Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54028 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54028 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 270(@200wpm)___ 216(@250wpm)___ 180(@300wpm)
I grinned, mostly happy we could add a third beverage to the list.
“How is she doing?” Jack asked next, and he looked a little concerned. “She must be exhausted after a week with the whole family.”
The sound of heels clicking against the floorboards let me know Samantha was joining us too.
“She’ll bounce back fast,” I said confidently. “It’s mostly the travel that unsettles her.”
“I’ve barely seen her all week,” Samantha said, amused. “If she wasn’t painting or making snow angels with Claire, she was reading and playing Go Fish with Peter.”
Good, I was glad she’d had fun. Peter was all right too. He and I had never been the best of friends, but he liked Lily. Around her, he wasn’t such a curmudgeon all the time.
“Have you stayed with Franklin your entire trip, dear?” Samantha asked Jack.
He shook his head. “Not in the beginning, but then we had dinner here one night, and he said it was pointless for me to return to my hotel. He could use a better setup for guests in his study, though.” He shot me a smirk.
Smooth.
I grinned wryly and placed Lily’s snack in the microwave for thirty seconds. Plain toast with an abundance of cheese—and oregano ground so finely that she couldn’t “taste the leaves.”
A pinch of guilt seeped through me when I thought about the future and how Samantha would react one day. But I had to remind myself that we weren’t doing anything wrong, in that sense. I’d never once betrayed her. We’d fallen out of love and been a married couple on autopilot for years before I’d found the courage and energy to ask for a divorce.
“Well, I should get going,” Samantha said. “Are you bringing Lily home later, or…?”
Lily was home. And no, I wasn’t. But I was glad she was prepared.
“She said she wanted to stay,” I answered. “I think she’s too tired to go back and forth today.”
She inclined her head. “I figured. You might as well keep her tomorrow too. I don’t see a reason for her to be with me for just one day.”
And that was where we couldn’t be more different. Putting Lily’s comfort aside, I’d take every hour with her I could.
“Fair enough.” I took out the plate from the microwave again.
Samantha turned to Jack with a much brighter smile. “We’ll see each other again soon. Let’s have dinner when you get back from New York.”
“Right, yeah, we’ll find a day,” he said.
Oh, how I was not attending that dinner.
While Jack accompanied Samantha to the door, I cut Lily’s melted cheese extravaganza into little pieces, then put the plate on a tray with a fork and a ginger ale with a straw in it.
By the time I’d given Lily her snack—with the promise to check in fifteen minutes from now—Jack had thrown himself onto the couch and switched on the news.
It was such an insignificant scene, and yet it warmed my heart. He was comfortable here in my home, and he wanted to be close to me.
“Come sit, gorgeous.”
I smiled and joined him.
“That’s gonna be an epic shitshow one day,” he commented.
“Don’t make me overthink.” I blew out a breath, torn between chuckling and groaning at our situation. “For months now, I thought I was leaving the Dune family. Not making my way back using another route.”
He laughed through his nose and flipped the channel from CNN to BBC. “If only you could resist my tight route.”
I grinned and kissed his shoulder. “If only.”
A few hours later, I was served with a reminder of why I would probably never be able to resist the Jack “route.” Lily had woken up from a two-hour nap, tired but in high spirits, and after a tight two-Mississippi-long hug with her Jack Attack, she’d climbed up on one of the stools at the kitchen island, PJs on, teddy bear in her grasp, and she’d settled in to enjoy the show of Jack and me trying to cook dinner.
Emphasis on trying. This recipe was useless.
“Is this finely chopped?” I asked, blinking past the sting in my eyes. “God, I hate onions.”
Not eating them, just handling them.
“Aww, Franklin’s crying.” Jack inspected the onions. “I don’t know. They look fine and chopped to me.”
Lily laughed. “The onions do that, Daddy. They make it sting. You look so silly.”
“Thank you, darling,” I drawled.
“What the hell is a dollop?” Jack asked, frustrated. “Best in my class in algebra, calculus, and economics—you know what I never ran across? A freakin’ dollop.”
Why couldn’t we just order in? I knew exactly which places accommodated for Lily’s needs.
“Google it,” I said, eyeing the stove. “After you’ve stirred the chicken. I don’t think it should look that way.”
He huffed and dropped the dish towel he’d been holding. “I need music first. Lily bug, you wanna help me pick?”
He shouldn’t have done that.