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“What?”
“Will you try to relax and just…enjoy this meal?” His eyes turn soft, and he reaches out to place his hand over mine. “Don’t worry about me or Izzy. Just…order all the fucking pickles your heart desires,” he says while grinning. “And relax. You deserve it. You’re a great mom, and great moms deserve a break sometimes, okay?”
For some insane reason, I want to cry at his words. But not because they make me feel bad. Actually, they make me feel so good the relief they provide is overwhelming.
All I can do is swallow hard against the emotion and nod.
“Okay. Deal.”
“Lovely doing business with you.” He gently squeezes my hand before letting it go to grab his menu. He peruses the dinner options, and I just sit there, looking at my own menu.
But mostly, my mind races and wonders, How, after all these years, is Remy Winslow here, with me?
In the blink of an eye, he’d gone from someone I hadn’t seen in so long to the first person I called when I felt like everything was falling apart.
The only person I wanted to call, actually.
Rem tilts his head away from a still-sleeping Izzy on his chest and carefully lifts the rest of his chicken sandwich to his lips, all the while avoiding inadvertently dropping food onto an incoherent baby’s cute head.
Izzy stirs ever so slightly as he takes one final bite, but her tiny cherubic face stays lax and her sweet little body just keeps on snoozing.
I don’t know if it’s exhaustion from giving me hell today or if Remy has cast some kind of secret baby voodoo on her, but somehow, someway, she stayed asleep through the entire meal.
“Okay, let me hear it.” Remy wipes his hands off with a napkin and tosses it down onto his now-empty plate. “What did you think?”
“You want my review on Jacob’s Pickles?”
He nods and rests his hands at Izzy’s back. “You bet your cute ass I do.”
My cute ass? I kind of want to tell him my ass isn’t looking all that cute after having a baby six weeks ago, but I bite my tongue and focus on his real question.
“Well…” I feign a small frown. “It was…okay.”
“Okay?” He narrows his eyes and nods pointedly toward my plate. My very empty plate that used to hold seven different flavors of pickles, French fries, and the best flipping chicken sandwich I’ve ever had in my life. “My surprise was just…okay?”
“Yeah.” I shrug and bite my lip to fight the urge to smile. “I mean, I appreciate the thought behind the surprise. So…I definitely give that five stars. But the food?” I shrug again. “It was…okay.”
“You’re so full of shit.” He laughs. Outright. And then he reaches out across the table to gently run his finger along the side of my cheek. “And I know this because this dimple right here is your tell.”
“I do not have a tell.” I quickly lift my hand to cover the traitorous dimple in question, and immediately, his mouth turns up in a megawatt, proud-as-a-peacock smile.
“Oh, but you do, Ria. It’s that dimple right there, and it only reveals itself when you’re lying.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I know a lot of things about Maria Baros.” He waggles his brows. “All sorts of awesome things, in fact.”
“Watch yourself, buddy.” I playfully point a finger at him. “Because I just so happen to know a lot of things about Remington Winslow too.”
He chuckles at that. “We had a lot of good times back in the day, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we definitely did,”
Oh man, did we ever…
Instantly, my mind joins the stupid dimple in its traitorous behavior and goes straight toward memories of what it was like to be the girl on Remy’s arm. To spend nearly every waking hour with him. To be the person who made him laugh and smile. To be the girl he kissed. And touched.
To experience what it felt like to have Remy slide inside me.
Stop it.
Still, even though I know it’s not good for me, I can’t stop myself from taking in how painfully cute he looks, sitting there, with Izzy.
He was right. The ladies of Central Park were definitely appreciative of this view.
Honestly, it’s almost criminal how perfect he looks with Izzy or how good he is with her. Like a baby whisperer, but only, so insanely attractive that every pair of ovaries within a hundred-mile radius is at risk of exploding.
Hell, he should probably be restricted from walking around like this in public; he’s a danger to biological clocks everywhere.
When his phone vibrates on the table, he lifts it up to check the screen for a brief second before setting it back down. But other than that, he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even respond to the sender.
“What do you say we start heading back to your apartment?”
