Waking Up With Dr Off-Limits

Jess looked at him. ‘Really?’ She wondered if she’d be so bold as to ask him for a birthday kiss? ‘Well, I guess …’

‘Good. That does it then.’ He grinned. ‘Get the girls to spread the word.’

Jess rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, sir.’

Adam chuckled. ‘So how old are you going to be?’

Jess took an internal breath. ‘Twenty-four,’ she murmured.

He slapped his forehead theatrically to cover the internal groan as she gave voice to the paltry number. ‘Still a baby,’ he teased.

Jess opened her mouth to object at the unfairness of his statement. To say, no, not a baby. A woman. A fully fledged woman with a woman’s desires. But a car beeped as they waited for the lights to change at an intersection and people crowded all around them, also waiting for the green flashing man.

It was hardly the kind of thing you said to someone surrounded by a bunch of strangers.

She wished she didn’t look so young. That she could add ten years. Hell, she wished she could add one or two. She didn’t want to be twelve years younger than him. She didn’t want him to think of her as some young girl with a silly crush.

As a baby.

Maybe it was time she showed him she was all grown up?

CHAPTER THREE

JESS eyed Adam’s bedroom door from the kitchen as she mixed a dash of melted chocolate into the already decadent icing mix. He hadn’t come home last night. Not that she’d seen anyway and she’d stayed up very late, feigning interest in some rubbish movie.

He’d gone on a date with some ward nurse from the hospital so she figured he was still playing hard.

The radio, which she’d tuned to the country music station, serenaded her as she took her frustrations out on the icing, beating it into lumpless submission.

The oven timer rang, interrupting her activity, for which her arm muscles were exceedingly grateful.

Jess turned and opened the oven door. A wave of heat rolled over her as the aroma of perfectly cooked Anzac biscuits permeated the entire room. Jess inhaled deeply as she took them out and upended them onto a cooling rack.

The kitchen smelled like baking day back home and she felt suddenly homesick. Her forthcoming trip home couldn’t get here fast enough.

Jess pushed the biscuits aside and dragged the chocolate cake she’d cooked that morning closer. She’d just spooned a dollop of icing onto the cake when Adam sauntered into the kitchen.

‘Mmm. Something smells amazing,’ he said.

Jess looked up. He was lounging in the archway, one shoulder shoved against the jamb, a suit jacket hooked via his index finger over the other. His tie had been pulled askew. A hand buried deep in a trouser pocket pulled the fabric interestingly against a firm bulky quadriceps.

‘I’m baking,’ she said unnecessarily as her heart lifted a little. He hadn’t gone out last night in a suit so maybe he had come home after all?

She marvelled at the many faces of Adam—boardies, scrubs, birthday suit and now a business suit. They were all so tantalising she couldn’t decide which one she preferred.

‘So I see,’ he remarked, pushing off the jamb and prowling into the kitchen. His stomach rumbled and he realised his meeting had run over and he hadn’t eaten any lunch. He slung his jacket around the back of a chair and reached for a cooling biscuit.

‘Be careful,’ Jess said, blowing out of her eye a piece of fringe that had loosened from her ponytail. ‘They’re hot.’

Adam’s mouth watered. They weren’t the only things that were hot. Jess bouncing around the kitchen in a ponytail and an apron was pretty damn hot too.

He gave himself a mental shake as he picked up the closest biscuit. Since when had he ever thought domesticated women were hot? Where had it ever got his mother?

He bit into the biscuit gingerly to hide his confusion.

‘Wow!’ he said as golden syrup and melted brown sugar infused his taste buds with glorious sensation. ‘This is a damn good biscuit.’

Jess felt her heart fill with joy at his enthusiastic compliment. His look of bliss as he’d savoured that first bite would be duly categorised in her memory banks as one of her best Adam moments. ‘You wait till you taste the birthday cake.’

‘You’re making your own birthday cake?’

Jess laughed. ‘Of course. You can’t have a birthday party without cake.’

‘We could have bought you a cake. You shouldn’t have had to make your own.’

Jess waved her hand at him, dismissing his suggestion outright. ‘Why buy one when I can make something much better?’

Adam eyed the cake. ‘It’s that good, huh?’

Jess pulled the spoon out of the icing and they both watched as its glossy texture slid off the back like treacle. For good measure she licked the back of the spoon and sighed. ‘Hell, yeah.’

Adam, who had followed every single second of Jess’s pink tongue gliding across the metal surface, temporarily lost his train of thought as a bolt of desire ignited his loins. In any other woman he would have said it was a deliberate come-on but Jess just looked at him with the same openness she always did.

No hint of coyness or agenda.

‘I didn’t know you baked,’ he said, changing the subject.

Jess nodded. ‘Always. I love to bake. Which is just as well seeing as how I have a terrible sweet tooth.’

With the image of Jess licking the spoon fresh in his mind, Adam had to admit there was something about a woman who loved to eat. Too many of the women he dated barely ate a thing. It was a revelation to see one embrace the whole process with such enthusiasm.

‘Well, these biscuits are winners.’

‘They most definitely are,’ Jess said with pride. ‘They’re my grandmother’s recipe. She’s known throughout the district for them. They’ve won her the blue ribbon at the Edwinburra Show for the last thirty-eight years.’

Adam chuckled. He took in the whole scene. A country song played in the background. The kitchen smelled like an old-fashioned bakehouse. Jess was dressed in a gingham apron with ‘Bless This House’ embroidered across the yoke.

He eyed her speculatively. ‘You really are a country girl, aren’t you?’

Jess wasn’t sure if admitting it was a good thing or a bad thing. But she refused to pretend to be something she wasn’t. Even for Adam. ‘Through and through.’

A look of contentment infused her features into a mask of pure serenity and kicked him hard in the chest. Had he ever felt the way she looked?

The urge to know more surprised him.

‘Tell me about home,’ he said, pulling up a kitchen chair.

Jess looked at him uncertainly. ‘The farm?’