Coming Home by Mariah Stewart

cut.”
    “Cut?”
    “With cookie cutters.”
    “Sure.” He nodded. “I can do that. I used to be good at that.”
    “Great. You’re hired.” She waved him over to the table and pressed something into his hand. He looked down at the smooth plastic object, then back up at Vanessa.
    “My mom always used a round cutter,” he told her.
    “Mia wants hearts.”
    “Oh.” What, he wondered, had happened to kick-ass former FBI agent, criminal investigator Mia Shields in this town?
    “You can work over here.” Vanessa cleared a space and tore a piece of waxed paper from a roll. She flattened it onto the counter, took a blob of dough from the refrigerator where it had been chilling, and dumped it onto the waxed paper. She sprinkled a rolling pin with a little flour, then proceeded to roll it out to the thickness she wanted.
    “There you go,” she told Grady. “You’re up to bat.”
    He hesitated for a moment, then realized there would be no escape until the job was done.
    Oh, if only my old friends from the Bureau could see me now …
    He grimaced at the thought. Where once he tracked serial killers and child predators, he was now reduced to cutting out little heart shapes in dough with Miss Fluff. How the mighty have fallen …
    From the corner of his eye he stole a glance at her. He had to admit she wasn’t looking quite so fluffy today. As a matter of fact, she was all business, in an intense sort of way that he found oddly appealing. He struck the thought from his mind as quickly as it had entered.
    “Nice of you to offer to help Mia,” he said to break the ice.
    “Mia’s my friend, and she’s marrying my brother,” Vanessa replied very matter-of-factly. “Why wouldn’t I help?”
    “She has other friends who didn’t offer to hire someone to work for them so that they could help out.”
    “She’d do the same for me.” Vanessa took one batch of cookies out of the oven and placed it on a cooling rack. Into the oven went another tray.
    “What do you want me to do now?” A line of cutout dough hearts lined up across the table.
    “That was fast.” She glanced at his work, then nodded. “They look pretty good. You can put them on that tray on the counter there, as soon as I get a minute to clean it off.”
    “I’ll do it,” he told her.
    He stepped around her and grabbed the tray and took it to the sink and turned on the water. He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck while he washed off the cookie sheet, then dried it.
    “I think we need a sheet of parchment on that tray before you put the cookies on it.” She was at the kitchen table measuring flour. “So they don’t burn on the bottom.”
    “Okay.” He pulled a sheet off the roll and fitted it to the tray. When he finished placing the cookies on the tray, he asked, “What now?”
    “Now we have to wait for another tray to come out of the oven. I should have picked up a few extras but I ran out of time, so we have to shuttle them back and forth.”
    He left the tray on the counter and walked to the table.
    “Hey, my grandmother used to have a table like this.” He tapped his fingers on the blue-enamel-on-metal top. “Does yours have flowers in the corners?” He peered around her. “Yep. Just like Gramma’s.”
    “Mia told me.” She opened a stick of butter and dropped it into a bowl. “It was in the house when I moved in, as was most of the rest of the furniture.”
    “The previous owner just left it all here?”
    “The previous owner was just shy of one hundred when she passed away. She had a grandniece who really wasn’t interested in the house or the furnishings. She did come for the funeral, and while she was here, she took the things she thought had some value, but she just left everything else where it was.”
    “Aren’t you lucky she didn’t have a better eye.” He took a seat in one of the chairs next to the table. “I noticed the stuff in the living room when I came in. That mohair sofa and the chairs with