I swallowed hard, but the more I looked at the kid, the more I seemed to notice the Westwood stamp written all over his face. No one else had seemed to notice. Gage had been working with this kid a while and he hadn’t said anything, at least. Hell, I hadn’t even noticed it at first, but despite his eyes being green instead of blue, there was an undeniable similarity to my brother’s features.
My mouth itched to open. I desperately wanted to crack some joke about whether she’d had a fling with any billionaires in San Francisco back in the day. The words were right there, loaded and cocked, but for once in my life, I shut the hell up.
Instead, I decided to be a touch more tactful about it. If I pissed her off now, she’d inevitably run again and decide it really had been a mistake. I still wanted it to be her, so I kept my voice as even as I could.
“Is, uh, is Brody dad going to be an issue?”
Her hand jerked just a little on the coffee cup. “No, he’s never been part of his life.”
The way she’s suddenly refusing to meet my eyes and that little jerk of her hand?Something was definitely off. My chest tightened with a suspicion I couldn’t quite name, but the whistle blew and practice wrapped up before I could puzzle through it.
The kids came off the ice, sweaty, laughing, and helmets askew as they shouted their goodbyes to the coaches and shoved each other like playing puppies. Maisie rose and waved to her son. He waved back.
I stood too, watching him sit down on the bench to take off his skates. “Hey, before you go, would you guys like to go golfing this weekend? You said Brody likes it. I’m a member at a country club upstate, near my parents’ place. It’s a great course. Maybe he’d like it?”
She glanced back at me, cautious but polite. “A country club? Are you sure it’s kid friendly?”
I shrugged. “It’s whatever I tell them it is. You won’t have to worry about a thing. What do you say? It’ll be fun.”
Her eyebrows lifted, but she gave me the tiniest smirk. “Well, I said you needed to get to know him.”
“Right? Doesn’t that sound like a nice way to ease into it?”
“Yeah. Okay. We’ll come. Saturday?”
“Saturday. I’ll text you the details.” I felt my chest loosen just a little, like maybe I’d just won something important.
Important enough that if I played my cards right, it might even result in marriage one day soon.
CHAPTER 12
MAISIE
Brody had been bouncing off the walls for days about this golf outing, and on Saturday morning, he was up before the sun, tugging on my blanket and whisper-yelling in my ear like the world would end if we didn’t leave right then. I groaned, rolling over and opening my eyes to see him standing next to the bed, hair all sleep mussed and still in his pajamas, but his eyes were bright and happy.
“Can we go now?” he asked in a half-whiny, half-singsong voice. “I don’t want to be late.”
Groggily turning my gaze to the digital clock on my nightstand, I blinked hard when I saw the numbers, but they didn’t change. “Baby, it’s only seven-fifteen. We’re not meeting Callum until ten. Come cuddle with me. Maybe we can get a little more sleep.”
“Noooo,” he said, drawing out the word as his head shook and he took a big step back from the mattress, as if he was afraid I would snatch him into bed andforcehim back to sleep. “I’m hungry. Let’s have breakfast. Then we should get ready.”
“We don’t have to get ready yet,” I moaned, grabbing the pillow from under my head and dropping it over my face. “Five more minutes.”
Brody laughed and yanked the pillow away. I wrapped my arms around his little body and started tickling him. He broke out into hysterics. For just a few minutes, with the soft, first rays of dawn glowing in my bedroom and my little boy playing with me as if we had all the time in the world, I like my planets were finally aligning. I felt at peace.
Reality only sank back in when Brody had finally won, dragging me out of bed and downstairs to the kitchen. Natural light was only just starting to spill in through the windows, the streets outside still quiet and tranquil.
I looked around our space as I scrambled some eggs and popped bread into the toaster. Our house was modest but cozy. I’d done my best to make it feel like home, with lots of pictures and art prints on the walls, tons of worn rugs on the floors, and scatter cushions we actually used on the couches. Comfort was key. The outside world was bristling with sharp edges. Our home was a soft space to land.
The entire first story was basically one room, with only a few walls as partitions between some areas, but no enclosed spaces. We had the TV mounted on the wall in the living room and I could see it clearly from where I was in the kitchen.
Outside of that, we had a small entrance hall and a dining area large enough to fit six people around our table, but that was it. The staircase leading up to our three bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths was situated in the space between the kitchen and the living room, and overflowing bookshelves lined whichever wall had had room left against it.
While I loved our home, I couldn’t quite picture Callum here, but I shook off the thought when Brody came bouncing into the kitchen, already dressed with his hair damp as if he wet it in an attempt to tame it. I chuckled, wondering again when the heck he’d gotten so big.
I ran my fingers through his hair when he came to stand next to me. “How am I going to get you to stop growing so fast, huh? Do you think a brick on your head will do the trick?”
“Nope, I’ll just keep growing and pushing the brick up,” he reasoned easily, dropping into a seat at our breakfast nook after getting himself a glass of water. “How do you know Callum?”
