“Have a seat, loves,” she says innocently. “Food’s getting cold.”
??` ?? ?´?
“SO, NIALL, MOLLYtells me you’re the captain of the Morrigal team, yeah?”
I glance at Molly—who’s talking to Claire and avoiding my gaze—then back at her father. Dinner has been warm, but mostly I’ve just been letting Mam talk Molly’s parents’ ears off and flying under the radar.
“Uh, yeah. Yes, sir. I am.”
I’m trying to remember the crash course Molly’d given me about her father yesterday on the car ride home. I know that he’s a doctor of a team in New York, she told me his last name was Adami (her and her sisters’ have her mom’s last name), and some other stuff I’m kinda blanking on at the moment.
“Molly’s told me lots about you,” he says, and I can’t really tell if his smile is genuine or if it’s some sort of trap.
I wonder wildly what exactly “a lot” constitutes. The good? The bad? The tension, the ignoring, the fighting, the drinking problem, the shifting?
Best not to mention any of it.
Dinner drags on, the conversation flowing in fits and starts. I spend the vast majority of my time covertly glancing at Molly. I can’t help myself, it’s like a magnetic pull. Every time she reaches for her drink or pushes those little strands of loose hair behind her ear, my eyes track the movement.
And the maddening part is, I keep catching her doing the exact same thing. She looks up from under her eyelashes, her gaze snapping to my hands, or my face, and the second our eyes meet, she looks away. It’s a mutual silent game of chicken, and it’s driving me mental. I swear if we were closer, we’d be kicking feet under the table.
Eventually, dinner is reduced to greasy remnants, and Mam is announcing it’s time for dessert—a massive, triple-chocolate cake Claire had insisted she had to bake this morning, which she did while I was with Comet at the groomers.
Molly’s parents follow her over to the kitchen side of the room to get the cake from the fridge. Lorraine asks for at least three pieces, and eventually her parents cut her off sweets and Claire takes her upstairs to make bracelets or something.
“Right,” Luca announces, dropping his crumpled napkin onto his empty dessert plate and scraping back his chair—one of the ones from the Biggs’ house. “That was phenomenal, but if I eat another bite, I’ll need to be rolled out to the car. Let’s get these dishes cleared.”
“Oh, nonsense, Luca,” Ma protests immediately. “Sit, sit, relax. You’re our guest. Niall and JJ can do the cleaning up—”
“I insist,” Luca says smoothly, already gathering plates. He shoots me a look from across the table. “In fact, Niall, why don’t you give me a hand in the kitchen? Let the ladies relax. It’s what us men are for, right?”
My stomach drops straight through the floorboards and into the foundation of the house. “Uh. Yeah. Right.”
“What am I gonna do?” I hear JJ ask. “Sit here?”
I hear Molly and my mother both snap, “Yes!”
I stand up so fast my chair squeaks violently against the hardwood. I quickly grab my plate, JJ’s and Molly’s, pointedly refusing to look at her as I follow her father’s back over to the sink while Mam leads everyone else to the sitting room for tea. For plausible deniability, I suppose, when Luca Adami murders me for shifting his daughter.
Luca sets his tower of plates on the counter with a heavy clatter, and then turns on the tap. He rolls up the sleeves of his expensive looking navy jumper up his thick foreheads. “You dry, I’ll wash.”
“Yes, sir,” I mutter, quickly grabbing a striped tea towel off the oven handle and stepping up beside him.
“So,” Luca finally says, after a few dishes worth of silence. “You seem like a good kid. Molly says you take her to schoolevery morning, that you keep all the other boys’ in line at practice and such. All that good stuff, right?”
“I try to, yeah,” I say, my voice sounding painfully thin and reedy to my own ears. I aggressively dry the plate he hands me, nearly rubbing the floral pattern off the porcelain.
“Good,” Luca nods slowly. “I like that. Nice to hear... Had a very interesting Thursday afternoon then, I heard?”
He holds onto the handle of the fork he’s handing me for just a second too long before letting it go so I can dry it. “Right. That. Sir.”
“Yeah.That.” He goes back to scrubbing. “Look, Niall, I’m a realist. You’re a teenage boy and you seem to like my daughter. Things happen. I’m no idiot.”
He shuts off the tap with a sharp twist, plunging the small kitchen into silence. He leans back against the counter, crossing his damp arms over his chest, staring down at me. He’s got a couple inches on me height wise.
“But here's the reality,” Luca continues, his voice hardening into stone. “Molly has been through a massive amount of transition lately. She's in a new country, a new school, trying to build a new life from the ground up. She’s incredibly focused on her soccer. She has scouts looking at her. She has a real future here, and she’s trying to keep her head on straight despite everything else. So, I'm going to make this very simple for you. If you’re going to be a distraction in her life... you need to be a good distraction. You understand what I’m saying to you, son?”
I meet his gaze, forcing my spine straight, refusing to look away or cower. “I care about her, Mr. Lockhart. Adami.”
