She looked from me to Mason with hope all over her face. “Cand I?”
Mason nodded. “Let me feed Dolly and I’ll heat it up for you. If you’re lucky and your room is tidy, I might even bring you one with whipped cream and strawberries.”
Maya gasped, slapping her hands against her little pink cheeks. “Das my favorwit!”
“I know.” He nodded.
She turned on her heel and ran off, then did a u-turn and barreled into me. “Fanks, Miss Immy.”
I froze for a second as she squeezed my legs so tightly I thought they might temporarily go numb, then smiled and gave her a gentle hug back. “Thank Grandma next time you see her.”
“I will.” She beamed up at me. “I tidy now.”
Just like that, she was gone.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable being an accessory to bribery,” I said, following Mason with my gaze as he moved through the kitchen with ease.
“Sucks for you,” he replied, taking a pancake with a half-grin flashed my way. “My mom told me something the week Maya was born, and it’s stuck with me: ‘Ninety percent of parenting is bribery, and the other ten percent is hoping they never get smart enough to figure it out.’ Then she said she’d get me a coffee if I took Maya for half an hour so Fran could sleep.”
I blinked at him.
And waited.
“Did you?” I said after a moment.
“Well, yeah. We’d been up all night, and I wanted a coffee and Fran wanted sleep.”
“It’s gone right over your head, hasn’t it?”
“What has?”
“She said that and bribed you right after. With coffee.”
He peered over his shoulder at me for a moment, and I could almost see the cogs turning in his brain as it occurred to him that his mom had proved her point within seconds of her words.
“Holy shit,” he breathed, putting down a knife. “You’re right.”
Bless him. “How did you graduate law school if you can’t even recognize bribery from your own mother?”
“I slept with my professor, obviously.”
I gave him a flat look.
“He was seventy. It wasn’t all that enjoyable.”
Rolling my eyes, I stood up and took my empty mug to the sink. “And that’s enough of you for today.”
He laughed, turning around and meeting my eyes. “Oh, come on. I can see you’re enjoying talking to me again.”
“I’d rather cuddle a coyote.”
“I bite on request.”
“Mason.”
“Imogen.”
I folded my arms across my chest and stared at him. “What?”
“Would it kill you to say the last twenty minutes haven’t been so bad?”
“It might. Why risk it?”
“What’s life without a little risk?”
“Safe, secure, and probably a lot less deadly, for a start.”
He laughed and pulled Maya’s pancake out of the toaster to let it cool for a second. “Also, a bit more boring, less exciting, and potentially vindicating for me, because if you don’t admit it, I know it’s true.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What if I do say I enjoyed talking to you? How do you know I wasn’t lying?”
He planted one hand flat on the counter next to me and leaned forward ever so slightly, just enough that I could smell the coffee on his breath and see flecks of blue-black in his irises. “Because your eyes are sparkling.”
“Eyes do that. It’s thanks to a little thing called tear ducts.”
“Don’t be awkward, Imogen.”
“‘Don’t be awkward, Imogen.’ At what point in all the time we once spent together did you think I would ever not be awkward?”
“I can think of plenty of times you weren’t awkward. Granted, you usually had your legs around my waist and your nails raking my shoulders to shreds, but you weren’t awkward.”
Heat flushed to my cheeks. That was not how my morning needed to continue. “Stop talking like that. It’s in the past.”
“Memories last forever.” He pushed away with a shrug and went to the fridge where he pulled out a can of whipped cream and strawberries. “You said the past brought back memories for you. It did for me, too.”
“It brought back memories of how you hurt me, not how hard you screwed me on a Saturday night.”
He snorted, but it quickly turned into a cough that made him back up from Maya’s pancake before he coughed all over it. “And a Monday, and a Tuesday, and a—”
“All right, all right. Feed your child before she starts a mutiny.”
His laugh sent a shiver down my spine, but he turned and quickly sliced two strawberries. After placing them on the pancake, he added some whipped cream and cut it into four pieces.
He tossed a wink my way before turning around and disappearing through the door, Maya’s plate in hand.
I slumped against the counter. What the hell was I doing here in his house? Talking to him? Enjoying it?
I was going to kill Grandma for making me bring pancakes. The woman was a mastermind, I swear. She knew what she was doing when she decided to make pancakes this morning, and I was going to find out if church was actually canceled or if it was her being a heathen.
I was willing to bet on the latter at this point.
I rubbed a hand down my face and straightened up. I’d showered last night after my fight with the grass, but I felt like I needed another one. Showering helped get my thoughts straight, and right now, I desperately needed that.
“Huh. I thought you would have left while you had the chance.”
“Damn it. I missed my chance.” I turned around and looked at him. “I was considering whether or not I wanted to try being friends with you.”
“And?”
“It was going well until I caught sight of that.” I pointed to the fucking clown that’d given me a heart attack yesterday. “Now you can fuck yourself.”
He laughed. It took him mere seconds to cross the room and reach me, leaving only a few inches of space between us. “If you’d done that to me, you’d think you were a genius.”
“Moot point.” It took everything I had to control my breathing so he didn’t see how affected I was by his closeness. “You almost killed me with fear. It’s unforgivable. You’re lucky I opened it before I started my class, or you’d have killed my students, too.”
“Always dramatic,” he murmured, fixing his gaze on mine. “If you’d almost died, you’d have tried to kill me by now.”
“Maybe I’m biding my time.” My voice was quiet. “I have access to knitting needles and paintbrushes.”
“And I’m sure you are positively terrifying wielding those at the old ladies who buy them.”
“No idea, but I’m sure they’d be great to shove six inches inside your rectum.”
“That’s the poshest way anyone has ever told me to shove something up my ass.”
“Oh, I’m not telling you to do it. I’ll do it for you. Really wedge them up there. If you’re lucky, I’ll pierce your brain, and you’ll stop getting so close to me.”
Mason tilted his head to the side, his eyes still focused on mine, his lips oh-so-slowly curving upward. “I don’t think so.”