by Holley Trent
Afótama women were desirable lovers because they were so passionately vigilant about their relationships. They were choosy, and rightfully so. Marty wasn’t going to be an easy catch, even if had all the right bait held out for her. Fortunately, Chris had never been afraid of hard work. He also knew when best to call in the big guns.
“Let me buy you a cookie,” Chris said as Marty approached the curb.
“What?” She glanced up at the crossing light, and then gave up on waiting. There was no traffic. She crossed the street, and Chris followed.
“Big, soft, hot, chocolate chip cookie.” He wrapped an arm around her lower back and pointed to the closing bakery with the other. “Unless you don’t like chocolate.”
She paused on the corner, staring at the bakery two doors down. “I…” She shook her head and turned on her heel. “I need to get back to Shani.”
He pulled her back gently to him, and whispered, “You and I both know that she’s not seeking you right now.”
“There’s no way to know that.”
“I disagree. Maybe she’s not completely knitted into the web here, but she’s your daughter. You know when she’s looking for you. You’ve always known that.”
A little muscle in Marty’s cheek twitched, and she tried to pull away.
He let her. He’d never been the kind of man who’d push a woman’s limits. He’d have to let her come around on her own.
“Am I right? Don’t be frightened, sweetheart. That’s normal for us. We’re often more in tune with what our family members are doing than anyone else. It doesn’t matter that you’re only half and Shani is only a quarter. You’re still Afótama, and we’re wired to cling.”
Which is why he knew that his mother was wondering if he’d come by. He was close enough in proximity to her to notice the psychic tug.
“Besides, if anything happens—if Shani wakes up looking for you—Erin will call you. Don’t you trust Erin?”
Marty’s nod came slowly.
“Then come here.”
“I need to go.”
“Why? Because you’re worried someone will accuse you of not being an attentive mother?”
“For God’s sake, she broke her damn arm today, Chris. I’m pretty sure that’s the first thought people are going to have.”
“Because you’re never allowed to look away for a second? You’re not allowed to let a six-year-old play the way six-year-olds sometimes do? You can’t micromanage her every second of the day.”
“She’s never broken anything before. She hadn’t even had so much as an ER visit before today.”
“Then you’re batting well above average with her. My mother would tell you it’s a wonder I survived childhood. I was always in a cast or sling of some kind. I always had cuts and bruises. I found trouble to get into, even with my mother staring right at me. She couldn’t stop me from getting hurt. All things considered, I think I turned out all right.”
That muscle in her cheek twitched again.
He liked that twitch a lot. It was more honest, at times, than the things coming out of Marty’s mouth.
“You’re just trying to placate me,” she said quietly.
“No, I’m trying to make you comfortable. When you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable. I don’t particularly like being on edge.”
“Why would you be on edge?”
“Because you are right now. You’re transferring your anxieties to me.”
She took a few steps back, ashen-faced.
He let out a frustrated growl, and pulled her back to him by the hand. “Stop. You’re with the clan. Get used to the weird shit.”
“I don’t want to.”
He ground his teeth. “Tough.”
“I like to think I have some say in the matter.”
“As of right now, assume you don’t. I’m going to move you from Point A to Point B and show you that nothing bad is going to happen if you eat a cookie, or if you take ten more minutes for yourself. You might even like it.”
Her pretty features sagged and shoulders slumped.
He may not have been able to read emotions the way people like Erin did, but because Marty was his, he knew she felt like shit. He knew because he felt like shit, too. Her happiness was his. Her sadness was his. They’d met and touched, and that meant they’d forged a shared investment in each other’s wellbeing.
“Come on, Marty. Let me make you smile. Can I at least do that?”
She moved ploddingly beside him, her hand limp in his.
“Tighter. I don’t buy for a minute that a woman who can damn near knock me on my ass psychically has a limp grip.”
Sighing, she tightened her hold on his hand, not quite as possessively as he would have liked, but at least it was strong.
He pulled open the bakery door, and the pungent aroma of dough and sugar wafted out to the street.
“Mom,” he called out. “It’s just me.”
“I know. Lock the door, will you?”
She was back in the kitchen, probably. The shop was deserted, as it usually was that time of day. Chairs had already been overturned onto the few rustic tables, and the food cases were practically barren. Aside from a few seasonal bagel flavors, the trays were empty.
Chris turned the lock, hit one set of the shop lights to dim the place, and guided a very tense Marty toward the rear.
“Chris—”
“Don’t get too excited. She’ll probably make me pay off the cookies through labor. Doesn’t matter that I have a medical degree and haven’t lived at home in sixteen years. I’m not allowed to say no. Ever.”
“You could say no,” Mom called out. “But you run the risk of not being my favorite anymore.”
“I never was your favorite, anyway. Don’t feed me that line.”
Chris nudged open the swinging half door that divided the front of the shop from the employee-only area and pulled Marty through the gap.
“Was I that obvious?” Mom asked.
Chris grunted and kept Marty moving.
They rounded the corner.
Mom was standing in front of the huge stand mixer, staring down into the bowl. Probably dough of some sort. Her life was dough and nagging.
The commercial facility, located in a factory on the edge of town, provided all of the bread for the local grocery and for a few other New Mexican stores as well. Most of what Mom and her smaller staff made in the storefront facility were higher-end, artisan products. Folks didn’t have a problem paying three bucks for a plain bagel if they came from Holst’s. They were huge and filling.
Mom turned, wiping dough off her hands onto her apron. She nudged her glasses up with her forearm and peered dead-on at Marty.
Marty shifted her weight nervously.
“Don’t panic. Mom’s just being Mom.”
“Yeah? You do this often?” she thought at him. “Bring women here for cookies?”
“No.”
Mom snapped her gaze up to Chris’s face. “Felt the tug on the web when you were near. I sensed there was someone with you. I couldn’t tell who, though, only that it wasn’t Paul or Will.”
“This is Marty,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” She nodded as if she’d expected a wholly unsatisfactory introduction and had gotten one.
“Marty—”
“Petersen,” Marty interjected quietly. “Not Quan anymore. You might as well go ahead and lay it out, Chris. I’m Dan Petersen’s daughter.”
Mom’s nearly transparent eyebrows flew upward, and she nudged her glasses up her nose some more. She needed to get the damned things adjusted but never seemed to have the time. “Hoooooly shit.”
“Mom?” he snarled.
“What?” She faced the mixer and cranked the handle to lift the dough hook from the bowl.
“Manners, maybe?”
“Well, what do you expect me to say? Dan slept around, the scheming turd.” She slapped a hand over her mouth and turned around. She said, “Sorry,” through her parted fingers.
<
br /> Marty raised a shoulder and dropped it, likely not knowing what to say. Mom regularly had that effect on people.
Mom dropped her hand and let her breath out in a sputter. “I didn’t know. I mean, way back in the day, I’d heard rumors that Dan had been cheating, but I didn’t know that…”
“There’s two of us,” Marty said quietly. “My sister works in the mansion. She’s been here for almost a month. I’m just visiting.”
“Visiting your father?”
“No,” Marty said.
Chris cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention and projected to her, “Marty doesn’t speak to him. She’s here to visit her sister. Please don’t needle her.”
“Needling’s what I do. Everyone knows that.”
“Yeah, well. Rein in the compulsion for once. She’s my match, and I’d like to keep her.”
Mom’s big eyes went even rounder behind her glasses. “Uh…” She turned and started scraping the remnants of dough off the hook. “I didn’t believe you when you said you had someone. I thought you just wanted the salad. You should have told me better, and that way I wouldn’t have put my foot in my mouth.”
“I had the dreams. I didn’t know she was real until this morning.”
“Oh, Chris, I’m so thrilled for you. We haven’t had a fated match in our family since… Oh, who the hell even knows anymore.” She grinned broadly. “I’ll behave.”
He didn’t believe her. She’d probably come out of her mother’s womb misbehaving. “I appreciate that you’ll try to.”
She narrowed her eyes. “And yet you always wonder why your sister’s my favorite.”
“I never stood a chance, anyway.”
Mom’s gaze tracked toward Marty, who was peering at the checklist the last person out of the bakery every night was supposed to run down. Mom was the one who’d written it—twenty years ago when she first started taking on non-family staff—but she pulled the list out every now and then to make sure she wasn’t skipping steps. Occasionally, she’d get home and realize she hadn’t fed the sourdough starter or some such thing.
“The work isn’t as bad as it seems,” Mom said, “if you know where everything is. The trick is to be systematic.”
“There are a lot of steps,” Marty said. “You do everything by yourself?”
Mom shrugged. “Sometimes. I gave the staff manager the night off today. She won the raffle to have dinner at the mansion with the queen and etcetera.”
Chris snorted and leaned his forearms onto the stainless steel counter in front of him. “Gerry?”
“Yes. Why do you sound so appalled?”
“From what I hear about those dinners, they’re not exactly white tablecloth affairs. The queen is a very casual lady, and the chieftains don’t have the patience for all those courses.”
“I think Mallory told me about those dinners.” Marty was by a baker’s rack, hands stuffed into the pockets of her jeans, peering at various pan sizes. “They had one a few days after she moved in. It got a bit raucous.”
Mom grimaced. “I’m sure Gerry will be fine.”
“Nah,” Chris said grimly. “She’ll probably blush herself faint. Good thing I’m not on duty at the hospital tonight. She makes a horrible patient.”
“Give her some credit. She’s not the prude you think she is.”
“Sure. Okay.” He snorted.
Gerry would clutch her pearls at the suggestion that there was alcohol in a champagne cocktail. “Is there any cookie dough left?”
“No.”
“Then why were you wondering if I was coming by?”
“You should come by whether there’s any cookie dough left or not.”
“You act like I never see you.”
“That might as well be the case. You live a ten-minute walk from the house, and I only see you when you’re sniffing around for Sunday dinner.” She blinked. “And salads.”
“And cookies, apparently,” Marty said low.
Chris closed his eyes.
“Did he lure you here with promises of cookies?” Mom asked.
“Does he do that often? He said he didn’t.”
“He used to all the time back in high school. You know, I—”
“Mom,” he said on a growl. He opened his eyes only to glare at his mother.
She blinked again. “What?”
He stared at her, hoping Marty wasn’t buying for a minute that look of abject innocence and ignorance.
She blinked once more, then narrowed her eyes. “What?” she projected.
“High school was a long time ago.”
“And yet you’re still reverting to the same tricks.”
“Well, I didn’t know what else I could do besides buying her a unicorn. She’s wary as hell and because she has a kid, I have to do everything I can to not convince her that I’m a derelict lecher. Cookies seemed a safe bet.”
“She has a child?”
“A little girl. Shani. She’s at Erin Petersen’s right now. She broke her arm this afternoon.”
Mom’s mouth formed a silent O and she tipped her head back. “Shit, Chris. That complicates things.”
“You think?”
“Watch your tone.”
“Behave yourself, then.”
Mom huffed and pressed her palms over some wrinkles in her white chef’s jacket. “Bring the child here. Children like me.”
Chris rolled his eyes at his mother as Marty approached the table.
“I’m sorry, I need to get back to check on my daughter. She broke her arm today, and she’s never taken pain medication before.”
Mom gave a slow nod, grunting as if Chris hadn’t just fed her the same information. “How old is she?”
“She’s six.” The tightness Marty had been holding in her jaw relaxed, and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “She reminds me of that as often as possible. She’s really snobby now that she’s all done with kindergarten.”
“Oh, she sounds like such a cutie. You should bring her by tomorrow.”
“Mom.”
She waved off Chris’s silent warning. “I should be in before the lunch crowd shows up looking for the day’s special. By ten, anyway. She can keep me company while I run the payroll reports.” Mom put up her hands, obviously to stave off whatever objection Marty had opened her mouth to make. “I promise I won’t fill her up on soda, although I won’t lie and say she won’t have cookies.”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Marty said quietly.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to do it. I’m not one of those people who enjoy wasting time that way. If I say I want the company, I want the company.”
“She means it,” Chris projected to Marty.
Marty cut him an inscrutable look, and furrowed her brow.
“Solitude isn’t something most Afótama enjoy,” he added.
He kept forgetting that she hadn’t been born in Norseton and that she didn’t understand how the people were wired.
“Many of us would prefer to be around too many people than too few. Mom is one of the former.”
Marty fixed her gaze on the counter top and rubbed at a spot of flour on the surface. “I think Shani is, too. Her extroversion is exhausting sometimes. I tend to be more like my mother and appreciate the quiet.”
“The good thing about being in a community like this is that there’s always someone around who can pick up your slack.”
“To me, it just seems like one more way how I’m more outside the population than within. Already, Shani fits in better than I do.”
“Probably because Shani doesn’t know any better. She behaves as if she belongs, and that’s why she belongs.”
Mom cleared her throat. “If you’re going to carry on a private conversation with me standing right in front of you, I’ll just as soon go find something else to do. I’ve got a new playlist in my phone, and I’d like to get back to dancing.”
“Careful you don’t throw your back out again,” Chris said.
“You know, your sister doesn’t say nasty things to me.”
“When would she have time to? She’s so busy kissing your ass.”
“I oughtta—”
“Oughtta what?” Chris smiled serenely. Maybe he was an awful son for getting his mother riled up the way he had, but their relationship had always had that sort of dynamic. He was never going to be a mama’s boy, but he loved her, anyway.
“Stop teasing her, Chris,” Marty said. “My mother might have plucked you in the forehead by now.”
“See,” Mom said. “You should be nice, Chris.”
“I’m nice when it matters.”
“Your own mother doesn’t matter?”
“You just told me in no uncertain terms that you’d rather be listening to whatever you’ve got queued up in iTunes than to visit with your son, so…you tell me.”
“Don’t come over for dinner this Sunday. You’re not welcome.” She turned to Marty. “You can have his plate.”
Marty smiled softly and put her hand back in her pocket. “I don’t think I’m going to be here on Sunday, but thanks. I’ve got to get back to work. I just took a little time off to bring my sister some of her things.”
“You’re leaving already?”
“Mom, I told you that,” Chris projected.
She ignored him. She was too busy staring at Marty and wearing an open-mouthed expression of stupor.
“Mom.”
“What?” she asked aloud. “That’s not long enough.” She turned back to Marty. “That’s not long enough. You can’t just…go like that. How can you come here and want to leave so quickly?”
“I don’t belong here,” Marty said. “Florida is familiar. I have a job there. My mother is there. Everything I know is there.”
“But—”
“Mom. Please,” Chris silently interjected. “You let me deal with her, and you can deal with Shani.”
