“I told him you’re a Dallas fan,” I teased as I pulled a vase from the cupboard beside the fridge and moved to the sink to fill it.
“My condolences,” Luca joked.
“Not anymore,” she said. “He’s my second favorite.”
“Since when?” I asked, unwrapping the flowers to place them in water.
She gestured toward Luca with her thumb. “Since this one came along and made my daughter so happy.”
I cleared my throat, my cheeks burning.
She folded her arms over her chest, inspecting Luca through squinted eyes. “Plus, he looks like he could be one of thoseTwilightvampire guys if they’d lived a little longer before they were bitten.”
Luca burst into laughter. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it, Ms. James? Wait…is it James?” His eyes went wide with panic.
My mom cringed. “It is, but please call me Laurel. Ms. James makes me feel like I’m one bad trip away from a Life Alert bracelet, and I’m nowhere near that.”
Luca grinned. “Well, then. I like your apron,Laurel.”
“Thank you,” she said, grabbing her hand-knitted potholders and taking the lasagna out of the oven. “It’s only a suggestion, but please be advised that if you don’t at least pretend to love my cooking, I will guilt-trip you about it for the foreseeable future.”
“It’s true,” I sang, fiddling with the blooms in the vase. “But you’re in luck because she’s actually a pretty good cook. Unless she tries to make Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon, in which case, run.”
“Hey! It wasn’tthatbad.” She plopped the lasagna on some hot pads, then pulled out the garlic bread and nudged the stove closed with her hip.
“Maybe if you had the jaw of a werewolf or wolverine,” I said, placing the flowers at the center of the already set table in the connecting dining room. “Let’s just say it wasverywell done.”
“Kenz definitely didn’t get her cooking skills from me, but I’m not half bad.” She plunked the garlic rolls in the bread basket waiting on the counter. “And what I can’t make, this prodigy daughter of mine can figure out.”
“Howdidyou get started cooking, anyway?” Luca asked me.
“That was all Brennan,” my mom answered, leaning against the counter.
I nodded. “He used to cook a lot. He made dinner most nights when we were younger.”
“I was a single mom, and I have fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition. Being on your own with two kids is already a job in and of itself, but then you factor in something like that…It was a lot. But I always wanted my children to have home-cooked meals.” My mom gave him a wistful smile. “Brennan saw how tired I was and wanted to help, so he took it upon himself to learn how to cook.”
I couldn’t help but laugh as I thought about his early kitchen experiments.
“Surprisingly, we only had to call the fire department once,” I said. “He got pretty good. By the time he was ten, he’d started making things like meatloaf and beef Stroganoff.”
“Then he started teaching McKenzie, and it became a team effort,” my mom added. “I’d find the two of them joking around in the kitchen while they made supper. Coming home to a meal was a treat, but nothing compared to hearing their laughter when I walked through the door.”
Her eyes turned misty as she held my gaze, and a lump formed in my throat before Luca’s arm curled around my shoulders.
“I’d love to hear more about Brennan,” he said softly. “About him and McKenzie both as kids.”
My mother beamed as though Luca had just presented her a million dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas.
“I’ll go get the photo albums,” she said, removing her apron and placing it on the hook inside the pantry.
Luca was about to get a front row seat to every single awkward moment of my life from birth, but after seeing how happy it made my mom, I couldn’t bring myself to mind.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“What for?” he asked.
Before I could answer, my mother returned with a stack of five albums.
