Another strange effect of Carolyn’s accident; she’d lost all sense of taste. She could tell the difference between hot and cold; differentiate textures, but nothing else. After the six-month recovery period, when she attempted to return to daily cooking for them, she’d realized she couldn’t cook at all. She had some sort of disconnect in her visual language skills which resulted in difficulty reading and she couldn’t follow the most basic recipe.

So at age seventy-five he’d finally learned to cook. The only good thing about that? Since she couldn’t taste, she couldn’t tell the meals he prepared tasted like shit.

They ate out a lot.

And because cooking had been such a big part of what’d defined her, they’d kept her loss of skills to themselves. Carson told anyone who asked that after fifty years of kitchen duty she’d officially hung up her oven mitts and retired.

He curled his hand around her face. “Liesl is not lookin’ for the truth, sugar. She’s lookin’ for validation from her Gran-gran because she respects the hell out of you. So tell her whatever she did surpassed the original recipe and you don’t remember it ever tastin’ that good.”

“You always know just what to say, silver-tongued devil that you are,” she murmured.

“How much longer do we have to stay?”

“Another hour or so. They’re doing the whole cake-cutting thing and first dance thing, which is weird because we didn’t have either of those things at our wedding. I doubt they’re expecting us to stick around after that.”

“Good. I have plans for us.” He brushed an openmouthed kiss at the base of her neck. “Nekkid plans that include you, me, our hot tub and a bottle of bubbly.”

She laughed. “You really believe that hot tub is the fountain of youth, don’t you?”

“Yep. Makes me feel twenty years younger.”

“Lord, crazy man, I love you. You really will be chasing me around when you’re a hundred and five, won’t you?”

Carson smiled. “Count on it.”