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“Jesus.” He grabbed a paper towel to clean it up, then marched the whole mess out to the garbage can. When he came back in, she was tearing open the envelope.
“Oh, these are lovely! You’re going to stay and help me choose, right?”
“No.” He washed his hands. Twice.
“Well. All right.” She only lapsed into silence for a few minutes. “So how in the world did you ever become an engineer?”
“I went to college.”
“I’m sure, but... Well, sweetheart, you weren’t exactly a good student.”
He froze to shoot her a hard look, then threw the paper towel into the trash can. “Are you kidding me?”
“You almost failed ninth grade, remember?”
“Yes,” he ground out. “I definitely remember. That was the year you pulled me out of school four times to go on cross-country wild-goose chases. Remember?”
“Well, we had to. Your father—”
“My father was right here in Teton County, good and dead.”
“I didn’t know that!” she cried. “So many people were telling me so many things!”
“You mean you were harvesting rumors to keep you going. Regardless, after I had to go to summer school in ninth grade, I refused to go on any more trips with you and Shane. Amazingly, I managed to get my grades up by my junior year. Who would have thought that taking a kid to school every day would result in better grades?”
“Alex,” she sighed. “You’ve always been so rigid.”
He laughed. “Sure, Mom. I’ll see you later. Enjoy your paper samples.”
“Wait a minute! I wanted to talk to you about this awful lawsuit! What am I going to do? If that evil little man—”
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“Mom. I’m leaving.”
Amazingly, she didn’t follow him out the door, weeping and wailing. He stepped outside and almost tripped over the tiny cat that wound between his feet. “Hey,” he murmured. She purred against his ankle.
Alex picked her up and nearly winced at how cute she was. Her tiny meow made him shake his head. “You’re not trying to survive with that woman, are you?”
She meowed again, and her purr vibrated through his palm.
“Take it from me. You need to get out of there.”
He glanced back at the house, thinking of the dangerous piles of papers and the ants in the cat food. “Shit,” he muttered. He couldn’t leave this baby here to get hit by a car or eaten by coyotes. He tucked the kitten inside his coat and headed for his bike.
Even without the warm bundle against his chest, he felt silly riding his bike a hundred feet, but he couldn’t leave it there for his mom to see, so he drove to Sophie’s and eased his bike into the narrow space between her garage and the next house.... Just in case he was still here when the sun rose. When he knocked, she answered the door wearing a modest blue dress and a frilled pink apron.
“Are you baking cookies?” he asked.
“Cupcakes, actually. Do you want one?”
“Hell, yeah.”
She led him to the kitchen and popped a little cake in his hand. The white frosting was covered with sparkly pink sugar crystals. “Pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“The cupcake, too.”
