She wouldn’t be allowed to keep Daisy with her. Daisy would be in a crate or she would need a pet sitter. That was an option. But she had a plan and it was almost time to put the plan in place. Papillon was a bump in the road.
“Yeah,” she heard herself saying. “I mean, unless you don’t think it’s a good idea. Like I said, I work a lot.”
Maybe he would save her from herself. If he told her she could be bad for Daisy, she would let the puppy go.
“And like I said, you can take her with you,” Zep reassured her. “Or have someone watch her. Once she’s trained, she can be on her own for a while. Dogs sleep a ton during the day, too. All she wants from you is love and food. Dogs don’t require much more.” His voice had gone husky, as though he’d been talking about something other than Daisy. “Now that we’re done with the evening, you want to tell me how you think it went? I hope I held up my end of the bargain.”
They had a bargain? From what she could tell, he’d done all the work and gotten nothing out of it but trouble. He’d upended his whole life to help her for a week.
What had Lila said? Zep showed he cared by helping. But shouldn’t he get something out of it, too? She could think of a few things she would like to give him.
But first she would tell him what she really thought. “You were amazing. I think my family is kind of in love with you. Please tell me my mother didn’t hit on you more when I wasn’t looking. She doesn’t actually mean it. She likes to flirt. I think it makes her feel young.”
“Your mother was fine.” He moved up to the couch and sat back. “She talks real fast, though. I had to pay attention to keep up. Your brother and father seem nice. I couldn’t tell much about the fiancée. She just seemed scared of alligators. And pretty much everything else. She didn’t eat much.”
“Shawna doesn’t eat at all.” Her brother and Shawna had been dating off and on for five years and not once had she seen that woman eat a full meal. She knew there were women out there who were naturally on the slender side, but Shawna worked hard to keep skinny. It looked good on her and she seemed perfectly content to push her food around. It would likely save her brother a ton of money, and he was always concerned with that. Roxie sank down on the couch with him. “She missed out. The étouffée was delicious tonight. I’m sorry my parents were fussy about the food.”
They’d looked over the menu and found something wrong with every single thing, from the fact that the chicken was fried to not understanding what a grit was and what it had to do with shrimp. Remy had offered to grill some chicken and shrimp for them. He’d made some baked potatoes and rice that wasn’t dirty since her mother couldn’t handle that.
Zep’s brows rose. “Oh, I seem to remember a newcomer from the city a while back who didn’t know what jambalaya was.”
She hadn’t been as bad as her mom, but in the beginning she hadn’t been familiar with most of the dishes here. “I grew up mostly eating white food. Like literally white food, and really bland, too. My mom was good with chicken breasts and white rice and mashed potatoes. Canned green beans. She wasn’t the most imaginative cook.”
“Sometimes you have to be open to new experiences.” There it was again, that deep tone that made her breath catch because he wasn’t merely talking about rice and beans or a muffuletta. “You love jambalaya now.”
She loved a lot of things about Papillon now. She shook off that word because she wasn’t going to even come close to associating it with Zep Guidry. It would be dangerous to love someone like him, and she didn’t do that kind of danger anymore. “It’s good. I like it a lot. I like it at Guidry’s.”
She could like him, too. But only for a little while.
“I know,” he replied with a slow, sexy smile. “You like it so much, I even started giving you the local heat.”
She gasped because she hadn’t changed the way she ordered. She hadn’t known there was more than one. “There’s only one on