Page 93 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
“Anything to help you, Lina. You deserve better than all of this. You deserve better than me.”
I wanted to hug him. Hell, I wanted to kiss him too. I wanted to tell him I still cared about him and that he deserved better than the hand he’d been dealt in life, too. A dead wife and a young son. Nobody deserved that.
But I didn’t say anything about it. Instead, I smiled, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek. “Even if this is it for us Cal, I’m grateful.”
“How can you be grateful for this?” he asked softly.
I shrugged one shoulder and opened his front door. A chilly breeze whipped around my legs. “Because I got to experience first love again. With the same man I fell in love with the first time. It’s a little odd, isn’t it?”
“It sounds terribly unlucky to me,” Cal said with a small smile.
“Oh,” I said softly. “I don’t think it’s unlucky at all. Quite the opposite actually.”
37
CALLUM
I didn’t fall asleep until four in the morning. My brain had been running a mile a minute, thinking about Lina and everything she had said before she left last night.
About how she had been lucky to experience first love again.
It hurt and felt good to hear that she had developed feelings for me in the time she spent at my house. I had definitely fallen for her all over again, which was what was making this so damn hard, but I took some comfort in the realization that she had fallen too.
Of course, she had fallen for a man she hadn’t really known. A liar.
I rolled out of bed at eight thirty. It was the latest I had slept in for at least three years. Maybe longer. Maybe since Claire had died. She and I used to sleep in on Sundays.
I went to the bathroom, showered, brushed my teeth, and shaved. I slapped on some aftershave, deodorant, and cologne. Then I got dressed and headed downstairs.
I said good morning to Asher, who was curled up under a blanket on the sofa, watching cartoons with a glass of water. I found my father in the kitchen cooking up a storm.
It smelled like eggs and cheese and bacon.
I breathed in deeply. “Smells good, Dad. What are you making?” I walked around him to peer over his shoulder at a massive pan on the stove.
“A skillet,” he said. “Eggs, hash browns, veggies, bacon, the works.”
“What’s this for?”
“It’s the first day of the new year. I thought I’d come over and prepare a good meal for the three of us to start it off right. Sue me.”
I laughed. “I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing. It smells awesome.” I rubbed my growling stomach. “Really awesome.”
“Coffee is in the pot.”
“Hell yeah,” I said, helping myself to a cup and sitting down at the kitchen table as my father stirred everything in the pan.
My father was serving his concoction within five minutes. He brought out a plate to Asher, who dug into it fiercely, and then he and I sat at the kitchen table, not supremely interested in watching cartoon reruns for the thousandth time.
As we ate, we chatted.
“You slept in a lot later than usual this morning,” he said. “Were you up late?”
“Yes, actually. Lina stopped by.”
My father arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Yeah, it surprised me too. She showed up about twenty minutes after you left. She wanted to know the truth of who we were when we were kids and what happened between us. So I told her everything. Literally everything. About Harvard and about why I lied to her all this time.”
