubt about his answer. :D But he's not just falling mindlessly into this new start (that was never going to work for me); like he told her, they need to talk. There are things they need to address, that *I* need them to address, even if the show never does. :/
I was talking to my friend "Blemishes and Brushstrokes" about her new post-S10 N&E story "Christmas Crossing and Truth, Evergreen" (which I recommend!), and told her we must be in unconscious sync as, unbeknownst to either of us, her new story and my new chapter both include Elizabeth having a vision of a future with Nathan and calling LJ "my sweet boy."
Hope you enjoyed the second chapter as much as the first. More chapters on their way! Hugs, Paths