Cocky Protector - Kat Mizera Page 0,41

not me, and while it’s taken me thirty years to learn that, I’m trying to be better going forward.”

“Oh, Mom.” I was both happy and sad about that, but it would be better to focus on the good stuff.

“So…was there anything you wanted to…mention?”

I smiled to myself. “About me and Ace? Maybe.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Shannon, yes or no?”

“Goodness, it almost sounds like you…want us to be together.”

“I want you to be happy and I know you had a crush on him in high school. Also, your father told me how you asked about him just before your wedding. I wish you’d come to me to tell me you were that conflicted about Douglas.”

“You wouldn’t have listened to me back then,” I told her gently. “And anyway, that was all fantasy. Now that he’s here, it’s reality. Dad didn’t even know where he was back then.”

“I guess hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

“I suppose it is.”

“So what are you guys doing next?”

“You mean on the cruise or something else?”

She chuckled. “On the cruise, of course.”

We talked about the plans for the week and she told me to call her once we got to Switzerland. I disconnected feeling happy but slightly out of sorts. I’d never had a phone call like that with my mother, both lighthearted and sincere. And she’d acknowledged my sex life, something else she’d never done before. I was so confused, but really glad we’d reached this point in our relationship. She was all I had really, since I was an only child and she was as well. My father had a brother who’d passed away, and he had two boys that were much older than I was, but other than exchanging Christmas cards, we didn’t have much of a relationship.

“How was your mom?” Ace asked as I joined them at the coffee shop.

“She wanted to know if you and I had gotten naked yet.” My eyes twinkled and Ace just stared at me.

“She hates me,” he said after a moment.

“Apparently not.”

“Wow.” He shook his head. “I don’t even know what to say about that.”

“Me either, but it feels good to have this kind of relationship with my mother after so many years of being at odds.”

“Not close to your mom?” Aubrey asked softly.

“Not until after my father died. Now that it’s just us, I guess she has no choice but to be nice to me. We went to a therapist, though, a neutral party to help us navigate through some of the hostility. Mom finally understands that I’m nothing like her, so she can’t expect me to make the choices she makes, and I needed to wrap my head around the idea that just because I didn’t care for her methods didn’t mean she didn’t want what’s best for me. It took us a while, but counseling helped and the last year or so has been so much better. Of course, I’ve been living six thousand miles away from her, so that might be part of it.”

We chuckled and I hurriedly drank my coffee so we could get back out to the market. We only had a few more hours before we had to get back to the boat and I wanted to see everything.

Chapter Nineteen

Ace

Between the gorgeous woman I was spending my time with and the fact that I was actually on a real vacation, I’d almost forgotten about Shannon’s stalker. Almost. I was always on guard, aware of my surroundings and where Shannon was, but I was a lot more relaxed about it. It was hard to explain, because I could be woken out of a deep sleep and break a man’s neck before I opened my eyes but I felt different now. Being with Shannon, as a couple, changed everything I thought I knew about myself. Our relationship had advanced in leaps and bounds. We went from distant-memory fantasies to friends-who-wanted-benefits to being together intimately within a very short period of time, but it felt perfectly natural.

I relied on my gut to stay alive and normally moving this fast with a woman set off all kinds of alarms. With Shannon, the only thing going off was me. I was crazy about her and couldn’t even begin to describe how amazing it was to make love with her. We didn’t just make each other feel good physically; we had a bond I couldn’t adequately describe. There had been no awkward getting-to-know-each-other moments even though we were definitely still getting to know each other. I felt like