Beach Blanket Santa

going be a love professor, and soon you’ll be teaching me.
    That was all the encouragement he needed to grab an apron off a nearby hook and tie it on. “Did you bring any sugar?”
    “I brought a small container, enough for what I use in my coffee.”
    She produced the square Tupperware, and he whistled. “Got quite a sweet tooth, have you?”
    Her cute face reddened all over. “I brought extra.”
    “Well, that’s good, extra good. And, I’m betting we both brought butter.” He grinned, his enthusiasm building. He was going to do this. Teach Sarah to bake cookies from scratch. Even if forcing himself to keep his hands off her sumptuous body killed him. Man, didn’t she look sexy offering up her sugar that way? “I brought eggs and a bag of flour for coating fried fish.”
    She gasped as he set it on the counter. “A whole five-pound bag? Got quite an appetite, do you?”
    He shook a finger at her and grinned. “Got me there. Now, all we need is vanilla.”
    “Think there’s any in the house?”
    He turned to check supplies in the pantry, figuring he could replace anything they used later. After a few seconds passed, he held up a small dark bottle.
    “Bingo.”

    Sarah didn’t know how Matt made it all look so easy. They didn’t even have cookie cutters, but he’d fashioned some makeshift from various-sized drinking glasses turned upside-down to use their rims as cutting surfaces. “It’s incredible how you figured all that out,” she told him, duly impressed.
    “And you thought I’d only studied law at Georgetown.”
    “You didn’t learn this in law school,” she said astutely. “You learned this at home.”
    “Guilty,” he said, not looking culpable in the least. “It was all about food at the Salvatore house, especially with my folks running the restaurant.”
    “That must have been something,” she said a bit wistfully. “Growing up with a big happy family and so many siblings.”
    “We managed,” he said with a grin. “Managed to get into a lot of trouble and drive our parents crazy. Though I understand I’ll have this coming back at me one day.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “What goes around comes around. I have no illusions about my own kids not giving me grief, in one way or another, when the time comes. I’ll more or less accept it as my due.”
    It was easy to guess that Matt would make a terrific dad. His life experience had primed him for it. Naturally, he wanted kids. Not five children perhaps, but at least one or two.
    “Your turn,” he said, handing over the rolling pin. “Why don’t you try?”
    Sarah took the weighty implement in her hand, not knowing quite what to do with it. Naturally she understood she was to press it to that little ball of dough and flatten it out, but she wasn’t so certain her results would come out as stellar at Matt’s. The truth was, Sarah had never been instructed much in the way of cooking at all. And, for one reason or another had never felt much inclined to learn. Her mom was a restaurant kind of girl who considered prepackaged dinners sold in the frozen section as good as homemade. She’d probably passed that gene on to Sarah. Nearly everything Sarah ate came out of some sort of box. Not that she was prepared to tell Mr. I’m-Italian-and-Cook-Everything-from-Scratch at the moment. He probably thought she’d only packed frozen foods for her trip to the beach.
    “Go on,” he said kindly. “Just put your weight into it evenly and give it a go.”
    Sarah smiled uncertainly over her shoulder. “All right,” she said, determined to try. She centered her gaze on the big mound of glop on the counter, wondering how she was going to press that into a perfect one-quarter-inch slab the way he had. She grabbed each handle on the rolling pin and gingerly pressed forward. The blob squished slightly, but the rolling pin stuck. Not much else happened.
    “Put your back into it,” Matt prodded.
    She glanced at him cheering her on from the sidelines and then gave it her all, heaving her might into that little wooden spindle in her hands. Dough splatted out like an egg cracked fresh from its shell, transparently thin on the cutting surface. “Oh no!” she cried with dismay. Even she knew there was no way to bake cookies from that .
    “Here, let me help.” He sidled up behind her and calmly collected the mess, transforming it into a new ball. “It’s all in the technique,” he said, his voice a light tickle at the side of her