Finding Mr. Write (Business of Love #5) - Ali Parker Page 0,84

sash around her waist that made her look curvy as hell with dangerously long legs. She wore sheer black nylons under the dress, and for the moment, she was barefoot, but a pair of black heels sat beside her chair at the dining-room table, which I knew she’d put on before our guests arrived.

A dark green apron was tied around her waist and at the nape of her neck. Her hair, freshly dyed red again two days ago, was curly and tied up in a messy bun that she’d likely let down at the same time she put the heels on. But her mane of hair hardly seemed practical with all the cooking we’d been doing today.

I smiled to myself as she paused and reached for the glass of wine she was working on. We’d had a half full bottle to get through on the counter that we decided to polish off before Briar’s parents, our Thanksgiving dinner guests, arrived around six o’clock. We had another half hour or so before that and there were some last-minute fixings to see to.

Presently, Briar was throwing together a salad and I was on potato mashing and gravy duty.

I came up behind her and pressed a light touch to her lower back as I leaned over and kissed her cheek. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going,” she said as she set her wine glass down and returned to dicing cucumbers and red peppers. “Remind me again why we decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner?”

I chuckled. “Because we wanted to have a feast for your parents. Besides, if I’d been in an airplane and airports for the last twenty-four hours to get back home, I wouldn’t mind making a pit stop for turkey.”

Briar licked her lips. “True. I just didn’t realize how much work this would be.”

I smiled. “We’re almost done. Besides, you don’t get to be the stressed one tonight.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“No, it’s not fair. I’m the one who’s supposed to be stressed.”

“Where do you get off with that logic?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “I’m the one meeting parents tonight. Not you. I want them to like me. All they know about me is what they’ve read online.”

Briar turned to me and braced one hip on the counter. “My parents don’t care if you write romance books or flip pancakes for a living. So long as you make me happy and treat me right, they’re going to like you. And I can guarantee they’ll be able to tell how happy you make me.”

I grinned.

She turned back to her cutting board. “So just be yourself. Forget what’s online.”

That was easier said than done.

The reporter who’d caught up with Briar at the coffee shop a few weeks ago had run her story in her literary magazine, and some media outlets had picked up on the story and published it as well. Nobody knew what my face looked like or what my full name was, but I couldn’t help but feel like my days of being an anonymous writer were limited. As it was, people were freaking out that it had been confirmed that I was, in fact, a man.

It didn’t matter. I had Briar. So long as she was by my side, I could face any potential career changes and shifts the future had in store for me.

I tried applying that logic to her parents and their opinion of me. So long as Briar’s opinion didn’t change, I’d be happy. And why would it? She was an independent thinker. Besides, her parents had raised her and done a bang-up job. By default, I was guaranteed to like them.

Right?

While Briar continued dicing vegetables, I fished a fork out of the drawer and poked one of the diced-up potatoes boiling in the pot. It was the perfect softness, so I poured them through a strainer before returning them to the pot to start mashing and adding the butter, milk, salt, and pepper.

While I mashed to supreme smoothness I breathed in the smell of cooking turkey, stuffing, and bubbling cranberry sauce on the stove top.

“It’s going to be a feast fit for kings,” I said.

Briar grinned. “I hope so. I can’t believe this is my first Thanksgiving where I did the cooking. I always figured it would be in a shitty little apartment with a four-pound bird. And yet here I am in a luxury townhouse preparing something way out of my depth.” She giggled and slid the diced vegetables on the cutting board into a bowl of lettuce. “It’s