Page 56 of Brenna, Brat

“I meant the dancing with you,” he specified. “You’re very smooth.”

“You’re not bad, yourself.”

“When’s the next wedding so that we can take another spin?”

“All we have left in my family are Patrick, Grace, and me. It doesn’t look good for a wedding anytime soon. How about Carrington?”

“No, there’s nothing happening there. She hasn’t had a boyfriend in a while, and she won’t meet anyone now that she won’t leave her house. We’ll have to do something about it.”

“You mean, we’ll have to get her out?” I suggested. “Or do you mean that we’ll have find other opportunities to dance, like joining a ballroom club?”

“I’m going to think about it,” he answered enigmatically. “It’s late. Are you feeling any sleepier?”

“No.”

“Ok, I’m going to explain mortgage-backed securities. We’ll start with Ginnie Mae, and that should knock you out,” he said, and he was correct about that. He went on for a while and my eyelids gradually got heavy.

Then, just as I fell asleep, I felt his hand on my back like when we’d been dancing. I thought about being in his arms and how it felt right. It felt right to be with him at this moment.

I was going to look into a ballroom club, too. There had to be a way to keep this going.

Chapter 12

“Hm.” My mother sniffed as she plated the cookies, but it wasn’t because they smelled so delicious. It was a sniff of displeasure, and she explained why. “I’m not very impressed with someone who sends a picture of her…hoo-ha.”

Her hoo-ha? Thank God that Nicola had handled sex-ed in our house. “Can we talk about something else?” I requested.

They both ignored me. “I would have been very angry if any of my daughters had shown off a private image like that,” she went on, but her anger would have been the least of our problems if we’d shared pictures of our hoo-has with boys. We wouldn’t have lived, because Nic would have killed us.

“I wouldn’t say that she sounds like a very nice girl. Not the one for you,” Mom recommended.

“I agree.” Dion nodded. “I’m not going to respond and say anything about that picture, Jackie. I’ll leave her on read.”

“That’s a good decision,” she approved, and he smiled.

“I’m a new man now,” he declared, and he might have been right. In the month and a half that he’d been living with my mother, he hadn’t been on his usual prowl for companionship—which was her more polite way of saying that he wasn’t screwing every woman who walked by. “Can I have a cookie?”

“You may, if you say the magic word,” my mom told him.

In this case, the magic word didn’t have anything to do with Beckett’s phrases about spending loads of money or threatening landlords. “Please?” Dion said, and she nodded.

“One for each of you,” she told us. My former coworker eagerly reached for his. He had texted and told me to come over, saying that he had something important to talk about. No, he refused to write it—I had to come. So here I was, eating cookies as Mom gave him manners lessons? Yes, they were chocolate chip, and yes, he needed the instruction, but…

“Would you like some milk?” she asked.

“Yes, please!” He sat up straight and nodded, and this was just too weird.

“Dion, what’s going on?” I asked as my mother got him his drink. “Why did you need to talk to me so badly and why couldn’t you just text me?”

But he shook his head and waited until we were alone, and his landlord/my parent/his new bestie had headed to her meditation room, the former home office. There were severalloud thumping sounds and then what sounded like a crash, and I wondered what that noise had to do with meditation.

He paid no attention. “Alecta’s gone,” he announced to me, and then asked, “Do you think Mom would care if I had another cookie?”

“She’s not your mom,” I reminded him, “and I already knew that about Alecta.”

“What?You knew?”

I nodded. “She called me from the airport on her way to Laos.”

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