“Morning, Mrs. Lawrence,” Luke says politely. Thegleam in his eyes tells me he’s enjoying this. “What brings you here so early?”
“I—I brought Melissa some apples,” she stammers.
“Great.” Luke strolls into the kitchen and gives me a wink. “We’ve both worked up quite an appetite.”
My mother’s staring resolutely at the floor, but I can see that her cheeks are flaming red.
“Are you joining us for breakfast?” Luke asks.
“No,” Mom says quickly. “No, I just—no. I have to get home.”
“Okay, then,” Luke says nonchalantly.
Mom grabs her purse from the counter and hightails it for the front door. “I’ll call you later, Melissa.”
“Melissa will probably be busy today,” Luke calls after her. “Maybe tomorrow too.”
“Okay,” my mother says weakly, jamming her feet into her shoes. “Well, goodbye then.”
I lock the door behind her and walk back to the kitchen, where Luke is leaning against the counter. “I can’t believe you came down here like that!”
He shrugs, unashamed. “It’s no worse than a Speedo.”
“Yeah, but she knew.”
“That was the point, Melissa. Anyone with half a brain would have taken a clue from my car in the driveway and my shoes by the door. She knew you’d slept with someone, and she wanted to know who it was.” He shrugs. “I decided to satisfy her curiosity.”
A laugh bubbles up inside me. “The look on her face when you came down the stairs!”
“Pretty good, wasn’t it?” Luke says with a smirk. “At least we know it’s possible to embarrass her.”
“What would you have done if she’d taken you up on the offer of breakfast?”
“Eaten breakfast,” he says with a shrug.
I have a mental image of Luke in nothing but boxers, sitting down to breakfast with my mother.
It’s too much. I bend over and laugh until my abs ache.
When I get over my giggles, we head back to bed, but there’s no way we’ll be able to fall back to sleep. Instead, I amuse myself by licking my way up the ridge that runs down the middle of Luke’s abdomen.
“Your abs are insane,” I whisper.
“Mmmm,” he replies. “Your tongue is insane. Don’t stop, Melissa.”
“Seriously, though. You could be an underwear model or something.”
I feel Luke’s abs shake as he huffs a laugh. “I doubt it. The abs kind of come and go. The six-pack does, at least.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitates for a minute before grabbing his phone from the bedside table. After some tapping and scrolling, he hands it to me. “A few years ago, at Austin’s family cottage.”
It’s a picture of Luke standing on a dock in a bathing suit, looking good enough to eat. “So you look good in a bathing suit,” I tell him. “That was never in doubt.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have six-pack abs in that shot.” He smiles and takes his phone back. “It was a really busy year in residency, so I stopped going to the gym and mostly ate takeout. I gained, like, twenty pounds. Had to buy new pants, which I wasn’t too thrilled about. But since I’m not actually an underwear model, it wasn’t the end of the world.”
I snatch his phone back and study the picture again. Now that I’m looking for it, I can see what he’s talkingabout; he’s got little love handles and a tiny gut. Not much of one, but it’s definitely there.
