Winning His Heart: The Millionaire's Homecoming / The Maverick Millionaire

He could not have said no to her invitation if he wanted to.

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#u154f1487-a90a-5ce5-b9c4-2d41c72dff94)

TO ADMIT KAYLA’S KITCHEN, and her invitation, and Kayla herself, were proving impossible to say no to felt as if it would be some kind of defeat, so instead of saying yes, David just lifted a shoulder as if he could care less whether he ate her ice cream or not.

Kayla did not seem to be fooled, and her eyes were gentle as they lingered on his face. Then she acted just as if she had heard the yes that he had not spoken.

“It’s not quite ready. Give me a second.”

“I hope it’s not rose petal,” he said, needing her to know he had not surrendered to her charms or the charms of her kitchen completely.

“Oh, way better than that.”

“But what could be?” he said drily.

“I bought this at a yard sale,” she said, turning away from him and back to her crowded countertop. She lifted off her counter a bowl big enough to bathe a baby in.

At first he thought she meant she had purchased the bowl at a yard sale but then she trundled over to a stainless-steel apparatus that squatted on her floor with a certain inexplicable air of malevolence. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed it before since it took up a whole corner of the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asked warily, and gratefully, as something in him shifted away from that awful picture of porridge dripping down the wall in his house next door.

“It’s called a batch freezer!” Kayla said triumphantly. “What are the chances I would find one just as I’m contemplating buying an ice cream store?”

“Cosmically ordained,” he said.

She either missed his sarcasm or refused to acknowledge it. “Exactly.”

“It reminds me of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“That’s ridiculous. If I remember correctly, HAL was not nice.”

“You slept through ninety percent of that movie. And you were the one who insisted we rent it.”

“I was in my all-things-space stage.” She sniffed. “It disappointed.”

But what David remembered was not disappointment, but that there had been a bunch of them in somebody’s basement rec room gamely watching the vintage sixties movie Kayla had rented.

Somehow she’d ended up crammed next to him on a crowded couch. And partway through—after gobbling down buttered popcorn and licking the extra butter off her fingers—he realized she had gone to sleep and her head was lolling against his shoulder, and the cutest little pool of drool was making a warm puddle on his shirt.

And that he hadn’t embarrassed her by mentioning it when she woke up.

“How much did you pay for this contraption?” he asked gruffly, moving over to inspect it.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” she said happily. “That’s a steal. New ones, of commercial grade, start at ten grand. This size of machine is eighteen thousand dollars.”

He realized, uncomfortably—and yet still grateful to have his focus shifting—that Kayla was way more invested in the idea of owning the ice cream parlor than she had originally let on.

“Presumably,” he said carefully, “More-moo already has one.”

“They don’t,” she crowed triumphantly. “They buy their ice cream from Rolling Hills Dairy, the same as you can buy for yourself at the grocery store. There is nothing special about that. Why go out for ice cream when you can have the same thing at home for a fraction of the price?”

“Exactly. Why?”

“That’s how I plan to be different. Homemade ice cream, in exotic flavors that people have never had before.”

She frowned at his silence, glanced back at him. “And, of course, I’ll offer the old standbys for boring people. Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. But still homemade.”

“So what flavor is this that you’re experimenting with?” he asked, curious despite himself.

“Dandelion!”

“And that’s better than rose petal?” he asked doubtfully.

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Have you done any kind of market research at all?”

“Don’t take the fun out of it,” she warned him.

“Look, fun is playing volleyball on the beach, or riding a motorcycle flat out, or skinny-dipping under a full moon.”

Something darkened in her eyes when he said that, and he wished he hadn’t because a strange, heated tension leaped in the air between them.

“Fun is fun, and business is business,” he said sternly.

And he was here on business. To return a sweater. But ever since he had walked in the door and felt almost swamped with a sensation of homecoming, his mission had felt blurry.

“That’s not what you said in the article for Lakeside Life,” she told him stubbornly. “You said if a man does what he loves he will never work a day in his life.”

What did it mean that she had read that so closely? Nothing, he told himself.

“I’d play with the name,” she said, ignoring his stern note altogether. “That’s part of the reason I like it better than rose petal, well, that and the fact it would be cheaper to produce. I’d call this flavor Dandy Lion.”

His look must have been blank, because she spelled it out for him. “D-A-N-D-Y L-I-O-N.”

“Oh.”

“Cute, huh?”

“Not to be a wet blanket but in my experience, cute is rarely a moneymaker. Look, Kayla, if ever there was a time to worry, this would be it. I don’t think people are going to line up to eat dandelion ice cream, no matter how you spell it.”

“Oh, what do you know?” she said, and her chin had a stubborn tilt to it. “They drink dandelion wine.”

“They do? I can’t imagine why.”

“Well, maybe not the people you hang out with.”

“I haven’t seen any of the good wineries with dandelion wine,” he said, keeping his tone calm, trying to reason with her. “And you can bet they do their homework. In fact, Blaze Enterprises is invested in Painted Pony Wineries and—”