“We didn’t have cows or sheep or goats here until you people showed up,” he pointed out.
“Oh. Um. Buffalo?”
“Do you know how stupid you’d have to be to milk a plains buffalo?” he asked me.
“Do you?” I retorted, finishing untying the other shoe. “Last I checked, buffalo don’t live in Wisconsin.”
“There’s a buffalo farm like three hours from here in Baldwin,” he informed me.
I blinked. “Seriously?”
“Mmhmm. You can’t eat buffalo, either, though,” he pointed out.
“I mean. But I thought they were extinct?”
“That’s bison bison. And not quite.”
“Why are you repeating it?” I asked.
He laughed as I used one foot to pull off the other shoe, then switched. “I’m not” he said. “Bison bisonis its Latin name. The American Bison was knocked down to something like 500 individuals in the nineteenth century and had to be cross-bred with the European bison for the population, such as it was, to recover.” He made a face. “Not unlike many First Nations.”
“Sorry?” My extremely Scandinavian ancestors had emigrated sometime in the late nineteenth century. I didn’t know history well enough to have any idea of they’d been responsible for anything that might have impacted the Indigenous people living in Virginia where they’d settled. Apologizing seemed like the safer of the two options, though.
Elliot raised his eyebrows, lips quirked. “I’ll consider forgiving you,” he replied, and I could tell he was teasing me, both from his tone and because his hands came to rest on my hips.
“Anything I can do to help convince you?” I asked him, teasing back, although my voice had dropped a little.
“We can discuss you begging on your knees later,” he replied huskily.
My mouth went dry. “Okay,” I agreed, probably too quickly.
Elliot laughed. “Dinner first,” he told me. “You’re going to need your strength.”
I swallowed. “Are you going to expect me to be able to actually pay attention to what I eat?”
His laughter drifted down the hall as he turned and walked into the kitchen.
My pants a lot tighter and less comfortable than they had been, I followed awkwardly after him.
I sat backfrom the table, one hand rubbing my extremely full belly. I’d been too emotional to eat as much as I probably should have this morning, especially after not having eaten the night before, but Elliot had made more than enough food for both of us—and then some. He’d left me at the table, carrying the dishes of sweet-savory salmon, the spiced squash, some sort of baked beans unlike anything I’d ever had, and the thick-but-not-heavy corn cakes back into the kitchen to package up leftovers.
The fact that there were leftovers were not a judgment on his cooking. He’d just made that much food. I let out a satisfied breath, then pushed myself to my feet, picking up the empty plates and carrying them over to the sink, walking around the far side of the island to avoid getting in Elliot’s way.
“I can do that,” he told me, looking out from behind the fridge door.
“So can I,” I countered.
“You had a really long day.”
I shrugged. “I can do some dishes,” I replied, taking them to the sink and rinsing them before starting to load them into the dishwasher.
As he emptied the serving bowls and platters, Elliot handed them to me, so that he finished before I did, and I nearly dropped the last plate as he pushed his hips up against my butt, clearly already interested in taking this somewhere other than the kitchen.
Or maybe not, I thought as his hands pulled the tails of my shirt out of my grey work slacks and got to work on the buttons, undoing about half of them.
“Elliot—”
He pulled my undershirt out of my pants.
