Muffin Top

“As long as you don’t distract me into burning them.”

That was just the kind of comment that needed to be responded to, but not with words. Instead, he dipped his head down and started kissing his way up the column of her neck to the sensitive spot behind her earlobe. As soon as he got there, she almost dropped the spatula.

“Frankie,” she said in encouraging censure. “Don’t you have bacon to cook?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He nipped her earlobe and gave her a light smack on the ass before moving to the stove and putting the bacon into the pan.

They ended up skipping everything else but the juice and the scrambled eggs because by the time the French toast was done and stacked on two plates, both of their stomachs were growling. They hustled out to the balcony, where they sat at the tiny little bistro table and took in the Harbor City skyline, eating in companionable silence—unless you counted Lucy’s moans of pleasure when she took her first bite of the apple French toast.

It was nice, the lowkey ease of it. He’d never made breakfast with anyone who didn’t share his last name before. Like everything else with Lucy, though, it just felt…right.

He was trying to figure out how to put that into words when her phone buzzed and a photo of Lucy with her dad popped up on the screen. Looking down, she screwed up her mouth and flipped over the phone. Considering how close they’d seemed in Antioch, that was weird.

“Didn’t you want to take that?” he asked.

She turned her face toward Harbor City. “I’ll call him back after breakfast.”

Oh yeah. That set off every warning bell in his head. He’d thought Tom had liked him; hell, he’d seemed to practically give his approval for Frankie going after Lucy. Why the change? Unless he’d gotten it wrong. After all, he was the guy who’d never realized what all the women of Waterbury said about him behind his back until Shannon dropped her truth bomb.

“What is it?” He forced his fingers to loosen their grip on his fork. “He doesn’t like the idea of me dating his daughter?”

“Is that what we’re doing?” she asked, a teasing lilt to her voice.

“Yes.” Of that he had absolutely no doubts. Now, whether he could actually trust himself not to be his old man’s son, that was another thing, because for as much as he didn’t want to think he could, it was hard to ignore the family ghost that had been haunting him since high school. “I’d ask you to wear my class ring, but God only knows where my mom packed that away. So, what’s the deal with your dad?”

“He’s just watching out for me.” Still, she didn’t look at him. “Doesn’t want me making the same assumption that he did with my mom.”

As if all of the nonverbals she was sending him weren’t enough to make the back of his neck itchy with dread, the fact that she’d mentioned her mother sure was. The tightness around her eyes and the way tension filled her voice whenever she talked about her mom was more than enough to let him know that the comparison wasn’t a good one.

“What assumption was that?”

“That it was possible to change other people.” She let out a tortured sigh and pivoted her gaze from the sailboats in the harbor to him. A red spot had bloomed at the base of her throat. “The truth of it is that you can only change yourself—for good or for bad.”

And that’s what it came down to for him. Would he be able to change what seemed pre-ordained? Could he avoid being the man who seemed so straightforward on the surface but cheated on his wife when no one was looking? For Lucy, he wanted to. Nothing else was good enough for her. He wouldn’t be good enough for her. The French toast that had tasted so delicious a half hour ago turned into a lead weight in his gut.

“So what happened with your parents?”

She pushed what was left of her breakfast around on her plate with her fork. “Long story.”

“I’ve got time.” He had forever when it came to Lucy—at least he hoped he did.

She laid her fork down on her plate and dropped her hands to her lap, clutching them together as if she needed to hold onto something. “They met young, and there was this whole opposites-attract thing. He was the nerdy psychiatrist, and she was the sexy underwear model. Total freak meeting on a cross-country train trip. They started in Harbor City and by the time they got to Los Angeles, they were in love. They got married in Vegas.”

She inhaled a deep breath and let in out in a slow, controlled breath.

“It was a total whirlwind—one that probably never had a chance at a happily ever after. By the time I started grade school, they were basically living different lives, with him operating his practice and her flying off to Harbor City and Paris for modeling jobs. All that separation didn’t help things, nor did having a chubby kid, which was anathema to my mom’s world.