I bit the inside of my cheek at the thought of us even still seeing each other in a week. “Don’t you need to check it’s okay with Maureen first?”
“Nope,” he answered. “Mam will think it’s Christmas and Easter rolled into one. Believe me, she’ll be in her element cooking dinner for everyone. I think she misses it since Da died. We try to spend Sundays with her as much as we can around work and our other commitments, but I know she gets lonely.”
My heart panged.
I wasn’t here when Maureen lost Lorcan. My mom was going through her chemo treatment at the time, so I couldn’t leave her, and she certainly wasn’t well enough to travel. I knew how badly cancer could ravage somebody. Mom was lucky, and I was grateful every day for that. But I could still have empathy for a family that never deserved to lose their patriarch in that way.
“We’ll go,” I murmured. “It’ll be nice to spend a day with your mom.”
“I love Mrs. O’Shea,” Gabby declared. “She’s funny and I love her Irish accent.”
“Yeah.” DJ nodded. “Your ma’s a cool lady.”
“She is,” Donovan agreed. “And so’s yours.”
“Yeah,” my son breathed.
“Mom’s the best,” Gabby murmured.
Wet hit the back of my eyes, and I quickly blinked it away. It must have been the wedding making me melancholy. It had been an emotional day, and love was in the air. It was impossible notto be affected by it, but still, it was no excuse to turn into a sissy; I had sandwiches to make.
I cleared my throat and moved to the fridge to grab some fixings. “So meatball subs for two growing boys then?”
“Thanks, Mom,” DJ muttered.
“I’ll make the coffee,” Donovan offered.
I switched on the broiler to warm the bread just as DJ declared, “You’re gonna love it. Mom gets the English subs special from Martha’s bakery just to make our sandwiches, and she fills them with crispy lettuce, cheddar cheese, meatballs, and marinara sauce. They taste fucking awesome.”
My gaze cut to my son’s, and I cocked a brow before turning back to the countertop and cutting through the sub. “Stop saying fuck,” I ordered.
But I did it smiling.
CHAPTER 5
DONOVAN
The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that I had a raging hard-on. The second thing I noticed was the rancid smell of hot dog breath being panted in my face.
I cracked one eye open and almost jumped a foot in the air when I was confronted with big brown eyes staring into mine, just an inch away. As gorgeous as those eyes were, they weren’t the ones I would have liked to be staring into mine first thing in the morning.
“Hey, Barney,” I murmured, my voice husky with sleep. I lifted my head to look around Rosie’s living room to see that it was deserted. Everyone must’ve still been in bed, though it wasn’t a shocker, seeing as we stayed up late.
After me and DJ ate our meatball subs (which were fucking awesome by the way), we all drank coffee and hot chocolate and talked.
Rosie’s kids were great. They were smart and funny, and they’d both adopted the same laid-back sense of humor as their mom. They were confident but self-deprecating at times, and I thought it was cool. DJ was definitely part of the in-crowd, but it was clear that he used his popular teenage stud power for good.Gabby was sweet and pretty and clearly not part of the elite like her brother, but still, the fact that she was DJ’s sister pushed her up the social ladder enough to have an easy time with the other girls, mainly because they all crushed to fuck on him.
They told me all the high school gossip, including the Kai and Sunny saga (Kai wouldn’t go there even though he clearly liked her, and her him, but nobody knew why.) Instead, Kai scored with every other girl in school, and Sunny reeled the boys in right on back, just to make him lose his shit. Gabby and Sunny were best friends, and therefore Gabs had a ringside seat to the goings on, and fuck me if I wasn’t invested.
In fact, even if I didn’t like their mother (which I did a whole damned lot), I’d have had to keep seeing her just to get the next installment of the real-life teen drama Rosie had already named,Heartbreak at Hambleton High. I swear it was more entertaining than most of the shit on TV.
By the time one A.M. hit, I’d yawned so hard that Rosie offered me the couch for the night. It would have taken me all of ten minutes to drive home, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I may have initially been slow on the uptake when it came to Rosie Woods, but I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
Somehow in the space of one day, I’d developed a king-sized crush of my own, and it wasn’t just about the red, lacy dress that showed her ass and cleavage to perfection. It was the way she was with her kids. I loved how laid-back she was and how she tried to see the good in every situation.
Maybe the seed had been planted three years ago because I’d never forgotten her. She’d been on my mind every day since, and perhaps that had ignited something deeper, because I was drawn to her in ways I couldn’t explain or even understand.
Barney hauled his front paws up onto my bare chest and let out a little whine.
