Page 206 of Sweet Temptation

“Ronan, if you’re gonna start this date by flirting with me like that, you better believe you’re getting laid again.”

“I fucking hope so.” He took a lazy sip of his beer. The chemistry crackled between us, but it was warm and comfortable, temporarily sated by the pre-dinner sex, so I felt like I could relax and just luxuriate in his attention.

There was no hurry. Time to enjoy dinner and drinks, then get to all the delicious sex later.

“What should we talk about?” I asked him. “You know I’ll talk about pretty much anything. You’re the quiet one. So you go first.”

“Okay,” he said. “When are you planning on telling your parents that we’re fucking?”

I sipped my drink, considering. “Uh… would ‘never’ be an inappropriate answer?”

“Yes.”

“When are you planning on telling Andre, and the rest of the world?” I asked him.

“Soon.”

“See?”

“See what? I’m keeping things tight, for now, for your protection. There’s no harm in telling your parents about us.”

“Okay. Well, how about I tell them… sometime at a future date to be determined?”

He shook his head. “This is the part I don’t get. You’re unapologetic in the way you live your life. Except you’re also a thirty-year-old daddy’s girl who won’t tell her parents who she’s seeing?”

I pretended to consider that assessment. “Yup. That’s about right.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why won’t you tell them about our relationship?”

“Because… I don’t want my dad to worry that your ability to protect me is somehow… compromised… by our personal relationship?”

He frowned at me. He heard the question in my voice. He knew I was pulling that answer out of my ass because I thought it might satisfy him.

“If that were the truth, I might understand,” he said. “But since it’s bullshit, maybe you want to take a stab at telling me the truth?”

“Fine. It’s not that I don’t want Dad to know about our relationship, exactly,” I began, as diplomatically as I could. “It’s just… a touchy subject. My parents have liked some of my boyfriends over the years. But sometime around the coke-snorting mortgage broker, they lost faith. I guess they assumed since I was twenty-seven it was about time I found Prince Charming and rode off into the sunset. They were disappointed that wasn’t happening, and when I made the mistake of confiding in them about all the dirty details of that ugly breakup… they kinda flipped out. I learned not to tell them so much.” I shrugged. “They have a different life. They come from a different time.”

“They’re not that old,” Ronan pointed out.

“I know. But they met so young. They were barely twenty. My dad was nineteen when I was born. He went through that first breakup and then met Joanne and it was love at first sight. They hooked up so fast and never looked back. They’re old school. Marry young, make babies, family is everything… etcetera.”

“Wait…” Ronan was studying me, trying to follow. “Your dad had a first marriage?”

“Not a marriage. They never got married, but yes. He was with my mom first. My biological mom, I mean.”

“Joanne’s not your mom?”

“Joanne is definitely my mom. As much as my biological mom is. More so, in some ways. But yes, I have another mom.”

“Huh,” he said, sipping his beer as he absorbed that. “And where is she?”

“She lives in Victoria, too. Alone. She grew up there, and she never got married after her and Dad broke up. I was just a baby when that happened. I don’t even have memories of them together.”

“What’s she like?”

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