The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(17)



The little boy inside me dies a bit at knowing I won’t be able to stuff my face with six of them like the grown man I am would if no one was watching.

My pants would be tight tomorrow, but it’d be worth it.

I slide my mom a please leave look.

She smiles like she’s just getting warmed up.

Shit.

“Ingrid you said?” Mom says. “Lovely name. You run a book store?”

“It was my grandmother’s. We’ve remodeled it and started new programs to be a community gathering place for frazzled modern women, mostly because that seemed the smartest way to not lose customers who’ll see me in my natural habitat, but yes, our primary focus is books.”

“And you have a daughter?”

“Two daughters and a son.”

“How old?”

“Nine, seven, and four.”

“Married?”

“Divorced. My ex was—is a photojournalist. Traveled too much. Not the family type. Which you’d think I would’ve learned after the first kid, or possibly after the second, especially since he was gone even more after Piper and her—and I really didn’t need to go there, did I?”

“Oh, honey.” Mom squeezes Ingrid’s arm. “You are far from the only woman that’s ever happened to. And if we’d all stopped after the first kid when we were married to worthless shitheads, Levi wouldn’t be here either.”

They both look at me, Mom smug in a gotcha and you’re welcome kind of way, Ingrid mildly perplexed.

I shift uncomfortably. “Why are you both looking at me like Mom should’ve stopped after Tripp?”

Ingrid shakes her head as she lifts her hands, then twists her fingers together again. “No! No, it’s not that. I’m trying to picture Hudson eventually being an actual grown-up, and it’s not working.”

Mom laughs. “Oh, I had my doubts with this one too.”

“Did he shove marbles up his nose when he was four?”

“No, but he did try to play his penis like a guitar every night at bath time.”

For fuck’s sake, she did not. “Mother.”

Her eyes twinkle.

Ingrid’s gone pink in the cheeks, but she slides Mom a look. “Do they grow out of that?” she whispers. “After two girls, my boy has been…enlightening.”

“They reach an age where you voluntarily quit wondering about the answer to that question. But you should know I’ve moved into his guest room to take care of him. So maybe it is hopeless that they ever reach full maturity.”

Jesus. She didn’t just go for the jugular, she used a rusty hacksaw on it. “I don’t need a full-time babysitter. I’m fine. And I want a cookie.”

“Apologies that you have to see him like this,” Mom tells Ingrid. “I raised him better.” She peels the foil back and hands my guest one of her own cookies. “Sit. Make yourself comfortable. Do you like coffee?”

“I—yes.”

“If you’re anything like I was when my boys were seven and nine, I’d bet you live off the stuff. Levi, sweetheart, go brew a pot.”

I gape at her.

But Mom hasn’t been a mother for almost forty years without still being three steps ahead. “You’ve been insisting you’re not helpless. I’m sure you can push a button in the kitchen.”

Ingrid glances at me and smiles with those gorgeous curvy lips and kind hazel eyes, and my breath evaporates out of my lungs.

Poof.

Just gone.

And then she tucks her hair behind her ear, and I remember a Goldfish falling out of it the other day, and I couldn’t resist smiling back at her if the fate of the world depended on it.

Do I want to get seriously involved with a woman with three kids?

Not really.

But do I want to see Ingrid smile again?

Damn right I do.

There has to be middle ground here. Hell, over half my relationships the last ten years have been fake for one reason or another. Surely, I can find a way to take a lady out to dinner with no strings.

“Where are your kids now?” Mom asks her.

“Birthday party, gymnastics class, and with a friend hiking outside the city for the afternoon.”

“So you have thirteen minutes?”

Ingrid laughs again. I get a cramp in my gut realizing that take a lady out for a simple dinner probably won’t be nearly as simple as my brain is trying to convince me it will be. Her schedule is probably tighter than mine, and mine’s busy enough that I sometimes wake up in Japan in the summer and still think I’m celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans two years ago.

Mom makes the go on, go make us coffee, the lady doesn’t have all day gesture to me.

Considering it’s the first thing she’s let me lift a finger for in the last two days, I silently obey. I try to steal a cookie on the way and get my hand slapped, which makes Ingrid snort with laughter.

“Don’t grow up to be like her,” I tell Ingrid with a chin jut at my mother.

“He’s only saying that because I can hear him and he’s upset that he can’t have a cookie,” Mom confides to her. “He actually thinks I’m the best person on the entire planet.”

“Not every day,” I mutter as I pass into my kitchen.

Pippa Grant's Books