“I’m fine.”
A hard breath of disbelief and frustration jetted from his nose. “Do you really believe all the bullshit you feed yourself?”
“What can I say? It’s a talent.” My response was hard, but Mack laughed and scrubbed a hand over his face. Asshole was grinning again.
I started to tell him to go to hell when my phone dinged. I reached for it, figuring it was Jace following up about the building.
I fucking froze when I saw who the text was from.
My ice-cold heart flashed with a bolt of heat. A frenzy pumped directly into my veins.
Unknown: Thank you for what you did today. I wish I could have truly expressed to you what it meant to me. I want you to know it meant everything.
Grace.
I sat there staring at her message, fighting that same feeling again.
“Who’s that?” Mack nudged me with his boot from under the table.
I shoved my phone into my pocket. “No one.”
“No one?” he challenged.
“That’s what I said.”
Fucker grinned. “And you’re lying. I see it written all over you.”
I sent him a glare and tried to ignore the excitement that blazed just beneath the surface of my skin, my phone burning a damned hole in my pocket.
I had a number.
An in.
And I was fucking going to take it.
Mack laughed. “Looks to me like you’re not feeling so cold, after all. Maybe I shouldn’t lose hope in my best friend just yet.”
“It’s just a fuck, Mack.”
At least, that’s what I wanted it to be. Still, I cringed when I said it, as if it were insulting her, the girl who dripped sex and indecency and then had me fumbling when she looked at me with those sad, fathomless eyes.
Truth was, if I was right about the girl, that was probably all that the text was.
A thank you.
Mack was right. I wasn’t anything but an asshole. A predator. After one thing. Because sitting there right then? I knew I was going to take it as an invitation.
Problem was, everything about it felt different. Body lighting up at the thought. Pulse doing something funny when it thrummed an extra beat.
“One day, some girl is going to make a crack in that impenetrable stone, and you’re gonna put one on her finger. Have a small herd of kids. And you’re going to be happy, Ian. Fucking happy because it’s about time you had a little of the real kind.”
“You want to be called Uncle? You’ve got Jace for that. So why don’t we drop this bullshit you’re trying to get at? You know what’s important to me. What I live for, and you know damned well that I’ll live the way I want. I won’t let anyone get in the way of that.”
And it sure as fuck wasn’t going to involve marriage and a family.
I edged up so I could get my wallet out of my pocket, dug into it, and pulled out a twenty. I tossed it onto the table. “I have to go.”
Asshole cracked a grin. “Where you headin’, Ian?”
I pushed out of the booth and shot him a finger, not turning to look back. Only thing I heard was his laughter following me to the door.
Eight
Grace
“Thomas, set the table, please.”
“Oh, man, do I have to?” he whined, stomping through the kitchen and heading directly to the cabinet. Clearly, he already knew the answer to that, especially with the look I sent him.
But because it was Thomas, he was going to argue anyway.
Gramma chuckled and shook her head. “Boys. They like to do everything the hard way.”
Wasn’t that the truth?
“Not the hard way, Grams, the right way,” he corrected, hiking up onto his tiptoes to pull down the plates.
“Right way, huh? And how do you figure?” she asked, moving around the kitchen and finishing our dinner, poking at the potatoes with a fork to make sure they were soft. All the while, I was busy washing Sophie Marie’s face and hands since she’d decided to have a mud pie as an appetizer.
She’d shoveled about three fistfuls into her mouth before I’d made it across the backyard to stop her.
Mallory was spinning around in the middle of the kitchen, singing Taylor Swift at the top of her lungs as she danced and held a spatula to her mouth, the child already thinking she was a superstar.
We were all basically knocking into each other, getting in each other’s way.
A muddle of confusion.
I called it harmony.
Funny, how I’d gladly trade that rambling kitchen with a cook and a maid for the warmth of my grandmother’s.
The smell of a roast rising up from the faded white stove, flecks of paint missing, the counterspace close to nonexistent, and the floors a worn linoleum that had long since turned brown.
There was no place better.
No place safer.
No place that made me remember who I was and exactly who I wanted to be than when I was standing there in the perfectly orchestrated chaos.
Thomas rolled his eyes. “If we were doing it the right way, we’d be using paper plates. I mean, who even sits at a table and eats dinner together anymore, anyway? And I’m not even allowed to have my tablet.”
“The horror,” I told him, sending him a warning glance.
You’d better watch it, young man.
I knew he was just trying to figure out his place. Adjusting to the change. Dealing with the fear he tried to keep hidden, which worried me most of all.
“It’s family time, Tom Tom!” Mallory shouted, breaking song, before she was right back at it again, the little thing singing about shaking it off as she shook her little bottom, wearing a pink satin nightgown and my grandmother’s slippers with old style curlers in her hair.
Apparently, she’d had a little Gramma time this afternoon.
The kid was taking and giving good advice, that was for sure.
I was trying hard to keep it myself.
Hold it.
To pretend as if everything was normal. As if my beautiful stranger hadn’t come into the salon today and ripped the rug right out from under me.
Sophie squirmed, jogging me out of the daze. “I down. I eat now. I eat now.”
I was holding my toddler facing out, the squirming wild monkey wiggling in my arms. I finished washing the sand from her mouth and grabbed a hand towel to dry her face and hands. “We are going to eat right now. Don’t you smell that delicious dinner your gramma is making you?”
“Yeah, delicious because you’re not making it.” Thomas sent me a grin as he swaggered passed.
“Hey, that isn’t very nice.”
“What? It’s the truth. Right, Grams?” He turned to her, looking for confirmation.
She chuckled one of her light laughs, body swaying at the stove. “We all have our strengths, child. Unfortunately for your mother, cooking is not one of hers.”
From over her shoulder, she sent me an affectionate wink.
“Hey, why is everyone ganging up on me?”
“Shake it off, Momma!” Mallory sang, jumping around. “Besides, you make the best mac and cheese in the whole world.”
“See,” I shouted in something akin to victory, eyes going wide as I gave my grandmother an I-told-you-so look.
“She is your child who’s living in a fantasy world,” Grandma said with a shrug, grinning wide and making Thomas howl with laughter.
“Fine, only people getting any of my mac and cheese around here is my Mal Pal, isn’t that right?”
She jumped in front of me, those ridiculous pink curlers flopping around, one sliding right out. “That’s right. None for you two boohoos.”
“I down!” Sophie Marie shouted again, and I set her on her feet. She went running through the kitchen, scooping up her plush princess doll that she carried everywhere.
It was definitely going to need to take a tumble in the washer after she went to sleep, but I so didn’t need the meltdown that would come with taking it from her then.
My grandmother had taught me some battles were worth fighting. That was not one of them.
Plates clacked as Thomas set them on the round table in the kitchen nook. He went to the drawer and pulled out silverware. He waved it in my face. “Happy?”
“Very,” I shot right back.
“Can I have my tablet, then?”