Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,65
David sat, and she found creamer, sweetener and sugar to add to the tray bearing the two full mugs. She turned in time to see him lift the corner of the white linen napkin covering the bread basket and decided they might as well eat while the croissants were hot.
She turned to the refrigerator for the ever-present bowl of butter balls and a jar of her mother’s homemade peach jam, desperately thankful for the distraction and knowing she would only be able to get through this shared breakfast by avoiding his eyes.
David was pouring cream in his coffee when she returned to her chair. “You’re a good woman, Avery Rice. No matter how many times in the past I may have said otherwise.”
“The croissants won’t be good when they’re cold,” she said, refusing to rise to his bait. “That’s all.”
“Right,” he said, splitting a roll with his hands then stabbing a butter ball with the end of his knife. “Tell yourself that if it makes it easier.”
“Makes what easier?” she asked, slipping a knife through the layers of her croissant.
He lifted a brow as if the answer and not steam from her coffee rose to heat her face. “The truth.”
“And what truth might that be?” she asked, because she wasn’t going to allow him to win too easily.
He sat back, sighed, his hands at his sides holding to the chair’s aluminum tubing. “Why don’t you trust me alone in your mother’s house?”
Avery returned her croissant to her plate and twisted her hands into the napkin in her lap. She didn’t like her mother leaving him alone, but for none of the reasons he was probably thinking.
The simple explanation was that he’d surprised her, and she hadn’t had time to think, to process the scope of the situation. She realized that her mother would never have gone out had trust been an issue.
The more complicated version was that what she was feeling was a long-dormant uncertainty about her history with David finally rising to the surface.
She glanced around the kitchen that had changed so little from her childhood and not at all since her father’s passing. It was the idea of David in this space that had always been her refuge causing her now to act out.
“I do trust you. I apologize for leading you to believe otherwise.” She breathed deeply. “It was just strange…and a bit…difficult to understand you being here.”
David leaned forward again, his forearms on the edge of the table, his hands held in loose fists. He’d buttoned his shirt wrong, she noticed, as her gaze slid away from his to the relative safety of his now-covered chest. “Avery?”
She looked back up, her heart wedged tightly at the base of her throat. It was a wonder she was able to speak. “Yes?”
“We’re going to have to talk about it.”
Speaking was nothing; swallowing was the problem now. She reached for her coffee mug anyway. “Talk about what?”
David’s eyes twinkled and flashed. The corners of his mouth wrapped like parentheses around his wide grin. “About the fact that I saved your life. And that you ruined mine.”
CHAPTER TWO
AVERY’S COFFEE SLOSHED from her mug to the table when she slammed it down. “You did not save my life.”
Yeah, she was probably right, David admitted, though he did take note that she hadn’t refuted his comment that she’d ruined his. She hadn’t, of course, which caused him to wonder why she didn’t stomp his claim to the ground. Or if this was another demonstration of her unhealthy tendency to hold too tightly to the past.
Still, they’d been circling this itchy thing between them now for ten months—if not for the fifteen years since the incident beneath the bleachers—and it was time to put it to bed.
“Maybe, maybe not.” He spread the melted butter on his croissant and spooned up a serving of peach jam. “I seem to remember a few months later at the Dairy Queen you telling me that I had.”
Avery pinched off first one end of her croissant then the other, no doubt imagining the bread to be his neck. “I was frightened the night it happened, yes. Especially knowing what Johnny was capable of. But he wouldn’t have hurt me. I overreacted.”
David begged to differ; he’d seen the look in Johnny’s eyes when he’d pulled him off Avery and thrown him to the ground. “Another matter of opinion,” David offered with a shrug.
She paused, swallowed; her eyes darted to his, then away when he dared to hold her gaze.