She frowned over at him. “No, you’re not. You’re absolutely not.” Oh dear. That sounded far too earnest. She cleared her throat. “I was just thinking how nice it is that you spend so much time with your mother.”
He snorted. “Seriously? Don’t start thinking I’m son of the year. I ran off like a spoiled brat and left my family behind so I could deal with my own bullshit. When they wanted to see me or the kids, they had to come to London because I was too pathetic to come back here like a man. I robbed my children of time with their grandma just because this place used to make my skin crawl.” He scowled, his voice flat and hard. “I don’t even remember why I hated it so much. I mean, I remember why I hated it, but the anxiety…”
She bit her lip, studying the baked goods in front of them because it was better than staring at him. “Sometimes bad feelings don’t make sense.”
“Well, that’s true. Bad feelings never make sense.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said softly. “You’re here now. That’s all you can do.”
He didn’t answer. She didn’t push. Instead, she checked her shopping list and went about collecting pastries, until finally he said, “Jesus, woman, how many bloody croissants do you want?”
“These are for your permanently ravenous children, thank you very much.”
“A likely story,” he muttered. But humour danced through his words again, lighting them up. As if that dark, self-flagellating speech hadn’t even happened. Before she could think about that too hard, he asked mockingly, “You alright there?”
It was quite obvious that she was not alright there, since she was currently making a fool of herself, jumping up and down to reach the highest shelf. But Hannah paused in her indignities, pulled herself up to her full and majestic height—which was actually rather negligible—and said, “Fine, thank you.”
Nate rolled his eyes, plucked the tongs from her hand, and got her a Danish.
Reluctantly, she muttered, “Cheers.”
“So, the shopping list was a cool idea,” he said, as they wandered toward the next aisle.
Hannah tried not to smile. “I can’t claim credit. I believe they’ve been popular for centuries at least.”
“You know, you could just take the compliment.”
“Oh, was that a compliment?” she asked innocently. While internally she screamed It better not have been a compliment, because I’m too high-strung to deal with attractive men who occasionally devour me with their eyes and infrequently compliment me with their… mouths.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re mostly in charge of food now. You actually make real meals.”
“You make real meals.”
“I plonk as many of the necessary food groups on a plate as I can,” he corrected. “You cook shit that makes sense, like… like curry.”
“It’s true,” she said mildly. “I am an eminently sensible cook.”
Hannah was used to her sense of humour going completely unnoticed. She constantly made what she thought of as jokes, only to have those around her take each word completely seriously. She had decided long ago that her comedic delivery was simply too atrocious to save.
So when Nate laughed, she thought that she must be hallucinating or something.
But she wasn’t.
Nate had no idea why Hannah seemed to think that he would let her carry the shopping. But she did get strange ideas in her head, sometimes, bless her.
Still, once he made his position on bag-carrying clear, she didn’t argue. Instead, she took great satisfaction in ordering him about, telling him exactly how to unpack everything in his own bloody kitchen. And he took even greater satisfaction in her casual bossiness and easy smiles and the way she rolled her eyes at his teasing, because it meant he hadn’t ruined anything. She didn’t know he was currently suffering through a mortifyingly creepy attraction to the woman he paid to watch his kids. In her mind, the two of them were… friends, maybe. Close enough to talk and joke like this, anyway.
And that felt fucking fantastic.
“It’s amazing how much more smoothly things go,” she mused from the kitchen island, “when I have someone large and obedient to hand.”
“I am not obedient,” he grumbled, as he arranged the fruit juice in the precise order she’d asked for.
“Obedient,” Hannah repeated. “Like a well-behaved child—”
Nate growled. It was an excellent way to hide how much fun he was having, and also how much he’d like to put her over his knee.
“—with unusual strength,” she finished. “Are you growling at me?”