“It sucks that you’re so decent.”
The disgruntlement in her voice almost made him laugh. “I’m... sorry?”
“You should be. You would be much easier to resist if youwere the same person I thought you were in high school. Fun-loving, troublemaking Bryce. You’re not. You’re much more than that.” She paused. “I can’t afford any more mistakes and somehow, I suspect you would be a big one.”
He didn’t know whether to be flattered or hurt by that. He sighed. Did it matter? The last thing he wanted to do was make her life more complicated.
“Point taken. Let’s forget it ever happened and move on to take care of the renovation.”
How long had he been focused on the job at hand? he wondered after he climbed into his pickup and headed toward home. Probably since his dad left when he was ten.
He felt like he had been looking after his mom forever. In the old days, he had taken a job after school to pay some of the bills, had cleaned her up after she would come home drunk, would go grocery shopping with whatever spare change he could scrounge up.
Then, when he finally felt more stable, and she seemed to slow down her drinking and drug use, if not stopped it completely, the early signs of dementia had begun to show. It had been easy to put them down at first as general forgetfulness, a side effect from her years of hard living. But then, about four years ago, she had nearly burned down the house because she had forgotten to turn off the oven, then claimed she hadn’t been the one to turn it on.
A week later, she had been given a nuisance citation for yelling obscenities at a couple of very young neighbor kids for simply riding their bikes down the sidewalk. Police had urged a mental health evaluation and the diagnosis of a rare form of early onset dementia had been shocking and heartbreaking.
The reminder of his mother did more than any of Emma’s words to him why kissing her had been a mistake.
She was right, as much as he didn’t want to admit it. Neither of them was in a good place for a relationship.
Right now, he needed to focus simply on his job, on making sure he did his best work possible on the bookstore renovation to give Emma the chance she desperately needed to succeed.
Chapter Twenty-One
Emma
“Do you want some scrambled eggs with your crepes?” Emma asked her grandmother.
Sylvia sat again in Rosie’s kitchen, almost in an exact replay of the scene the day after she arrived.
This time, though, Emma hadn’t overslept, mostly because she hadn’t slept much at all. She had awakened with the sunrise, before anyone else, and sat for a long time on the porch, sipping her coffee and watching the Pacific.
When she heard everyone else moving around inside, she had offered to make breakfast and had decided on her favorite crepes, along with strawberries from her mom’s garden.
“No eggs for me this morning. Crepes and that fake sausage you made is more than enough,” Sylvia assured her.
“Can I have a strawberry, Mama?” Olive asked.
“You can have a few strawberries with your breakfast,” she told her, ladling another crepe out of the omelet pan to add to the growing stack.
“Okay,” Olive said cheerfully, returning with a furrowed brow of concentration to the important task of slicing the strawberries with the child-friendly knife Emma had provided.
Her daughter loved helping in the kitchen and Emma loved teaching her the basics of cooking healthy, nutritious meals.
“Do I really get to spend all day with you today?” Olive asked.
“All day,” Emma said brightly. She had decided to take the entire day off on this beautiful Sunday. As much work asshe had to do at the bookstore, she couldn’t spend seven days a week there. It wasn’t healthy.
Besides, it would give her a good excuse to avoid Bryce, whom she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since their kiss a few days earlier.
She had good employees who were perfectly capable of handling the bookstore for a day. At her mother’s urging, Emma and Olive were going to take a hike to a favorite secluded beach, where they could build sandcastles, go beachcombing and otherwise enjoy a beautiful sunny day.
Olive couldn’t be more excited if Emma had told her they were going to Disney World. Another thing she adored about her daughter was Olive’s sheer joy at simple pleasures. It was a good lesson for her. Life didn’t need to be nearly as complicated as she tended to make it.
After finishing one more crepe, she carried the stack to the table, where her mother and grandmother were chatting.
“What’s on your agenda today, Mom?” Emma asked. She wouldn’t have minded her mother’s company on her and Olive’s excursion but couldn’t bring herself to issue the invitation.
