“It beats the van I lived in before,” he muttered, before he could stop himself.
He said it half under his breath because he didn’t actually want to explain the van, but Pepper’s eyes lit up at him like a person who’d just been handed an interesting clue and was filing it for later.
“That is my room.” He waved at his under-furnished bedroom. “And across the hall, where Atlas sleeps,whenhe sleeps.”
He pushed open the nursery door to show the buttery yellow walls, natural wood crib, and some baby-appropriate animal art that had Vivien’s fingerprints all over it.
“Oh.” Her voice hitched as she looked around, oddly more affected by this room than any other. “It’s sweet.”
“What’s sweet is when he sleeps here and not the old bassinet that’s still next to my bed.” He leaned down. “Spoiler alert—he snores like a stuffed pig.”
She chuckled and stroked Atlas’s bald and oh-so-lucky head. “I love that about him.”
“He’s already had a nap today,” he said, fast and matter-of-fact, because he could not allow himself to look at Pepper pouring affection on his son and not…fall. Hard. Fast. Somewhere he’d been told by her father not to fall.
“I bet we can sneak another nap out of him, huh, Atlas?” she cooed.
“You’re really good at this, you know that?” He knew it was stating the obvious, but it had to be said. “There must have been a lot of little Broussards running around.”
She kept her gaze on Atlas. “Actually, I was an only child of two only children. No sibs, no cousins, just one cocker spaniel who hated all people. I’ve been waiting my whole life to have something small to hold.”
And the admission was just one more thing about her to surprise him. And make him want to wrap her in his arms for reasons he didn’t—well, he understood them. He just didn’twantthem.
She looked up and he realized he had drifted closer, and they were close enough that he could see the amber glints in her eyes and a smattering of freckles that might be how she got her name.
“You better get to work,” she said, her raspy voice like a siren’s call to him. “You don’t want to get fired the first day for being late.”
“You sure you’re good and ready?” he asked, inching toward the hall.
“Please. By the time you get home tonight, you’ll call me Mrs. Doubtfire.”
He laughed. “Not likely, but okay. You want to…” He pointed to the stairs.
“We’ll stay down here and play for a while,” she said. “Go wow Chef Vega. And remember, if you think my dad is tough, she makes him look like Jell-O.”
He cringed. “Thanks for the warning.”
He hesitated a second, then leaned in closer to Atlas, who almost looked terrified that someone would take him from his new favorite place on earth—Pepper’s arms.
“Be good, buddy. Be charming and sweet and don’t make scary things in your diaper. She might never come back. And then where would we be? Lost and…lost.”
He rushed out, grabbed his knife bag, and started up the ol’ rust bucket to go to work. As he waited for the Honda’s engine to decide whether or not today was the day it would die, he glanced at the house and imagined her first day on the job.
Pepper, floating through the rooms with happy Atlas on her hip. Pepper, making dinner for the family and worming her way into their hearts. Pepper, leaving her scent and her pheromonesand her spicy sweetness to linger in his space so he’d think about her all night long.
“Okay,” he said out loud, to himself, to the dashboard, to Atlas’s empty car seat in the rearview, to the man he was going to need to be on the line tonight in front of Isobel Vega. “Okay. Let’s talk this through.”
All he could hear was Marcel Broussard’s voice in his head.
My daughter moved here because she’s been hurt. Badly. She came to Destin, at my urging, to start over. Not to complicate her life.
And then—worse—a follow-up Jonah could not forget.
You do want that internship, don’t you?
Driftwood. Isobel. The line. The one shot. The internship that, if he didn’t blow it, became a job. The job that became a paycheck. The paycheck that became a future for Atlas that didn’t involve crashing on his father’s ground floor but maybe getting a place of their own.
Marcel Broussard held that power, and the man had drawn a line. Jonah had said, “Heard, Chef.”
