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The corners of his lips twitched, as if he were laughing at a private joke.
Landon rose from the bench and motioned with his head toward the house. “By all means, go ahead and... distract me.”
The way he said it, in a lower, huskier tone, made it sound dirty. I parted my lips, exhaling. Was Landon flirting with me? Or was my mind playing tricks on me because I’d been perving at him since he arrived? That look he gave me earlier, though... I thought he’d been doing some perving too. In any case, the smart course of action was to remain outside, work through lunch.
Instead, I wanted to follow him inside. Everything about him beckoned to me; the pull I felt toward him was almost magnetic.
“You win. What are you feeding me?” I asked.
“Something delicious.”
He wasn’t lying. We ate heated-up roast beef leftovers at the kitchen table, and it was the best thing I’d eaten in a while. The meat was tender, and I thought I tasted a hint of cinnamon in the gravy. I’d somehow managed to get gravy on my fingers too.
“Val is an excellent cook,” I exclaimed.
“Always has been. She picked up the best tricks from Mom.”
“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been, raising your brothers and sisters.”
“It wasn’t easy. We knew how to be their oldest siblings, but parenting them was an entirely different thing. You should’ve seen Val and me giving them an earful when we caught them sneaking out of the house. Guess who’d taught them the trick?” He pointed with both thumbs at himself, laughing.
“Did you ever regret giving up college and soccer? I think you were at Harvard, right? Val mentioned it once.”
“Yes, it was Harvard. I never regretted it. I was needed here,” he said simply, and I believed him. Nothing in his body language contradicted his words. I admired him for not shunning responsibility and commitment.
“How did you manage financially?” I asked.
“Val and I ran Dad’s pub for a couple of years while we took classes at a local college. We gave it up as soon as we got decent job offers. We wanted to keep it because it reminded us of our parents, but it wasn’t feasible. Dad opened it when he came over from Ireland,” he said with a melancholy smile.
“Wait, are you lot Irish?”
“Half Irish. The Connor part didn’t tip you off?”
“Not really. Neither of you has that Irish brogue.”
Thank God he didn’t. One thing Landon didn’t need was more help being sexy as hell, and the brogue was hot.
“That we don’t. But we did inherit a solid work ethic, an interminable list of oddball sayings my dad insisted were Irish—though I’ve never found proof of that—and a tradition for Friday night dinners. Dad always told us he got together with h
is folks every Friday before moving across the ocean, and we adopted that tradition. My siblings get together every week. I was part of it before moving to San Jose.” The melancholy was mirrored in his eyes.
“And you miss it.”
“A lot. I think coming here reminded me just how much. But enough about me. Tell me about your business,” Landon said. “Why landscaping?”
“I studied architecture, but after I got my degree, I realized that I like transforming outdoor spaces. So I branched into landscaping, and also took courses about plants and flowers. I mostly work on people’s personal yards. I like putting together beautiful spaces where they can come home and relax, you know?”
Landon had drawn his chair nearer to mine, and our thighs were touching under the table, which sent my senses into a tailspin.
“That’s great thinking. Everyone needs a place to disconnect and recharge.”
“Exactly. And I love it when I have a huge space to work with, like here. There’s so much I can do. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and since my parents knew we wouldn’t permanently live there, we rented small spaces. During summer holidays, we traveled in a trailer. It was very claustrophobic, and the outdoor space was always a parking lot.”
“Why were you moving around?”
“My parents traveled to music gigs across the country, and there was no one they could leave me and my sister with.” That nomadic existence had been exhausting. It had been hard to strike any meaningful relationships at school since we moved so often.
“Do they live in LA now?”
