“Good, Maxie. How are you?” Her gaze stayed on him, acting like the rest of us didn’t exist.
“Good. Busy with work.”
Her grin grew wider. “Well, work is what you do. I’m not surprised there.”
The familiarity between the two irritated; it always did. I understood she was a family friend, but it annoyed me to no avail that she seemed to pop up everywhere. And the way she looked at Max and the ease in which he looked back at her, like she was special to him in some way, drove me insane.
I looked at Pierce and he was watching me with a smirk. He tossed me a wink, a dimple just like Max’s sinking into his cheek. “Isa, let’s eat!” he said loudly, standing up. He pulled a chair out across the table from Max. “Sam, why don’t you sit over here?”
He looked at me and grinned. I returned the smile, feeling like I finally had a friend in the Quinn family.
Once everyone had settled down at the table, Pierce cleared his throat. “So, Kari. Max tells me you’re a nurse. Beauty and brains, huh?”
“You’re a nurse? That’s fantastic,” Isa exclaimed. “Now I know who to call with questions instead of using those websites. They’ll make you think you’re dying of some super rare disease. Every. Time.”
“They really will,” I agreed.
Max turned to me, melting me in my chair with his sexy smile. “Nah, Pierce. She’s more than beauty and brains. Kari is the whole package.”
FOUR
KARI
I pulled Max’s favorite red lingerie set out of my drawer. We made a quick stop at my house after leaving Pierce’s.
Dinner had been nice. Pierce was easy to like, a slightly more mischievous version of his cousin. Isa was kind and generous and funny, telling me stories about her family back in Texas. After dinner, she had put Joselyn to bed and Brielle and Sam had left. We sat around and drank wine. She promised to teach me how to play Euchre, a Quinn family favorite card game that I didn’t know.
“That little shit got sauce all over my shirt,” Max said, brushing himself off as he walked out of my bathroom. “Think this will come out?”
He was grinning and I knew he didn’t care one way or the other. That was one of the best things about Max—he didn’t sweat the small stuff.
“Probably. That’s one of the perils of babyhood, I think. They ruineverything.Hope Jada’s ready for that,” I laughed, closing the drawer with my hip.
“Jada will be fine. Babies don’t ruin everything. As a matter of fact, I think they make everything even better.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Yeah, maybe.”
Max stuck his hands in his pockets and watched me. His gaze was heavy and I was unable to move. Time stood still as I waited for the next words to come out of his mouth. Somehow, I knew what he was going to say and if I could have stopped it, I would have.
3... 2...1...
“Do you want kids, Kari?”
The room started to spin. The conversation I had evaded for months was staring me in the face. He finally flat-out asked the one question I had managed to avoid.
This wasn’t a yes-or-no question. This was the question that would end it all. I wasn’t ready to wake up without Max’s sleepy smiles. I wasn’t ready to reach into my pocket and not find a sticky note when I got in the car to go to work. I wasn’t ready to complain that he ran faster than me and I couldn’t keep up when we took early morning jogs.
I. Wasn’t. Ready. For. It. To. End.
“After seeing Joselyn ruin your shirt and picking up Titus’s accidents, I can only imagine the joy of having a little human,” I deflected.
“So that’s a‘no’? Or a‘not right now’?”
I took a deep breath and decided how to answer the question. Even after months of going over the question in my head, I still hadn’t decided how to answer it. I stood and walked quickly to my closet, needing some distance.
“Kari?” he asked again, his voice soft but curious.
There was no way out of the conversation this time. I could hear it in his voice. There was nowhere to run, no jokes to make, nothing on his mind that I could bring back up to take it off of this.
