Page 57 of Hold

“Not here!” Jake said at once. “Mom!”

“No, of course not here,” she said. “I’m not that crazy.”

Jake snorted. “You’ve been alone a long time, Mom. Maybe—”

“Okay! Thank you! Not appropriate!” She tried to calm the blush that heated her cheeks. It wasn’t the memory of Gabe that brought it.

If she pushed Gabe away and continued with Liam, Benji might never forgive her. But if she allowed Gabe back in and he let them down again, the boys might pay for it for the rest of their lives.

“Suffice it to say,” she said, still trying for a calm voice, “that I would like to hear him out. And I would like you to hear him out. If he wants a relationship with you, Jake, that can only be a good thing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Dammit, Jake!” she barked in her old tone. “Language!”

“Mom!”

“Dammit!” Benji said.

Shit. I suck at mothering.

“Okay, okay. Just be back here by five o’clock, all right?”

Jake drank the last of the milk from his bowl and went back into the kitchen for a refill. “All right?” she called.

“Fine,” he called back, his voice dead. He had no hope that Gabe would be better now.

It was only stupid Thea’s stupid heart that still betrayed her sometimes, reverting back to those years when she couldn’t throw him out, couldn’t keep away from him when the kids went to Cat’s for the weekend. When he’d looked at her and she’d felt like Superwoman.

That was what really scared her. Not that Benji and Jake would believe that he’d changed, but that she would.

Chapter 17

For this appointment, at least, Gabe kept his word. Since it was dinnertime and Thea couldn’t see herself sitting across the table from him while the kids ate, she cooked for all of them. Jake scowled when he saw the small kitchen table set for four. “We’re feeding him now?”

“What do you want me to do, Jake?” She sighed. “It’s dinnertime. We have to eat. He’ll be here.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Thea raised an eyebrow. Jake’s stomach growled. It did that a lot; he’d gained two inches in height this year.

“Fine,” he said and slouched off. All the progress he’d made in the last few weeks, the confidence he’d gained in working with Liam, had disappeared. His hair was spiky and angry again, his eyes sliding away from hers whenever she looked at him. She didn’t know what he’d done the night before, but the local news website had said someone had cut through the fence on the town baseball field. A pointless, petty act of vandalism she couldn’t believe her son would be involved with. Unfortunately, she could believe it of the friends he’d started hanging out with last year. Friends whose arms she’d probably sent him straight into last night.

Thea fidgeted over whether to put out wineglasses. If she did, it would look as if she were welcoming Gabe to a party. If she didn’t… well, she wanted—needed—the wine, and she couldn’t exactly drink without offering him some. So the wineglasses came out. But she used the oldest napkins she owned.So there, Gabriel.

He knocked on the door at exactly six o’clock. Even if she hadn’t been suspicious of his every move, Thea could have bet he’d stood on the corner of the street until he could arrive at the time he’d said. Still, better than not showing up at all, which she’d half dreaded and half hoped he’d do.

He’d brought flowers. “Gabe, what am I supposed to do with those?” Really? Romantic gesturesnow, after the flood that had gone under their bridge?

“A little water usually does the trick,” he said with a smile. “They’re for you, pet. Just because.”

She took them. They were from the local florist, not the supermarket as they might have been two years ago. Custom-arranged roses and camellias were interspersed with daisies and elderflowers; the effect was of refinement with a hint of meadow.

“They’re lovely,” she had to admit. Gabe beamed. She let him in and through to the kitchen, which was suddenly laughably small.

She’d never noticed before that he was too big for the place. He was about her height, but perhaps it was that he seemed bigger now than then.

The stairs shook before he’d even made it through the doorway, and Benji was throwing himself at his father. “You came!”

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