Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3)

Sean watched Emma take the first sip of her coffee and, when she didn’t shudder or make faces, he figured he’d done okay. He also noticed, as Cat started hauling things out of the refrigerator, that Emma wasn’t making eye contact with him.

He shouldn’t have walked out because now the awkwardness was going to fester until she felt a need to talk about it. He could have laughed it off as a morning wood, making it clear it had nothing to do with her. It would have been a lie, of course. He’d been up for several hours and it most definitely had something to do with her. But she might have bought it and not had to talk about it.

The kitchen felt claustrophobic all of a sudden, what with the two women he barely knew and the elephant in the room, so he took his coffee and muttered about catching the morning news. He turned on the TV in the living room and sank onto the couch with a sigh of relief. It would take a few minutes to make the French toast, so he had a few minutes of normal.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” It was Emma, of course, and there went his normal.

He sighed and moved over on the couch. “Knock yourself out.”

She sat down, far enough away so none of their body parts touched. “I get the whole guy thing. Morning…you know, and I don’t want this to be weird.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Okay.” She took a sip of her coffee, then wrapped both hands around the mug. “We’ll probably have more moments like this if we’re going to live together for a month. Probably best to just laugh them off.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Actually, when a guy’s standing in front of you, fully hard and wearing nothing but a towel, laughing might not be the best way to handle it.”

“True.” Her cheeks turned a pretty shade of pink and she laughed softly. “If we were in a movie, the towel would have fallen off. Could’ve been worse.”

“With my luck, I’m surprised it didn’t.”

“Breakfast,” Cat called from the kitchen. They both stood and Sean hoped this would be the last time they had to discuss his erections.

“Make sure you fill up,” Emma told him as they went toward the kitchen. “We’ll be planting trees today and that’ll take the piss out of you.”

Physical exhaustion? He was looking forward to it. Desperately.





Chapter Eight




Emma didn’t want her grandmother to ever leave. Gram had cut some chicken breasts into pieces and rolled them in a bowl of some kind of spices, then skewered them with a stick. A few minutes on the grill and Emma was in heaven.

It couldn’t be too hard, she thought. Of course, the last time she’d tried to cook something as simple as burgers on the grill, flames had started shooting out the side and she’d ended up with blackened lumps with raw meat in the middle even her grandfather couldn’t choke down. But this was chicken on a stick. How hard could it be?

“This is delicious, Cat,” Sean said, licking spices off his fingers in a way that made Emma’s spine tingle. “Aunt Mary makes something like it, but the spices don’t pack quite as much of a punch.”

“I can’t wait to meet her on Saturday. From all that you’ve said, she’s quite a woman.”

Emma’s spine stopped tingling and she picked up another skewer of chicken. She didn’t even want to think about how stressful Saturday was going to be, what with everybody having to be careful and watch every single word they said. And, regardless of what Sean had told her, she wasn’t sure Mrs. Kowalski would back them up when the time finally came.

“She’s looking forward to meeting you, too,” he said. “And Emma’s been so busy they haven’t seen her in a while.”

No, she wasn’t looking forward to seeing them Saturday. Lisa, yes. But it was going to be hard to look Mrs. Kowalski in the eye, no matter how many times Sean told her it would be okay.

“I rented a movie while I was in town today,” Gram said. “Some action movie the girl said was very good.”

Emma was all for a relaxing movie. Something mindless that she could lose herself in and stop obsessing about her body language and every word she said. A mental break was just what she needed.

She felt differently about the movie plan an hour later when Gram sat in the armchair and set her knitting basket at her feet, leaving the couch for her and Sean.

Crap. They couldn’t very well sit at opposite ends of the damn thing. A happy couple would snuggle, maybe sneaking a quick kiss here and there when they thought Gram wasn’t looking. Two hours of up close and personal with Sean Kowalski was about as far from relaxing as she could get.

He got there first, sitting in one corner and propping his feet on the coffee table. Putting in the DVD and getting it ready to play bought Emma a couple of minutes, but then she had to walk to the couch. He seemed to realize at the last second she wasn’t going to sit on the far end and, after glancing at Gram, he lifted his arm and rested it on the back of the couch.

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