He shrugged. “You were tired.” His grin turned wicked at the corners for a second. Then he said, “And who the hell gets up early on their honeymoon?”
“Good point.”
He walked to their makeshift kitchen and pulled a plastic bucket from beneath the exposed piping of the sink.
Ava slid from bed and found his t-shirt on the floor where he’d dropped it last night; she pulled it on over her head and went to his side. “What in the world is in that thing?”
He lifted the basket toward her and she saw that its frame was metal, and that it had an inner lining of netting. And it was half-full with little red wriggling, snapping crawfish.
“Mud bugs,” he explained cheerfully. “Our lunch.”
Her stomach turned over at the idea, but she said, “Well that sounds…interesting.”
He gave her a knowing look as he opened up the trap and dumped the little crustaceans into the bucket with a clattering sound. “They taste good, I promise.”
She nodded. “Oh, I know.” She smiled. “I believe you. I just have no idea how to cook the things.”
“You’re in luck, Mrs. L, because you’re about to learn from the master.”
She felt her smile widen. Mrs. L. That’s who she was now. No longer just Ghost’s daughter, or Aidan’s little sister, but Mercy’s wife.
He watched her absorb the idea, his gaze warm as she processed it all. Then he said, “Here, I’ll show you. Grab me the salt, and we’ll get them clean.”
Cooking lessons with Mercy were nothing like cooking lessons with Maggie. It wasn’t drudgery; it was just spending time with each other, in a new capacity, talking about seasoning instead of Shakespeare.
Mercy built up a fire in the iron stove, and Ava filled a big soup pot with water that she set to boil. Cleaning the crawfish was nasty business. She cringed to watch them writhe around as the salt and water went over them.
Mercy decided they’d do it up like a crab boil, and he set her to halving ears of corn and new potatoes. She managed not to cut herself.
“How’d you get to be so comfy in the kitchen?” she asked teasingly as she minced a head of garlic.
He shrugged his wide, bare shoulders. “Growing up, Gram cooked, and Daddy cooked, and I cooked. We all pitched in.”
“What’s your favorite thing to make?”
“Sausage gravy,” he said without hesitation. “On fresh biscuits.”
To the water, they added the corn, the potatoes, bay leaves, garlic, halved lemons, whole peppercorns, salt, thyme, cayenne, paprika, crushed red pepper. When the crawfish were deemed clean enough, and the dead floaters fished from the mix, Mercy poured the lot in. He splashed in half a beer and declared it ready to “do its thing.”
Then he caught her around the waist and crushed her to him. “You didn’t even kiss me yet.”
Ava wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts to his chest as he claimed her mouth with rough, wet kisses that left her straining up on her toes.
One of his hands went up under the hem of the shirt, found all her bare skin.
“How long do those have to boil?” she asked, breathlessly, when he finally pulled back.
His disappointed frown made her want to laugh. His hand on her ass made her want to drag him over to the bed. “Not long,” he said. He sighed. “After, then. Fucking crawfish.”
Ava did laugh then, resting her head on his chest. “They were your idea.”
“I know. Fuck me too.”
“After,” she reminded, smiling. “I’ll do that after.”
They poured their crawfish boil out over newspaper, as it should be done, and the smell was incredible. Ava ate a few. She ate more of the corn and potatoes, slathered with butter. There was just something about the texture that was hard to stomach. Not for her, she decided, but this was Mercy’s Cajun culture. And she wanted to support him in every way she could.
“Can we walk over sometime and see the church?” she asked as they were rolling up the shells in the newspaper and throwing out the trash.
