by Pippa Grant
When you’re known around the globe, you know you’re making certain sacrifices.
For me, it’s sacrificing trust.
Sacrificing normal.
Always looking for the angle.
I’m pretty sure the only angle Ingrid’s looking for is whichever one gets her to bed faster, and I don’t mean with me.
Which means I need to be on top of my game to make it worthwhile for her.
She needs to know how little in my life feels real sometimes, and how much I value it when I find it.
I wiggle my pinky between us. We’re so close, she has to look down, and when she does, she smiles, almost shyly. “I haven’t done this in decades.”
Her pinky hooks around mine, and I want to hold it there all night.
Instead, I lean in for another kiss.
She responds slowly at first, but then she melts into me, and the cold disappears, the night disappears, and the world itself disappears.
It’s just her and me floating among the stars in a nice to meet you kiss that’s rapidly becoming an I want to tear your clothes off kiss.
She’s had me transfixed from the moment I laid eyes on her, and this kiss?
Tonight?
It’s the first of many.
It has to be, because I don’t want to let go.
I’ll have to eventually. I can’t have a friends-with-benefits fling with a single mom forever. I’m always gone. Her kids are settled here, and so’s she.
But I can’t resist her, and I don’t want to.
Her fingers brush my cheek and drift down my neck. Heat rockets through my body, the electric current between us pulsing so hard, the shock that comes when we part will be unbearable. The rock star in my pants is ready for a show.
I need to go slow. Don’t scare her. Don’t push her too far.
But she’s kissing me back like she’s been underwater too long and I’m her first gasp of oxygen, one hand tightening around my shirt to hold me here, lips parted, tongue exploring, delicate, desperate noises coming from her throat.
Don’t ask how we end up on top of the picnic table, her on her back, legs wrapped around my hips, her fingers clutching my hair while I slide my hand under her shirt, taking in the soft skin leading to those gorgeous full breasts.
Pretty sure we just floated here.
All I know is, I feel more alive here, with Ingrid, than I’ve felt doing anything in a long time.
“I told you kids to knock it off,” a voice snarls, and a cold stream of water slaps me in the ear.
Ingrid gasps, then sputters, and fuck.
She’s taking it all right in the face.
I leap off the table and jump in front of the water. “Stop.”
“This ain’t for hanky-panky!” The man behind the hose keeps spraying me while Ingrid coughs and chokes.
I grab the hose and wrench it away from him. I can’t see him—I have water in my eyes—but I can see enough to know he’s shrinking back. “Do you own this building?”
“This rooftop is for pretty things and family things and—”
“Do. You. Own. This. Building?”
The hose is pointed at him now, but I’ve got it kinked so it doesn’t spray.
“It’s okay,” Ingrid says between coughs. “Mr. Bouchard, he’s with me.”
“Mrs. Scott?”
My shoulders twitch.
Ingrid wrenches out another cough. “We were having cheesecake.”
The older man looks at me.
I glare at him. “And we’re all going to forget this happened.” Not what I want to do—I want to turn the hose on him and see how he likes it—but it’s what I need to do.
Rumors went around five or six years ago that I was dating Cash’s sister, and there were paparazzi lining her neighborhood, stalking her, for weeks. Even with sitting on the fringes of public life for over a decade at that point, she got frazzled.
This thing with Ingrid?
It’s top secret.
I shouldn’t even be looking at this guy.
“I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but you keep your hands to yourself around our Mrs. Scott, do you hear me?” he growls.
She puts a hand on my chest and steps in front of me. “Mr. Bouchard, I’ve got this. Army training, remember? I know twenty-two ways to kill a man.”
“Hmph.” He scowls at me one more time. “You need help burying his body, you know where I’m at. And I’m sorry about getting you wet, ma’am. I thought you were a teenager.”
She follows him to the door to the stairwell, bends, and then twists something squeaky.
When the hose lightens in my hand, I aim it at a flower pot and release the last of the pressure.
“Sorry,” she mutters.
She’s shivering. I’d wrap her in a hug for body heat, except I’m soaked to the bone. “Not your fault. You okay?”
“Yeah.”
Dammit.
That’s not the yeah of a woman happy at the end of a date. “Twenty-two ways to kill a man?”
“I actually only know one, and it’s to sing to him until his ears bleed. You’re soaked. We should—”
“Definitely do this again sometime,” I finish for her.
One brow quirks up, and then she’s laughing. “You’re insane.”
“Yeah, but only in the best ways.”
She goes up on her tiptoes and presses her warm lips to my cheek. “Thank you for the cheesecake.”
“Anytime.” Preferably soon.
Twelve
Ingrid
I’m at Piper’s hockey practice Saturday morning, still reliving making out with Levi in my head while I try to entertain Hudson with Matchbox cars.
He has a habit of trying to get out on the ice with the other kids.
Zoe has her nose stuck in a book and earbuds in her ears, listening to music on my old phone. The other parents are gathered in their normal groups. It’s not that we’re outsiders—it’s more that after our first practice where Hudson sneezed red slime that he’d stuck up his nose all over the coach’s wife, who was very kind and understanding about the whole thing, we tend to rotate to wherever he’s happiest and wherever he can’t find more things to stick up his nose.
Like other kids’ popcorn crumbs.
His doctor tells me this will pass, but I sometimes wonder if he’ll be the life of the frat party with all the magic tricks he’ll be able to do with his nose by then.
And then I wonder if Levi would still want to make out with me if he knew how many things I pull out of Hudson’s nose every week.
Probably.
My kids don’t seem to faze him. But then, it’s not like he’s auditioning for the role of their stepdad. We’re having a thing where I get to pretend to be a normal adult, and he gets—
You know, I’m still not entirely sure what he gets.
A chance to blow off steam without the world watching? The novelty of dating someone different?
No, not dating.
Flinging.
We’re flinging.
We actually worked out terms over text early this morning before my kids were out of bed, with both of us agreeing that all of our dates—dates!!—should be kept on the down-low. He can’t guarantee I won’t get spotted by the paparazzi, but he did promise they’ll leave my kids alone.
I promised I wouldn’t tell a soul about our arrangement and added that no one would believe me even if I did.
Sad, but true, and he didn’t argue the point. And then Piper crawled into my bed, and she can read, so I put my phone away.
If I’m lucky, I’ll have another few texts from him the next time I get a chance to check.
I don’t realize how far I’ve retreated into my own head when Brittany Danvers plops down next to me.
In nine years of parenting, I’ve learned that we moms fall into basically three types.
There’s the organized PTO mom who can talk anyone into anything and generally sends her kids to school on national holi
days with hand-stuffed baggies for their classmates, full of raisin boxes, Snickers bars, glow sticks, those little stamps that kids use to stamp the hell out of their walls when their mothers aren’t looking, and toothbrushes.
Then there’s the working mom who donates more money than necessary to every fundraiser to alleviate guilt.
And finally, we have the hot mess mom whose socks rarely match and who sometimes forgets to comb her hair and check to make sure her sweatshirt isn’t on backwards before she leaves the house.
I’m somewhere between the latter two, and a quick glance down confirms that while I’m wearing pants, and my blouse buttons up the front and even correctly today, my shoes are two different colors.
And I’m wearing sneakers. They’re actually two different styles.
Crap.
The thing about all of us, though, is that we all feel like we’re on the cusp of losing it, whether we look like it or not.
Brittany told me over drinks that we all wished were spiked at last year’s end-of-the-hockey-season party that she hasn’t slept in eleven years and that the sand she got up her vagina at their family Christmas trip to an all-inclusive in Mexico was the most action she’d had in months.
So while it would be easy to hate her for making the rest of us look bad, I realize it’s her way of handling the stress and expectations of modern motherhood.
Also, when Hudson sneezed his red slime, Brittany was the one who whipped out baby wipes and mopped the coach’s wife up before half the other parents noticed what had happened.
Brittany’s youngest is Piper’s age. They’re seven. Rapidly approaching eight.
And she still carries baby wipes to save the rest of us.
“I heard Levi Wilson came to your store the other day,” she whispers.
My heart pitter-patters, swells to exploding, and then sinks to my toes as a million scenarios play out in my head, the first being that I’m suddenly uber-popular for nothing more than proximity to one of Copper Valley’s favorite sons, the last being that my kids never get a moment of peace again.
But it’s not like that. Levi’s spotted in stores all over Copper Valley. Brittany’s not asking if we’re dating. She’s asking if my store was blessed by the pop god.
“Oh my god, he did.” Brittany’s whisper is the kind of shriek that shrieks I have gossip, and every mom in the stands knows it.
Zoe looks at me.
I silently telegraph to her to keep her mouth shut, since Hudson wouldn’t stop talking about the magic babysitter and her friend who was a boy, which Zoe has deduced to mean that I had a man-visitor.
She seems on the fence about believing if it was a late-night plumber.
“I shouldn’t talk about my customers,” I say to Brittany.
“He’s a regular?”
“No, he—”
“Are we talking about Levi Wilson at Ingrid’s store?” Akiko Takahashi drags her five-year-old son down the steps to sit on Hudson’s other side.
“Local celebrities come in from time to time.” I shrug, but my face is getting hot, and I don’t know if they’ll buy it with me brushing this off like it’s nothing. “We had a few Fireballs players at the book club meeting the other night too.”
“When Levi was there?” Alyssa Perlman joins us too. She’s firmly in the middle camp of moms—middle management at one of the many environmental engineering firms in town, planned to stop at one kid, and instead got twins who like completely opposite things.
And clearly, she has the gossip. “Where did you hear that?” I ask.
She pulls out her phone and swipes over it, then holds it out, screen first, showing a social media post with Levi right there in his goofball big eyebrows and extra-thick graying beard that he pulled off once all the other customers had left. “My friend said he was there in disguise.”
I’m blanking.
I’m completely blanking.
“Oh my god, Ingrid, is he going to use your store for a video or something?”
“Tell me he secretly loves to read. What book were you talking about?”
“He probably lost a bet. I heard he and Cash Rivers make crazy bets all the time.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out and glance at it. “Sorry, guys, it’s the store. Hold on.”
Thank god.
I swipe to answer, and when I put the phone to my ear, all I can hear is the swell of voices. “Yasmin?”
“Don’t freak.”
That’s not reassuring. “About what?”
“The cash registers just went down.”
“What do you mean, down?”
Yasmin has been with Penny for Your Thoughts since it was my grandparents’ store. I used to babysit her kids. She’s seen a lot. She can fix a lot.
Calling me on my day off is not a good sign.
“I think the wifi is going wonky,” she says, “and I can’t log onto the iPad for backup either, so we’re having to do hand receipts, and we’re a little busier than normal since all those gossip pages are covering the Fireballs players being here the other night…”
I look up at the ice, at Piper skating around a line of orange cones with the puck firmly in her control, then at the crowd of moms gathered around me, watching my every move.
My gaze lands on Brittany. “Can I ask a favor?”
She beams. “Anything at all.”
Crap. She probably thinks this means I’ll give her all the gossip. “Can you bring Piper home? There’s a problem at the store.”
“Of course.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m walking into the back door at Penny for Your Thoughts. I hand Hudson an iPad in the stockroom and tell Zoe to sit on him if he tries to get away or shove anything into his nose or ears or let the squirrel in, then push through the more-crowded-than-average aisles to get to the register.
Yasmin’s smiling like a champ, but I recognize the tightness in it, and the worry lines around her eyes.
“Still nothing?” I ask as I point to the computer.
She shakes her head. “Still nothing.”
I’m already dialing our web support, ignoring the pinging in my own heart and the little voices demanding to know why a single day can’t just go right. The store does pretty well, but a Saturday with a lot of customers when we can’t take credit cards?
This isn’t good.
“We should get a sign on the door until we can get this fixed. Cash only today.”
“I’m on it.” Her eyes flicker down. “And I’m sorry I called you on your day off.”
“Don’t apologize. Things happen. It’s not your fault.”
It’s rarely anyone’s fault. But things do happen.
They happen all the time.
“Are you up for hand-calculating discounts? I feel like today’s a hot mess day. Twenty percent off all hot mess merchandise paid for in cash.”
“Appropriate.” Yasmin smiles at me, but it’s a stressed smile.
Sort of like my budget might be this week if we can’t take credit cards all weekend.
Brittany drops Piper off while I’m trying to restart our internet connection, and I manage to get Mrs. Schneider to watch the kids the rest of the day. Zoe misses gymnastics. Hudson misses his little ninjas class, and also Zoe’s gymnastics, where her instructors let him play to his heart’s content on a spare mat to get his energy out.
I’m on the phone for five hours, mostly on hold, with the companies who should be able to help us get back up and running.
And I swear the shop’s busier for a Saturday than it usually is.
We close an hour early when it becomes clear we’re dealing with more frustrated customers than customers that we’re making happy, and that the issue won’t be fixed today. I get my kids takeout from a greasy spoon down the street, and we walk a couple blocks to a park so Hudson can run until it gets dark, which will unfortunately be too soon.
And all the while, as I’m huddling on a park bench in the chilly November weather, I’m w
ondering little questions.
Were we busier than normal today, or was that in my head? And if we were, was it because Nora Dawn’s been talking us up in her reader group, because the Fireballs players came by for book club, because holiday shopping season is creeping up soon, or because rumors are going around that Levi’s been at the store too?
The moms at hockey practice knew it, and it’s not like my store is the thing any of them randomly think about during the week. They have their own lives that are just as hectic as mine.
And speaking of Levi—he texts me as we’re walking home from the park.
Someone just handed me an oatmeal raisin cookie. Made me think of you.
I’m both smiling and wrestling with myself at the same time.
Do I call him and ask if he’s telling people to go to my store?
Or is that super presumptuous of me?
Screw it.
I’m calling.
That’s why I have his number, right?
As soon as I get the kids inside, I tell the girls to get Hudson in the bath, then duck into my bedroom and dial Levi. I don’t expect him to answer—if someone’s offering him cookies, he’s not alone—but his voice tickles my ear almost immediately. “Hey. This is a nice surprise.”
“I had a shitty day and needed a friendly voice.”
Huh. Not sure where that came from, but it’s true.
“Glad to be of service. Tell me nobody broke any bones.” I can practically hear him smiling. Is that weird? That’s definitely weird. I don’t know him that well yet.
Do I?
“No, but the day’s not over. Just… our software went on the fritz at the store so it was…interesting to say the least, and I swear there were twice as many people as there would be on a normal Saturday…”
He clears his throat.
And yeah, it’s the awkward throat-clear. Not the I have something in there clear, but the I don’t know what to say so I’ll make an awkward noise clear.
“Levi. Please tell me you’re not sending people here. I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t have the staff for a bigger crowd on a regular basis, and I don’t want to hire someone if interest is going to peter out, plus, people will start putting two and two together. All the moms at hockey this morning saw a picture of you at book club the other night, and now they’re asking tons of questions, and I don’t want this to sound super rude, but I thought we agreed we’d be a secret. My kids—”