She tucked a stray curl behind her ear. “Surely this is not that exciting?”
“More than you know,” he said.
Holy guacamole, he was doing it again, saying seemingly innocent words in a way that shot through her like a jolt of electricity. Every inch of her sparked to life, even parts she thought had long gone dormant.
“Would you like another taste?”
“Yes, please.” Her breathless tone revealed the effect he was having her.
He lifted the next forkful. Paige licked her lips and saw Lucas’s eyes flare ever so slightly. Oh yeah, he wanted more than cake too. His jaw fell slack as he eased the bite into her mouth, never taking his attention off her lips as she slid the cake off the fork.
“So are you close with your mom?” he asked.
Paige choked on her cake. Talk about a libido buster. “What?” she tried to ask, but all she ended up doing was inhaling more cake crumbs.
“Shit. Hold on.” Lucas disappeared into the kitchen and returned seconds later with a glass of water. “Sorry,” he said as she downed three huge gulps.
“No, it’s fine.” she said. “I just wasn’t expecting to be asked about my mom.” Not when she thought Mr. Sex-on-a-Stick was seducing her with chocolate cake.
“You mentioned she used to bake a cake like this for your birthday, so it got me thinking that might be a good place to start.”
“Start?” Holy hell, if this was his idea of foreplay…
“My ten questions.” He cocked his head to one side. “What did you think I meant?”
That you were starting the seduction of Paige Parker. Talk about getting their wires crossed. “Nothing.” She gulped down more of the water. “But for the choking, I’m docking you two.”
Lucas laughed. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “But you still have to answer the question.”
“I’m not quite sure how to answer that.” It was the truth. Paige and her mother had a complex relationship, to say the least. It was going to be hard to put it into words.
“Paige Parker at a loss for what to say?”
She kicked him with her toe. “You don’t have to look so shocked.”
“Tell you what, you can think it over while I build us a fire.”
Paige sat on the rug considering her answer while Lucas stacked several birch logs on the iron grate. “My mom and I are close,” she finally said. “But only on the surface.”
“Aren’t those opposites?” he asked. “How can you be close, superficially?”
“We talk all the time, but never about anything important.” She drew her knees up and leaned back against the couch. “My mom is complicated. She was a 1950s housewife living in the 1990s. For a solid twenty years, her entire existence revolved around me, my dad, and my brother.”
Lucas lit the kindling, then closed the screen. “Was that a bad thing?”
“Not for us.”
“For your mom?” he asked as he came to sit beside her.
“My mom was…” She corrected herself. “Is brilliant. Smartest one in our family, if you ask me. And I don’t just mean with books. The woman can watch a YouTube video and teach herself to do anything. Hang a ceiling fan, install a new faucet, repair the garage door. You name it, she’s done it. All while tutoring my brother, making home-cooked meals, and managing the family finances. She even did the taxes.” The latter was something Paige never quite understood, seeing as how her dad was a CPA.
Paige stared into the brick fireplace as the white bark began to crackle. “She says she has no regrets, but sometimes I’d catch her looking at the framed law degree she’d hung in the living room.” Paige blinked back the tears that always threatened when she thought of her mother living a life filled with what-ifs.
“I think she underestimated the personal price she would pay when she agreed with my father’s plan for her to stay home with the kids. Which is why I try not to tell her anything negative. I want her to feel like the choice she made was worth it, you know?” She tried to laugh, but the sound she made was laced with far too much unease to appear lighthearted. “It’s also why I’ve promised myself that I will never rearrange my life for a man.”
The flames shot higher as the wood caught. “Is that why you’re celebrating Singles Day?”
Paige rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m a man-hater or against relationships as a whole. But I hadn’t taken time off since I started my business, and then I saw this stupid quiz about finding your perfect vacation. I guess it made sense. At the time.”
“No,” he clarified. “Is that why you’re still single?”
Paige looked down at the woven rug. A strand of wool had come loose from the weave. Just like her story, she knew that pulling that first string would unravel the whole thing. And yet she tugged. “I almost wasn’t.”
Lucas waited patiently for her to say more. Or maybe for her to change the subject, which she almost did. Talking about an ex can be even more of a mood buster than talking about your mother. But something about this man made her want to share the bits of herself she thought she’d locked away for good.
“I was engaged,” she said.
“When was this?”
“Oh, a long time ago,” she replied without even doing the math. But as she thought about it, she realized that it actually had been a long time ago. Nearly five years. “I met Bobby just after I finished grad school. On paper he was perfect. Straitlaced and mature. An accountant even.”
“Like your dad?”
“Yeah.” Paige nodded. “He was only three years older than I was, but he’d already accomplished so much. He’d graduated from college at nineteen, had his masters by twenty and had traveled the world twice over by the time I met him. He was…” She fumbled to find the right words.
“The perfect man to bring home to your parents?”
Paige hadn’t realized it at the time, but even at twenty-five, she’d still been seeking their approval. “They loved him,” she said. “And so did I back then. So much so that I shifted my life plans around him. Everything from where he wanted to live to the types of vacations we took.”
“Sounds like you were doing exactly—”
“What my mom did?”
He nodded.
“It’s funny, because when we’re young, all we really have to base things on are our parents.” She considered that, then added, “And even when that starts to change, well, it’s not like our friends have all the answers either.”