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“Oh, shit.”
Flaring her nostrils, Lily didn’t care if he was offended by her response. She was sick and tired of the way people just acted like reprobates and expected everyone else to play along.
“Wow, Adam. I guess I’m not that open minded.” She dragged a five-gallon drum of flour over to the worktable. “Look, I need to get back to my work because I’m gone like a bad habit at noon.”
Dumbfounded at his stupidity, Adam quickly lifted the heavy container for her, wondering how he could take back what he had just revealed.
“Please don’t repeat that, Lily. I beg of you. I thought since we’ve worked together for a year, you must have figured out that Ryan is Morgan’s dad. It’s not like I hid it from you. I guess I thought it was more public knowledge than it is.”
“Isn’t it illegal, what they did? Incest? I’m just surprised that you’re taking it in stride.”
“It took place before I was in her life, Lily.”
He almost made matters worse by trying to explain it away by saying they were both drunk when they had sex.
“Right, so it was easy to rationalize, I guess. They’re lucky the baby didn’t have genetic issues.”
“That’s a fallacy, actually. Anyway, I’ll let you get back to work.”
He left the kitchen and went out to the front of the café to unlock the door, flipping the open sign over.
Fortunately, there were people waiting to get in, so he was occupied. Never in a million years would he have figured that Lily was judgmental. He knew stories about Dan Chua that would shock her, but he wasn’t going to go down that path, not yet.
While he waited on customers, Lily looked at the clock on the wall. It was only eight, and she didn’t want to call Dan too early, or he might look at her calls as being an annoyance. Herein lay the problem; one declaration of love and she was already trying to mold her behavior to something acceptable to Dan. She’d been down that road with him in the past, and it had ended badly. She wiped the flour off her hands and reached into the apron pocket for her phone.
“I’m sleeping,” he said, his voice gravelly.
“I have gossip.”
“Should I get up and get coffee, or is this going to be fast so I can go back to sleep?”
“Ryan Maddox is the father of Alison’s daughter Morgan.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“He’s her brother, Dan. You’re an attorney. He had sex with his sister, and she got pregnant. I bet if I Google it, that’s illegal.”
“Oh god, you’re not one of those, are you? In my family, we call them Lindas. Don’t be a Linda, Lily. It’s their business. This is my family you’re talking about, too. I’m not making waves.”
He lay in bed with his arm across his forehead, looking up at the ceiling. Why in the hell had he invited her to Pam’s party?
There was silence for a moment. Lily realized she might have crossed a line, but it was a revealing one. She and Dan didn’t share the same values, it appeared. The issue hadn’t come up in the past that she could remember, outside of his carousing.
“I’m going back to bed,” Dan said. “I’ll see you at one.”
“Okay, I’m sorry I pissed you off.”
“You didn’t piss me off, Lily. You showed me a big red flag.”
“I’ll work on it, Dan,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Not talking and still thinking a certain way is passive-aggressive.”
“It sounds like you’re having second thoughts now,” Lily said regretfully.
“Maybe,” he said. “I’ll see you at one.”
After hanging up from the call, he got into the shower to try to cool off. It was so unlike Dan to get angry, he’d surprised himself. Even when Julie got caught cheating on him, he was more disappointed than angry. Or when Sandra left him, he was hurt and confused. But now, he wondered how he had managed to know a woman for all of these years and not recognize that she was a prig.
