She stopped and covered her eyes, her cheeks flaming. “I can’t live up tothis.” She waved her hand up and down him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You,” she said, mortified that she was even saying it. “You’re too much for me.”
Brodie’s mouth spread into an even bigger grin.
Maeve tried not to look right at him. Looked at the dip of his neck instead, which itself was a bad idea, the hollow of caramel-tanned skin. “I’m not very good at things like this, Brodie. I understand my life as it is. I can only cope with so much. And I don’t want anything to upset that.”
“What if it made it better?” he asked, his upturned eyes half smiling, half beseeching.
There was an earnestness in the way he held her gaze, like she was different to any other woman he’d met, that she could trust him with anything. She could feel it inside her, the temptation to nod, to let herself fall and believe he would be there to catch her. She was so close. The risk within sight.
Then suddenly Zoey came bolting in from outside waving a framed photograph. “Brodie, why didn’t you tell me you were famous!”
Maeve’s heart sank.
Brodie, however, switched immediately back into his fun-dad persona and strolling over to Zoey, said, “I’m not famous.”
But she was brandishing a photograph of him and his brothers in the band.
At the table, Logan looked over at them apologetically, as if he hadn’t thought to hide any evidence of Silver Sky.
“Looks like you are!” Zoey said, pointing to him in the picture. “Looks like you’re as famous as Taylor Swift.”
Brodie scoffed. “No one’s as famous as Taylor Swift.” Then he pulled out a chair, real casual, and sat down, hoisting Zoey onto his lap. Holding the other side of the photograph with her, he said, “Iwasfamous. We all were.” He gestured to his brothers. “But we’re not now. Some people know who I am, but that’s just a bigger version of people at your school knowing who you are.”
Zoey thought for a second, everyone watching, braced like they could all see her mind working. Then she looked at Brodie and said, “Is that why when I told people about you being my dad at school, Suki Watson said that her mom said that you had areputation?”
Maeve spluttered.
Noah laughed.
Emmett, at the other end of the table, raised his bushy eyebrows.
But Brodie said, without pause, “A reputation for makingverygood music.”
Zoey grinned, clearly delighted to hear that her dad was once a pop star.
Maeve, however, felt the weight of the comment in the pit of her stomach. Glad of the reminder that Brodie Carter wasn’t the man to trust your heart to.
ChapterThirty-Two
It was the first week of school vacation and Maeve had to work. But for the first time, rather than scrabbling around for childcare, she had Brodie. He would saunter up the path five minutes before she was due to leave, never early but never late, although she would say he was cutting it close, with his sunglasses on, baggy pants, expensively disheveled T-shirt, ready for his day.
Maeve would say, “There’s a list of?—”
“Emergency numbers on the fridge,” he’d cut in. “I know.” Then Zoey would bound to the door dressed in whatever took her fancy that day, huge smile on her face about what was to come.
Throughout her shift at the hospital, Maeve would be updated with pictures of Zoey eating ice cream, Zoey feeding penguins at the zoo, Zoey climbing Starlight Mountain. Sometimes, Brodie would be in the shot, too, and Maeve would try hard not to look at his smiling face and his perfect white teeth and the way clothes just hung beautifully off him. He had a knack for making life seem so effortless.
When she came home, sometimes he stayed for a while, sometimes he left right away. She hated to admit that those times, she felt a pang to see him walk off down the path. During the tiny snatches of downtime she had at work she realized she felt a warmth in her chest about going home, about Brodie being there. Sometimes she wondered if he left on purpose to make her feel exactly that, but no one could be that calculating, that adept at reeling a person in, could they?
A couple of weeks into Zoey’s vacation, when Maeve came home, Zoey was bursting to tell her, “Someone asked for Dad’s autograph! Isn’t that amazing!”
Maeve hardly heard past the wordDad. “Yeah, isn’t it?” she agreed, less convinced. It was a reminder that the guy she could see sitting casually at her kitchen table making models out of air-dry clay was actually still a celebrity. That one day he would have another lavish wedding and live in a beautiful, expensive house like his brother, and her daughter would go off and stay withDad.
She swallowed, felt suddenly, unexpectedly, like she wanted to cry.
