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“Yes! Those jeans need to be burnt. Tonight. Now. This very fucking minute.” I pause. “Actually, wait. Turn around.”
He smirks. “You wanna see my ass?”
“So what if I do?”
He leans close and brushes his lips across mine. The bastard! “Anytime you wanna see a body part of mine, all you gotta do is ask. I’d be more than happy to take the jeans off for you and burn them right now if that would make you happy. The shirt, too.”
I suck in a breath.
Oh, hell no.
No, no, no.
I press against his chest. “We need to go and eat. No more talk of clothes or body parts.”
He laughs as he reaches for the takeaway bag I’m holding and leads me to his back office. I haven’t spent a lot of time in his office, so I take the opportunity to inspect it in greater detail.
It’s small, but Luke manages to keep it tidy and uncluttered. It’s a theme I’ve noticed in his personal spaces. Not that I spent very long at his home, but in that time, I observed it was clean, open, and uncluttered.
Luke has a small desk facing the door. Besides the window behind it, the desk is the first thing you see when you enter. The wall to the left has a large dark wood bookcase—it’s made of the same wood as the desk. The wall on the right is bare of furniture, but frame after frame hangs on it. A quick glance reveals photos of him, Sean, Tyler, and Paris. There are also some with an older man, who I presume might be his father because of the way they have their arms over each other’s shoulders. And then there’s one of Luke, Sean and a woman of about forty. It could be his mother, but she looks too young. Maybe an aunt?
Luke cuts into my thoughts. “It’s my mother.” At my blank look, he nods at the photo I’ve been inspecting. “In that photo, it’s Mum with me and Sean.”
I sit in the chair he gives me. “She’s so young.”
“Forty-nine this year.” He moves the office chair from his side of the desk so he can sit next to me.
I take another look at the photo. “Wow, she’s aging well. I would have picked her for under forty-five.”
Passing me a plate, he says, “It’s amazing what plastic surgery can do.”
I’m so engrossed in the photo that I don’t realise Luke has served my dinner for me. “Thank you,” I say quietly when he gives me chopsticks. I’m fighting with myself over arguing with him. It seems ungrateful not to appreciate him doing things for me, but at the same time, I need him to know I still want to do things for myself.
He frowns. “What’s wrong?”
I take a moment before trying to make him understand. These words need to come out right. “I love that you want to do things for me, but I’m capable of doing them for myself.”
“I know you can. But, you’re just going to have to get used to me doing some things for you, because that’s who I am. I’m a man who likes to take care of his woman.”
His woman.
My tummy does somersaults. I try to ignore them, though because it’s important to me that Luke understands my needs.
“I’m getting that. But what you need to know is that I’m not okay with that.”
“Why?”
“Because as much as you’re a man who likes to take care of his woman, I’m a woman who likes to know she can look after herself. I won’t be one of those women who doesn’t even know how to access her bank account when her husband dies.” I can feel myself getting a little worked up, but I’m helpless to stop it as memories flood my mind.
/> He stills as he processes that. “Has this happened to someone close to you?”
“Yes. To my grandmother, Mum’s mother. I was with her when she found out my grandfather had died, and she looked at me with such despair and told me she didn’t think she could live without him. I thought she meant that she loved him so much that she’d be lost without him. What she actually meant was she couldn’t drive, she didn’t know what bills they had, she didn’t know how to use an ATM machine because he’d always done it, and she had hardly any friends because he was her entire life. I won’t be her, Luke.”
He listens closely. When I finish talking, he says, “Taking care of someone doesn’t mean taking over their life. I fully expect you to give me hell if I go too far. But I will take care of you, Callie. It’s in my DNA.”
His expression is so earnest. I take a moment to pull my thoughts together. This is give-and-take, and he’s signalled that he fully expects me to call him out if he takes too much; I need to give a little here.
I smile. “Okay,” I say softly.
