Baking and Babies (Chocoholics #3)(24)

She shrugs. “He only shows them to people he likes, so that’s a good sign.”

I press my hand to the small of her back, guiding her outside and down the steps of the front porch, stopping in the yard and pointing proudly to the curb.

“Well, what do you think?”

Molly stares out at the street, my new beauty perfectly spotlighted under one of the blazing street lamps right in front of it.

“What do I think about what?” Molly asks, looking everywhere but at the lovely little lady in front of her house.

“Do you not see what’s parked right in front of you?” I ask with a laugh.

“I see a mom van. Where’s your Mustang?”

Claire walks around us to check out my new set of wheels with Liz, Jenny, and Charlotte following right behind her. “Oh, my God, did you buy a minivan?”

I scoff and put my hands on my hips.

“It’s not a mom van OR a minivan. That is a state-of-the-art, safest thing with four wheels, family car,” I announce proudly as the four other women walk around the brand new red, Chrysler Town and Country.

“I repeat, where is your Mustang?” Molly asks, not sounding anywhere near as excited as I thought she’d be.

“The guys told me it wasn’t safe or practical for a family man,” I explain. “It didn’t even have the proper hook-up in the backseat for the six-point harness system car seat or side airbags, and we can’t have our baby riding around in a death trap like that.”

I realize as soon as the words leave my mouth that I sound crazier than anyone in Molly’s family. I’m a twenty-four-year-old single dude helping the woman I want to sleep with fake a pregnancy. It does not require trading in my chick-magnet Mustang for a mom-magnet van, but it was peer-pressure, dammit! I couldn’t exactly refuse to trade in the Mustang for a family car with Molly’s dad and uncles cracking their knuckles and staring me down. Besides, this thing has plenty of room, and I didn’t have to ride in the trunk on the way home.

“Wow, it has built-in DVD players in the seat backs!” Claire shouts to us as she slides open the side passenger door and sticks her head inside.

“Marco, how much alcohol did my dad and uncles give you? Do you feel strange or lightheaded? Is there a tingling in your arms and legs? They could have roofied you,” Molly tells me nervously. “Never leave your drink unattended around them, wasn’t that one of my warnings on our way over here earlier?”

I laugh, patting her softly on the back. “I’m not drunk and I haven’t been roofied. I traded in the Mustang for safety reasons.”

“Are you forgetting the one little fact that you aren’t going to be a family man?” she whispers. “You don’t need a mom-mobile with a six-point whatever or extra air bags. Did they hypnotize you? What’s your name? What year is it?”

She leans up on her tip toes and uses the pad of her fingers to pry my eyes open wide so she can stare into them.

Even after the pretend meat sweats or whatever the hell happened to her while I was gone, she still smells like apple pie and I smell like I pissed my pants. Which I will neither confirm nor deny happened after Drew drove to an abandoned parking lot, did a hundred donuts at roughly ninety miles an hour, and then from my fetal position in the trunk, I heard the guys screaming about Drew playing chicken with an oncoming semi and how he’d never be able to jump the gap in the bridge at such a slow speed. How was I supposed to know they were f*cking with me when I was trapped in a dark trunk?

“It’s not my fault and it happens to everyone!” I shout, realizing I said that out loud by mistake.

“You’ve definitely been hypnotized,” Molly says with a slow shake of her head. “I know it sounds weird, but my Uncle Drew learned how to do it on the Internet. No one believed it until Aunt Jenny volunteered to let him do it to her. Whenever he said the word moist she’d bark like a dog and try to shit on the carpet. It wasn’t pretty.”

She drops her hands from my face and I’m surprised I’m not even shocked by the things I continue to find out about her family at this point. Claire, Jenny, Charlotte, and Liz are all busy looking in the front seat and talking about the GPS and other bells and whistles and luckily can’t hear us.

“Is that a car seat in the back?” Molly asks in shock.

“We went to Babies R Us after the dealership and the guys all chipped in. Wasn’t that nice of them?” I tell her excitedly as I push the sliding back door open wider. “We went to the fire station after so one of the firemen could properly install it. I had no idea you couldn’t just buckle one of those things in and call it a day.”

Molly grabs both of my arms and turns me around to face her. “I knew it. My family made you lose your mind. I thought you’d be able to make it out unscathed in four weeks, but I was wrong.”

I laugh and shake my head at her. “I know it’s crazy, but I didn’t lose my mind. That Mustang really was impractical.”

“It was not impractical for a single, twenty-four-year-old guy who is NOT going to be a father,” she whispers, echoing my earlier thoughts.

“Well, maybe I am going to be a father. I’ve been thinking about getting a puppy for a while now and I’m going to need something safe to transport him in,” I explain.

“I don’t think a puppy needs a mom-van,” Molly laughs with a shake of her head.