Page 32 of The Sweetest Mistake

“I owe you one,” Julia said as she crawled off his lap and walked across the room.

She reached Ava before he’d even gotten up, and carefully lifted her out of the bouncy seat.

Damn, they make a pretty picture, he thought as Julia walked toward him.

“Here’s your daddy,” Julia said, handing Ava off to him.

All his worries were forgotten as he folded his beautiful daughter into his embrace. But when he glanced up at Julia, she was gazing at them wistfully.

Well, not all my worries.

Chapter Nine

The next day, Julia pulled into the parking lot of her dad’s pediatric practice. Parking next to his blue Mercedes, she sighed. As the only child, it had been expected that she would follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor or a nurse, but the mere sight of a needle made her squeamish. Much to her father’s chagrin, she’d decided to study accounting, a much neater profession without all that messy human emotion attached to it. Give her a spreadsheet full of figures, and she was happy.

After obtaining her accounting degree, Julia had reluctantly agreed to begin her career by taking over the accounting tasks at her father’s office. Call it familial duty or, more accurately, guilt. But three years later, when she’d seen the ad in the paper for an accountant at a nearby photography studio, she’d jumped at the chance.

When she’d first told her parents about wanting to quit, they’d been so disappointed that she’d offered to continue working for them on the side. But she’d made it very clear that her first priority was her job with Harper. So far, she’d been able to juggle both jobs and keep both of her employers happy.

Before she and Connor had started dating, she would have looked forward to going there, but not today. She hadn’t spoken much to her parents since the night she and Connor had had dinner with them. It was difficult knowing that her parents were disappointed in her, but she was a grown woman, and she could make her own decisions about who to date.

She suspected that their disappointment had less to do with Connor and more to do with her breakup with Alec. After all, it was her father who had set her up with Alec in the first place. As the son of one of her dad’s colleagues, their families had always been close. At first, Alec had seemed like the perfect match for her as they had a lot in common, including their Asian-American heritage.

But after dating for almost a year, they’d started discussing marriage, and it was then that their relationship had fallen apart. She still remembered the conversation very clearly…

“If we’re going to get married, we should probably discuss some of the big issues that can cause problems, don’t you think?” she’d asked him over dinner one night.

“Like what?” Alec said as he used a fork and spoon to twist some spaghetti noodles into a perfect bite-sized portion. He was nothing if not meticulous.

“You know, like money for example. Who’s going to balance the checkbook? Are we going to have a joint account or keep separate funds? That sort of thing.”

Alec swallowed his bite and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. He was the only person she knew who could eat spaghetti without getting a drop of sauce on him. Thinking of that, Julia glanced down at her blouse and discovered that yes, indeed, there was a bright orange stain right above her left breast. Dipping a napkin in her water glass, she dabbed at the stain and waited for Alec to respond.

But instead of answering her questions, he said, “That’s just going to make it worse. Why don’t you wait until you get home to treat the stain?” And then he looked around the restaurant as if to make sure that nobody was watching them.

While she usually admired his affinity for neatness, sometimes it really bugged the crap out of her—like now. Who cared if she was wiping a stain off her boob? Nobody was paying them the least bit of attention.

“You haven’t answered my questions,” she said, giving up on the stain.

“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. You’re the one with the accounting degree, so you should balance the checkbook. And I don’t see any reason to have separate accounts. What’s mine is yours, and vice versa.” With that, he went back to his spaghetti.

“So, that’s it? Just because I’m an accountant, I have to balance the checkbook?” She wasn’t sure why that bothered her, but it did. Maybe it was because of the haughty way he’d said it, almost like he couldn’t be bothered with such a menial task.

Alec didn’t flinch. He simply swallowed his bite and then set down his fork again before answering. “Would you rather mow the lawn instead?”

“Huh?” She wasn’t sure what the correlation was, but he was about to explain.

“The way I see it, I’ll probably be the one who mows the lawn and takes care of the outside maintenance because that’s what guys do. I wouldn’t ask you to do it because it doesn’t seem like something you’d be interested in. Just like I’m not particularly interested in balancing the checkbook. See? It all works out in the end.”

But Julia wasn’t done. “What if I want to mow the lawn? Are you not going to let me?”

She must have ruffled him, because his brow quirked up a notch on the right side. It wasn’t much, but it was a sign that she’d gotten to him. Why she felt victorious over that, she had no idea.

“Do you want to mow the lawn?” he asked incredulously.

“Not particularly, but that’s beside the point. If I did want to, I should be able to.”

“Fine. If you want to mow the lawn, go ahead, but I’m still not interested in balancing the checkbook.”