Chapter 12 #2
“You’re right,” she interrupts, barely a whisper, and I nearly dive across the table to hear it. “I don’t know how to talk to her. I don’t know what to say to any of them. I’m not a confrontational person, and I don’t…” She peers up at me with watery eyes, and yeah, I might commit a felony.
“Don’t cry. It kills me to see you cry.”
She blinks a few times and dabs at the corners of her eyes with her napkin before sniffling and taking a gulp of her iced tea. “I’m thirty years old, and I don’t know how to tell my mother that she hurts my feelings. It’s pathetic, right? I’m pathetic.”
“You’re not pathetic.” It’s her mother who’s pathetic. Everyone else in her life who’s ever made her feel this way. When she still doesn’t brighten, I make an attempt. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked this much in my life at one time. Might have said more words to you tonight than I have all year.”
“Yeah?”
When I nod, she smiles, and I breathe a sigh of relief, gesturing for her to eat. She picks up her fork to stab a few vegetables next to her salmon. I dig into my steak frites, and we eat silently for a few minutes before she asks me to go on. “So, how’d you end up here?”
“Mazie.”
“You moved back for Mazie?”
I swallow a bite of food and wipe my mouth, using the time to consider how much I should tell her about Amy, if anything at all.
It’s been so nice talking about all of this with Eloise, but I feel like that might be a step in the wrong direction.
“When I found out I was having a child, it was like a switch was flipped inside me. All the years of falling into and out of sobriety, it all suddenly coalesced. I thought about my mom and how much I loved her. I knew I could never be as perfect as she was, but I needed to try. So I spent the last few years trying to give Mazie the kind of life my mother gave me, but I needed my family to do it, so…”
“So here you are,” Eloise fills in, grinning like she’s actually proud of me.
“Here I am,” I repeat.
“With me.”
“With you,” I confirm, and she takes a deep breath that I feel in my lungs too.
It’s as if my whole life has led up to this moment, to this woman, the opportunity to make her happy, win her smiles, and, if given the chance, protect her from anything that might hurt her.
So that makes it all worth it. That I can be the man here with her.
While we finish our dinner and a shared creme br?lée for dessert, she takes over the conversation, telling me more about Sloane, and Eloise’s theory about how every relationship—romantic or platonic—has to have a grumpy or sunshine person.
I don’t get it, but then she points out that I’m her grumpy, and I like that, so I don’t argue.
Anytime I can be her anything is okay with me.
I pay the bill, even though she tries to argue, but quiets when I grumble her name, and we walk out of Tabby Cat with my hand on her lower back. At my SUV, she waits for me to open the door for her, but before I close it, she holds out her hand. “We never got to talk about the rules.”
“The rules?”
“About…touching or kissing,” she finishes, cheeks flaming.
“You can touch me anywhere,” I say without hesitation, and she giggles. I take her hand in mine and put it on the center of my chest then let my hand fall to my side, testing her. Seeing what she’ll do.
When she understands the silent challenge, she slowly skims her palm up to my throat and splays it along the back of my neck, fingers sinking into the hair at the base of my skull.
“This okay?” she asks, and I close the distance between us. She turns in her seat, feet on the edge of the running board, and I place my hands on her knees, holding them open to make room for me between them and lower my head to hers.
“It’s good.”
“Maybe we should kiss to make sure it looks real,” she whispers, and I don’t need to be told twice.
My lips are on hers less than a second later, brushing and prodding at the plump pillows until she parts them, allowing my tongue to find hers.
She tastes like sugar, and I have to mentally tell myself to relax my grip on her thighs.
But then she makes this needy little sound in the back of her throat, and I forget all about what I’m supposed to do and drag her closer to me, gripping the sides of her thighs as tight as I want, pressing my fingertips into the softness of her hips.
She’s all heat and sighs, and it’s the best kind of torture, knowing she is as desperate for my tongue as I am for hers. She licks into my mouth like I’m her favorite ice cream, and my cock grows semi-hard because I know that’s how she’d lick my dick.
Fuck.
I pull away to find her breathing as raggedly as I am. I drag my hands over the sides of her face, pushing her hair away without an ounce of gentility. I’m a wild animal pawing over her, but she’s in my car and had her tongue in my mouth a moment ago.
She is mine.
At least for this goddamn family wedding of hers.
“How was that?” I ask, and she sways toward me as if drunk, biting into her bottom lip.
“Mm-hmm.”
I raise my brow, needing more of an answer.
She pats my pecs before swiveling in her seat to face forward. Then she giggles. “Yep. That’ll, uh…really show my family what’s what.”
That pulls a laugh from me. It sounds raspy, even to my ears. “Right. For your family.”
Still refusing to look at me again, she inhales audibly. “Just get in the car, Roman, before you make me blurt out something else neither one of us is ready to hear.”
I’m not so sure about that, but I do as she commands. “Whatever you say, sunshine.”