“Let me just give you a head’s up about Helen Morris. If you think your mother’s difficult? Think a hundred times as difficult minus the orgies and ability to see an invisible arrow. She doesn’t need to turn you into a cow to make you pray for death.”
“Aw. She doesn’t look so bad. She’s the size of a minute, Quinn,” he said on an affable smile, flashing his toothpaste-commercial white teeth.
“Ah, but her opinion’s the size of the population of China.”
He winked, all charming and easygoing. “There isn’t a woman on the face of the planet I can’t win over. Don’t worry.”
Quinn leaned into him, despite her better judgment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was hot. Indeed, he was probably a real lady killer. But he was in for a big whack to his self-esteem with her mother.
“Listen, if you want your ego to remain healthy, run. Run far, run fast, because if anyone can trash your record, it’s Helen.”
She knew well how hard her mother could be on a person’s self-esteem, how critical, how utterly infuriating—all part of the reason she’d spent so much of her childhood and teen years buried in books.
He rested a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze, shooting her another one-hundred watt smile. “Trust me. I got this.”
Khristos yanked the door shut to her apartment and leaned against it with a shudder as Nina skipped up the steps in front of them to survey the street.
Quinn gave him the I-told-you-so look. “I warned.”
“And I was an idiot not to heed. Jesus, she’s brutal—a warrior disguised in pink mom jeans and a turtleneck with sheep on it. She looks so innocent. Who’da thunk a woman the size of a teacup poodle could fit so much venom in that small a space?”
She pulled her gloves on and laughed. “I tried to tell you. I know you have your Casanova on level ten, but my mother’s immune to all men. It doesn’t matter how good-looking, how smart, how anything, she wants nothing to do with them.”
Khristos held out his arm, offering it to her once they’d made their way up the stairs when Nina gave them the thumbs-up. “You’re not kidding. I pulled out all the stops, too. Every last one. Centuries worth of tried-and-true methods all hacked to pieces by a gladiator.”
Quinn giggled as she had to decide whether taking his arm was healthy for her state of mind. “I gotta give it to you. That was a smooth move, chatting her up about the rare Mauritius kestrel. How do you know so much about birds? How did you know she even liked birds?”
Khristos wiggled an eyebrow. “I saw a text from her to someone named Maude about their Bird Enthusiasts Club meeting next week. And then I googled so fast, I almost broke a finger.”
She patted his arm as they strolled down the sidewalk with Nina trailing behind them. “Ah, Maude. The only friend my mother has. You still get an A for effort. That bit about how the sheep on her turtleneck accented her eyes just might’ve worked if you hadn’t tried to take it to the next level.”
Khristos grimaced. “Yeahhh. I should have known to stop at sheep and not get carried away with the whole pink-galoshes thing.”
“But you were right—they did match her lipstick.”
Nina pushed her way between them and cackled. “Your mom is like a fucking ray of GD sunshine. Christ, she beat player here’s ass down like she was the hammer and he was a nail. That crap about his cheekbones being the sharpest thing he owns was the shit.”
Now Quinn winced. Her mother had gone for Khristos’s jugular from the moment he’d sat down next to her. Every word out of his mouth, she’d made a point of shooting down like she was the supersonic death ray and he was the army of supervillains.
She’d whipped him with her words while she’d poked and prodded Marty and Wanda about their relationship to Quinn—and all during the course of just one meal that had lasted no more than thirty minutes.
She’d held her breath the entire time as Marty explained they were having a book club sleepover to console Quinn after her breakup with Igor.
Which then sent her mother off on another tangent about the unreliability of men and somehow kept her so occupied, she didn’t seem to notice Quinn’s breasts.
Breasts she’d taken great pains to wrap an Ace bandage around to flatten them out. She’d also borrowed one of Khristos’s sweaters, at least three sizes too big for her, in order to camouflage them.
Her lightly tinted sunglasses had mostly kept her eyes hidden, heavier than usual makeup had covered her bruised face, and she hadn’t even had to explain away her glittery skin due to her mother’s laser focus on angry rants about that anus-head Igor.
“I can’t even believe you told her you were gay.”
Khristos chuckled. “Are you kidding me? I’d have told her I was the Zodiac Killer if it meant she’d sheathe those claws.”