Hot Mess - Elise Faber Page 0,30
her more tightly against him, loving the way her scent fluttered up and flowed over him, her soft moan in the back of her throat as she leaned more heavily against him.
“Mom! Mr. Finn is kissing you!” Rylie yelled, words punctuating her footsteps on the deck.
Shannon lurched from his arms, feeling like she yanked out half of the hairs from his scalp in the process. Finn sucked in a breath, resisting the urge to tug her back against him, to kiss her again, to watch her melt, feel her lips and tongue against his.
But Rylie was there.
He turned and squatted down in front of her. “I was kissing your mom.”
Shannon made a choking sound.
“Is that okay with you?”
Rylie tilted her head to the side, brown-blue eyes studying him closely. “Do you like her?”
“Ry—” Shannon gasped. “That—”
“I do,” he said, meeting that gaze straight on. “I think your mom is pretty great.”
Rylie nodded. “She is great.”
“So is it okay with you if I kiss her?”
“My dad never did,” she said.
Finn struggled to absorb that gut punch, to not look over at Shannon when she made a pained noise. “If she wants me to kiss her, then your mom deserves to be kissed.” More clunky words. But the next he spouted at least made more sense. “She deserves to be happy.”
“I know.” Her response was laced with the nonchalance of a seven-year-old, especially as her eyes drifted from his to the remains of her meal on the table. A nod. “If it makes her happy, then you can kiss her.”
She scooped up a nugget and took off for the sand, just enough sun left in the sky for her to add another turret to her sandcastle masterpiece, but skittered to a stop on the bottom step. “Mr. Finn?”
“Yeah?”
“If it makes her happy, you can marry my mom, too.”
The nugget went into her mouth, and she took off for her sandcastle.
Finn straightened, slowly turned back to face Shannon, seeing her expression was as shell-shocked as he felt.
From the kiss.
From Ry’s matter-of-fact declaration.
From, at least on his part, the notion that the almost-seven-year-old’s idea might not be the worst one.
He saw a flash of red hair in his periphery, knew that Pepper was watching, that she and Derek were probably documenting the event for posterity . . . and for Pepper’s part, to tease Finn later.
But he didn’t care.
There was only one question he wanted the answer to.
“Does it?” he asked softly.
Wide blue eyes met his, a trace of panic in their depths.
“Do my kisses make you happy?”
No, he wasn’t proposing marriage. Yes, he liked her. Yes, he was considering setting up a home base in Stoneybrook to be closer to her and Rylie.
But, marriage?
No. Not yet, anyway.
But not yet isn’t a no, Finn. That mental voice was his mother’s. The same one that always infiltrated his inner thoughts. Part ensuring he stayed on task. Part calling him to task. But also never failing to help him get his thoughts in order.
“Shannon?” he asked when she stared at him without speaking.
She shook herself.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you like it when I kiss you?” A beat. “Or, in Ry’s words, does it make you happy?”
White teeth nibbling on a pink bottom lip. “I—” She sighed, gaze coming to his. “Yes, Finn. I like it when you kiss me.”
Relief.
Sweet, sweet relief.
But also awareness that she hadn’t answered his other question, about it making her happy. Instinctively, Finn knew the time for that conversation could come later, when she wasn’t so unnerved, when Pepper and Derek weren’t watching, when their dinner wasn’t getting cold.
So, he tugged her back into her chair, handed over her burger, and then he asked her about her second day of school.
Shy.
Shy at first, but then she found her rhythm, quickly having him in stitches about a kindergartner who’d been confident enough to climb the outside of the play structure while she was taking her turn supervising midday recess, but hadn’t been confident enough to get down.
“And finally, the custodian managed to find the tall ladder and we got him down.” She chuckled. “But I could have sworn that I was going to have to call the fire department.”
“They did have to call the fire department for me once,” he said.
“What?”
His lips twitched and he told her a story he’d never shared with anyone, about filming on location in Scotland a few years back, with a small crew he’d since sworn to secrecy.
“Then the director convinced me to climb down the cliff.”
She gasped.
“I