Page 55 of Reckless
I kept my expression still.
Her brows lifted.“Where is your smile to see your lady soon?”
I inched my cheeks up into an exaggerated smile no one would ever believe.Then asked, “What exactly would you like me to say?”
“That you’re excited to see her.”
“You won’t believe me if I lied.”
My mother noticed when I looked away.
“She likes the ocean,” she said.
I turned my head.“That information feels conspiratorial.Most people like the ocean.”
“True, she told me herself when she moved a few months ago to her small beach apartment after all her friends left Manhattan.”
Of course.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Kelly had survived a lunch with my mother.Or that my mother had gathered personal information from her like she assembled her precious jewelry in a vault.The image unsettled me in ways I had no interest in examining too closely.
“How did that go?”
My mother gave me the kind of innocent look that meant the opposite.“Very well.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes.”
My mother’s hand tightened once around my forearm.Not hard.enough to pull my attention fully back to her.
“Do not make this difficult.”
I looked down at her.“What exactly is ‘this’?”
She held my gaze for a beat.She took a breath and said, “Kelly is a good woman.Her parents dying in a car accident when she was twenty-one is tragic but she has a good spirit about her.”
Absolutely true and that became clear a few days ago in that moment I’d watched my mother use her to make a point at the dinner table and seen Kelly absorb it with that bright smile she used like armor.
What was still less clean was why the thought had hit me so hard.The moment was still in vivid color in my mind.
Before I could say another word to my mother, footsteps sounded behind us and Charlie’s voice carried through the open doors.
“Ah.There he is.The unmarried brother and mom’s last project.”
I closed my eyes for one very brief second.
Then opened them and turned.
Charlie came onto the terrace grinning, Hope tucked under his arm with the deeply irritating calm of a woman who had somehow figured out how to be in love without becoming boring.Behind them came Roman, Isabel at his side, and farther back Jeff and Miley, already mid-conversation about something dense and legal-sounding enough that I knew better than to ask.
Charlie pointed at me dramatically.“I would like the record to reflect that I knew you liked her the day you met.”
“No, you didn’t,” Hope said.
“You think everyone fell in love the same night you brought your now wife to meet your family.”
“Everyone knows I have the best taste and so does my wife which means friends and family naturally mingle.”
