“We were teenagers back then, Pops. We ain’t sneaking around,” Boogie assured.
Zander eyed his son for a moment before he seemed to accept his words as truth. He turned to Sweetie. “I heard you lost touch with your family.”
“Zander!” Tandy slapped her husband’s bicep, but he didn’t flinch.
“Pops, what that gotta do wit’ anything?” Boogie asked.
Sweetie just stood there, stunned. She had never interacted with someone so bold. He wasn’t really rude, . . . just direct and straight to business.
“It has everything to do with everything,” Zander responded with his eyes still on Sweetie.
“You don’t have to answer that,” Boogie said as he glared at his father.
Sweetie didn’t want to cause friction between the DeLuca family. She’d already done enough of that in her own family. She placed a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. My family and I don’t really see eye to eye. I saw them for the first time yesterday in a year, and I doubt I’ll really be seeing much of them in the future.”
Zander gazed at her curiously. She had the feeling that he was trying to figure out if he could trust her.
“What prompted you seeing them yesterday?” Zander finally asked.
Sweetie shifted uncomfortably. “My granny doesn’t have much time . . .”
A pain pinched her chest, and she let her words trail off.
Zander’s face softened slightly. “Lucille?”
“You know my granny?” Sweetie asked with a shaky voice. Her tender heart couldn’t bear the thought of living in a world without her grandmother. Guilt weighed on her for many reasons. She should have never distanced herself from her granny, and she should have done her best to keep the peace with her father in order to be with her for the remainder of her time. Hell, she could have even moved back in and let her father rule her life just to be close to her granny again. So many things she could have done, and now it was too late.
Zander cleared his throat. “A long time ago. I’m sorry to hear ’bout her declining health.”
“Alright, enough of that. We’re sorry to barge in on you like this, Boogie. We tried calling beforehand. We just wanted to take a look at that Jackson Pollock painting you mentioned wanting to sell. We can do it another time.”
Boogie nodded. “Great.” He tried to usher his parents out of the house, but they stayed put.
“Why don’t you two come to family dinner tonight? It’ll give us a change to get to know Sweetie a little better,” Tandy suggested.
Sweetie fidgeted. That sounded like the last thing she wanted to do.
“Uh . . .”
Zander interrupted Boogie. “Seeing as you two can’t seem to stay away from one another.”
Boogie blew out a breath and grabbed the back of his neck. “We just had family dinner last night.”
His argument sounded weak, even to Sweetie. She could tell his parents weren’t going to take no for an answer.
Tandy kept a kind smile on her face as she responded to her son. “We’re having another one tonight.”
“Does Zel know about this dinner?” Boogie asked with his brows lifted in amusement.
Tandy’s eyes turned to slits. “Seven o’clock. Be there or else. It was nice to formally meet you, dear,” she said as she turned to Sweetie, who stood there still as a statue, mortified.
“You as well, Mrs. DeLuca,” Sweetie murmured.
Finally, they turned to leave, and when the door closed behind them, Sweetie released a deep breath as she gazed at Boogie with worry in her eyes.
“Baby . . .”
One tear slipped from Sweetie’s eye, and then another from the other eye, and before she knew it, she was sobbing.
