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“It’s okay, Honey, nothing bad is going to happen. I just want to understand. Why didn’t you want to meet my family?”

“Seriously, Ryker, let go of my foot. I need to sit up. I was totally out of line on how I ghosted you, and I came here to explain, and you rubbing my feet is making it all confusing.”

“Am I hurting you?” he asked gently. “Or does it feel good?”

“It feels good,” she admitted. “But….”

“But what, Honey?”

“But I don’t want you to be nice to me when I wasn’t nice to you. I want to apologize and tell you how sorry I am.”

He clasped both of her feet in his hands, caressing them. “And you just did. I accept your apology. See how easy that was?”

She looked at his bright blue eyes and realized he meant it. He was totally sincere. Every moment of her obsessing and worrying about him not liking her anymore was over. He’d accepted her apology like it was nothing.

“I’m really, really sorry. Every time you called or texted I felt worse and worse. By the time you showed up at the restaurant, I totally understood why you were there to give me a hard time. I deserved it.”

His hands stopped moving on her feet. “Wait a minute, did you think I was making fun of you? Honey, you have it all wrong. I was just nervous and said the first thing that came to me. You’re just lucky I didn’t say ‘Hey, good looking, Whatcha got cooking?’”

“You weren’t there because you were mad and making a point?”

Ryker pulled her by her feet, and soon her booty was on his lap. “Never. I would never do something like that to you. Honey, even if we were in our worst fight, I don’t play that way. I won’t go out of my way to make you feel bad. That’s not how I roll.”

“It’s not?” she whispered.

“No,” he whispered back as he stroked her hair away from her face.

She let out a long sigh, then rested her cheek against his chest. “Do you know how much better I feel?”

“I can imagine. So are we good now?”

She pushed away so she could look up into his face. “Yeah, I understand now. But Ryker, let’s face it, you want a relationship with me, and doesn’t that huge misunderstanding prove just what a hot mess I am?”

“We all are.”

Amy gulped. “You were right when you guessed that I didn’t want to come and meet your mom. She sounds fabulous. The only reason I can handle Lark’s mom is because she was there in the thick of things during some of my mom’s shit. She knows where I come from, and how I was raised, and somehow she doesn’t hold it against me. I still can’t believe that knowing all of it, she still wanted to invest with me, but she did.”

Ryker started stroking his fingers in lazy circles on her back. “Tell me more.”

“You can’t possibly know how messed up my life is. I have a temporary restraining order against my mother. Who has that? Do you know why?”

“Tell me, Honey,” he coaxed. He breathed the words into the curls on the top of her head.

Amy pulled back and pushed up the sleeve of her dress. “See this? That’s my mom. Last year she cut me. Twenty-seven stitches. She wanted cash for drugs. Booze. Both. Who in the hell knows.”

Ryker slid his hand up her forearm until their palms were pressed together, then he twined their fingers together and brought her arm up to his lips. For long moments he lavished kisses against the scar.

“Baby, I can’t possibly imagine. I am so sorry.”

“And after that? After I get the temporary restraining order, what does she do? She keeps coming to my apartment drunk or high in the middle of the night, pounding on my door, screaming at me, demanding that I give her money. She says I owe it to her for everything she’s done for me. She calls me all kinds of foul and filth.”

She swiped at the tears tickling her chin.

“What happened when the cops arrived?”

“Oh, she knew how things worked. She’d get out of there before the cops got there, and she didn’t have a permanent address. God knew who she was sleeping with, probably her dealer. This has been happening well before I got the TRO. I’ve moved four times in four years, each place worse because I wouldn’t get a good reference from the last landlord.”

Ryker stopped the massage. “Fuck, Amy, where are you living now?” he demanded to know.