“You sure you don’t mind if I take this?” her mom asked, looking down at the green-blue ends of the scarf. “It looks so pretty on you.”
It did. It does. It was my favorite scarf, but Mom needed to leave so I could dunk my fresh batch of ginger cookies into the salsa in peace.
There were parts of this pregnancy business that required privacy, and this newfound obsession with ginger cookies and salsa was my own little secret.
“Absolutely, wear it in health. It goes great with your new hair,” I said, and as if cued, my mom smoothed a hand down the back of her new short silver bob.
“It does look good, doesn’t it?” she asked, preening slightly in the mirror beside the door.
Go. I thought. Leave. Please.
“You look much younger,” I said instead.
Mom beamed, tossing the scarf around her neck with a little flair, and I smiled. “You don’t look like you’re about to be a grandmother, that’s for sure,” I said, feeling tubby next to my mom’s hard-won thinness. Seven years ago, Mom had sworn she wasn’t going to turn fifty in a size fourteen and she hadn’t. She’d put her mind to it and lost twenty-five pounds. But that was Penny Madison for you. Once her mind was made up, that was it. Done. Deal. The weight had no choice but to leave in defeat.
“Okay,” Penny said. “I need to get to work, but I’ll see you tonight? We can go get a new slipcover for that couch.”
“What’s wrong with the scarf?” I asked, pulling on the pretty black fringe of the Spanish-style scarf that was draped over the back of my blue velvet couch. It had been part of a costume from a La Bohème adaption I’d done in Houston a few years ago.
“It looks a little trashy, sweetie. We’ll get you something in a nice tweed.”
I didn’t get a chance to say over my dead body, because Mom clasped her hands over my face, squeezing my cheeks just a little so that my lips pursed. An old routine Mom refused to let go of, despite the fact that I was thirty-seven and five months pregnant.
You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.
“Okay,” I said, the words distorted by my squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”
“I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” my mom said, and pecked my pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to my kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”
Was it illegal to punch your mother? Or merely immoral? Because immoral I had no problem with. I was, after all, a political scandal in the making.
“Bye, honey,” Penny said before I could even curl a fist, and then I was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, my favorite scarf trailing behind her.
“Oh, thank God,” I muttered and turned back to my cookies.
I cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because I wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.
It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed me? I eyed the cookie in my hand and dunked it again.
And why couldn’t I stop?
A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and I quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into my fridge.
Wiping my hands and any stray crumbs from my face, I opened the door.
“Mom—”
But it wasn’t my mom.
It was Carter O’Neill, in a suit and tie, dwarfing my doorway, his hands braced on the frame as if he were holding himself up. Or back.
Lord, he was big. Those muscles filling out his fine gray suit hard to ignore. And so were the blue eyes blazing through the distance between us.
It was Carter, all right. And he was pissed.
He stepped into my apartment without a word and slammed the door shut behind him, turning my spacious apartment into a linen closet.
“We need to talk,” he said.
3
“Talk?” I squeaked, because the look on his face said that what he really needed was to take me out back and chop me into pieces.
He nodded, curt and decisive. His jawline was like the marble bust of a Roman emperor—all he was missing were the laurel leaves in his hair.
The truth was—my secret, hidden truth was—that there was something about a man in a suit. I had a history with men in suits. And this man wore a suit like no one else.
I pulled my faded silk robe tighter around my ballooning waist, as if to compensate.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge that he had in fact barged into my apartment uninvited. He just looked around as if he smelled something far worse than ginger cookies.