“She’s lucky she found me. My little thief,” Graham says with a glint in his eyes.
I boop him on the nose. “Of your heart, honey bunny.”
Babs sighs, smiling. “Oh look, they’re so cute.”
Jane takes Londyn from me and makes a scoffing sound. “I didn’t know you were dating anyone.” The subtext is clear: You just broke up with Kian! What the fuck?
The microwave dings, saving me from a reply. Babs has already pulled out the high chair we keep in the kitchen, and Jane moves to get Londyn settled.
“Um, well, you see . . .” My voice is breathless. Sure, I acted my ass off at the Golden Iguana, but this is my family I’m lying to.
“We met in Vegas,” Graham finishes.
Andrew frowns. “But you went to Vegas because of Kian. You were going to a wedding.”
I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Right, of course, then everything happened, and thankfully Graham, er, saw me upset outside the Bellagio. We’d met previously, at some event Kian took me to, and he offered to give me a ride in his Lamborghini.”
“You said you took a taxi to Arizona,” Jane says.
“Hmm, well, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about Graham because . . .” I trail off, and he finishes.
“Because it felt so new, almost too good to be true.”
Jane searches my face, as if looking for a lie. “So you went from one football player to another?”
“I like the way they look?”
Babs grins and gives me a high five. “Same, girl, same!”
Graham picks up the story. “She wanted to get out of town. I’d just gotten my car and wanted a road trip, so . . .”
“We drove to Arizona and stayed at a place called the Golden Iguana. The place was full of scorpions, wasn’t it, honey bunny?” I smile.
He shrugs. “You were so terrified. Poor thing.”
“Well. I killed one.”
He nods sagely, laughter in his eyes. “You’re very brave, darling.”
“Thank you, honey bunny. So are you,” I say adoringly.
“And?” Jane asks, looking at us. “What else?”
Graham smirks, then: “Well, Emmy was crazy about me from the get-go. Apparently, she’d had a huge crush on me for years. I could hardly drive for her wanting to kiss me. We got to the motel, and she sent me out to buy cherry—”
I elbow him as I force a chuckle. “What? Stop that. No need to go into detail. Basically, we went swimming, we checked out the bar, and there was a little gas station where we loaded up on champagne. Not exactly the Four Seasons.”
“This sounds like a Hallmark movie,” Babs says with her hand over her heart.
Jane snorts. “Why do you like those awful things?”
Babs sniffs. “Maybe they’re predictable, but I like happy endings.”
“Not everyone gets a happy ending in real life,” Jane replies.
“Well, Emmy and Graham are,” Babs retorts, clearly miffed that Jane isn’t buying into her happy-ending love affair. “Freddy and I had a wonderful marriage, and he was taken too soon. The same for your gran.”
Jane’s face tightens. Number one, this is a total shock to her, and number two, she’s been down on love ever since her boyfriend dumped her.
“Then there was the guy, remember, darling?” Graham says, ignoring Jane much better than I am. “Fake Clint, your little nickname for him. He tried to hit on you, and I was jealous, and then you got between us and yanked me into the room like a wild woman. I wouldn’t have hurt him too bad. I don’t want to go to prison, after all. What was that word you used? ‘Carnage’? Yes. You didn’t want me to create carnage.”
“You are the jealous type,” I reply sweetly.
“It sounds weird to me,” Jane says, her eyes darting from me to Graham. “Almost as if you’re making it up on the spot. Also, I don’t see how she’d had a crush on you for years when she doesn’t follow sports. Totally not her style.”
Graham blinks. “Believe it or not, truth is stranger than fiction. Someone stole my Lamborghini—”
“Which was fine, because you didn’t need that car,” I say, interrupting him. “It’s a gas guzzler and entirely too expensive. Do you know what other things you could do with that kind of money?”
Graham’s hand slides under my hair to the nape of my neck as he brushes his fingers over my skin. “Oh, but I didn’t care. I just love beautiful things.” He presses his nose to my hair. “Like you,” he whispers.
I swallow.
“So you were there when Kian tracked her phone to the motel?” Andrew asks Graham.
Graham turns to my brother. “Yes. I drove her to the airport.”
“But your car was stolen . . . ,” Andrew says.
I roll my eyes. “What he meant was he called an Uber and rode with me. I mean, it was the plan all along for me to fly home.”
Andrew seems to accept our story as he grasps Graham’s hand and pumps it, then proceeds to tell him how he was thrilled when Graham got traded to New York.
Jane feeds Londyn a bite of mac and cheese. Londyn, who’s been darting her eyes from one person to the next and is probably understanding all of it because she’s a little genius, grabs the spoon to do it herself, smearing pasta all over her face.
I laugh at her, and she grins and slaps the high chair.
But Jane isn’t distracted. “So basically, you reconnected in Vegas, then went to a random motel in the desert, had an argument with some man named Clint, and now you’re engaged? Sorry. It’s nice to meet you, Graham, but Emmy, this is not normal for you.”
Andrews makes a humming noise. “Emmy can be odd.”
“What? Give me an example,” I say. “And remember, I’ve seen you bite your own toenails as a toddler.”
“Gross,” Babs says as she makes a gagging noise. “I can find you a self-help book for that.”
“I don’t do it now!” He points at me. “Emmy only eats broccoli when it’s flat. You smash it with your fork until it’s like a pancake, then stick it in your mouth. Same for cauliflower and potatoes. It takes you an hour to eat.”
“They tickle the top of my mouth,” I say as I nudge my head at Jane. “Jane puts pepper on her ice cream.” I direct my eyes at Andrew. “I have a list of weird stuff you did as a kid, so shut it.”
“Like what?” he asks.
Jane smirks. “Oh, you’ve done it now, Tiny. Ma never forgets.”
“For one, you ate toilet paper like it was chocolate.”
“It was clean, at least,” he mutters.
“Two, you also ate Bubbles the goldfish. You put your little hand in the fishbowl and gulped him down before I could stop you.”
Jane gasps. “You told me Bubbles was different because he lost weight!”
I sigh. “No, I just bought a new fish for you, Jane.”
She shakes her head. “And you never told me?”
“Sorry. I replaced Bubbles every three months like clockwork because Andrew was addicted to eating raw fish. Shall I continue? There’s the time you stripped down and ran around naked in the children’s section of the store—”