“Need to wear that dress when I can take it off.”
Wet flooded between my legs and I latched onto the edge of the door with my hand in order to remain standing.
“Yeah, baby?” he prompted.
“Yeah, Mickey,” I replied breathily.
He gave me my favorite grin of his, the one filled with heat and promise, before he turned away, lifting a hand in a short wave.
I lifted mine back before I looked to the truck and waved at Cillian.
He returned it.
Unsteadily, I closed and locked the door.
Moving into my dark house, I walked to the kitchen and turned on the pendant lights.
I looked across the space I created that was all me and I did it feeling something I’d never experienced feeling.
Light and airy, like I was floating above the ground and didn’t have my feet solidly under me.
It should have felt scary.
It was exhilarating.
The weight of my life had been lifted. The weight of my upbringing. The weight of the mess I’d made of my family.
All was not right in my world, but I’d discovered me and found that I’d done something right along the way.
I’d built a support network, new and old, of people who cared about me and were generous enough to take care of me, listen to me, understand me. And I was able to build this because I was me.
And that said everything. Everything about me.
Not the me I wanted to be.
The me who had always been.
Not to mention I was walking on air because Mickey liked my dress.
As in, really.
Chapter Fifteen
Soaring
“Marriage counselling?” I asked my phone sitting on the kitchen counter beside where I was working.
Lawr was on the other end and we were talking on speaker so I could continue to make my chocolate chip cookie sandwiches stuck together with chocolate buttercream frosting. A double delight. A real winner. And something I was making because the next day was Mrs. McMurphy’s ninetieth birthday, and she might think I was a Nazi, but I was going to be a Nazi bringing her birthday treats.
“Marriage counselling,” Lawr confirmed.
I slathered buttercream frosting on the back of a cookie and asked, “Are you crazy?”
“No,” Lawr replied with a smile in his voice.
“Okay, you think that then I’ll ask, is it working?”
“I’ve learned she doesn’t mind my working hours because, in three sessions, she hasn’t mentioned them. However, it annoys her that I sometimes don’t hit the laundry basket with my dirty socks. This is something I can’t imagine why it would be annoying since she has a woman come in twice a week who cleans and does laundry so she doesn’t even touch my socks. However, now I make certain I hit the basket with my socks.”
I knew long hours. My ex-husband had worked them too. I hated it but he loved his job, had wanted to be a neurosurgeon since his uncle, who also was one, allowed him to stand in an observation room and watch a surgery when Conrad was sixteen.
Alas, now I knew that those long hours weren’t all about patients.
I’d also had a cleaning lady and Conrad hadn’t even bothered to throw his clothes anywhere near the hamper. I didn’t really care. He worked. I didn’t. I had the time to gather clothes and dump them in a hamper.
If we had marriage counselling, I might mention the work hours…tentatively.
I wouldn’t give a fig about the laundry.
“Lawrie—” I started.
“It’s got to be done,” he told me.
I scrunched the top cookie on and set them aside, asking, “Why?”
“Because I have to tell myself, and my sons, that I did all I could do.”
I shut my mouth but I did it fuming.
He was correct. He should do that so he could live with whatever came of this, but also so his boys could see him giving it one last go with their mother before hopefully he made the decision to leave his wife and find some happy.
But I hated the idea of whatever that witch would put him through in the meantime, including during those sessions.
I mean socks?
Really?
“So, if you’re committed to this, then I take it Thanksgiving is out,” I remarked, irately snatching up another cookie.
“I talked with Mariel about going. We’re considering it.”
I threw up a little in my mouth at the thought of the Wicked Witch of Santa Barbara tainting my whimsical, beachy guest bedroom with her malevolence.
When I powered past that, I declared, “If she’s coming, I’m inviting Robin. Her ex has her kids this Thanksgiving. She’d be all over it.”
“MeeMee,” Lawr stated irritably.
“Mercer and Hart love Robin,” I reminded him, and they did. My nephews thought she was a hoot.
“She drives Mariel up the wall,” he reminded me.
“Of course she does, due to all the sexual tension that’s crackling between her husband and a beautiful, vital woman who’s learned how it feels to have a jerk break her heart so she’ll know it’s worth any effort needed to make a good man happy.”