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Since I left my regular gig at The Elliot and the early morning hours behind, Luc was not too excited about me going back there. I agreed to fill in as needed for vacations and such. I even picked up a few new personal chef clients from buzz about the cookbook, and I was coming home to my man every night. We’d only cooked together a few times lately, but those nights were the shape of things to come, and I couldn’t be happier.
“Turn off the light.” Lucas rolled and snaked his arm around my waist, pulling my back to his front.
“I can’t, Hot Shot. It’s the sun.”
“No, it isn’t. It can’t be time to get up. I feel like I just went to sleep.”
I reached for the remote on the bedside table and closed the blackout shades.
“It’s not time to get up yet. Go back to sleep,” I whispered.
“Or we could do something else.” He gave my ass a gentle nudge from behind.
“Luc, I love you. I’m so tired.”
“Okay. Me too. I must be getting old.”
“Hey, when’s your birthday?” I asked.
“November.”
“Mine’s October. You’re not getting old. You chopped wood all afternoon yesterday. There’s enough to keep the firepit going all summer.”
“Yeah, I need to get Dad to help me build a woodshed for when the rain starts this fall.” His soft lips pressed against my naked shoulder, and his whiskers tickled.
“I didn’t know you looked like that when you chopped wood. Then you took your shirt off, and I damn near fainted. Emily had to pull me back to the job at hand more than once.”
“I could use a hand job.”
I chuckled. “We’re tired, remember?”
“Oh, right. Old habits, baby.” He rubbed his palm over his face as he rolled onto his back with his eyes closed and pulled me to his side.
“What time do your parents land today?” he asked.
“Four. You arranged the car to pick them up?”
“Yeah.”
“I still can’t believe they’re coming.”
“They’re proud of you, Jo.”
“And it’s hot as hell in Tennessee right now.” And sticky humid. But the crickets would be out day and night, and I missed that Southern summer sound. “You’re sure your mom’s okay with hosting them in the farmhouse instead of them staying here among all the boxes,” I asked.
“Of course. It’s the Southern way.”
“Your parents aren’t Southern.”
“I know, Sweetness, but yours are.”
I snuggled in tighter to his warmth. “I’m sorry about my brothers-in-law and chopping all that wood with my dad.”
“It’s okay. It was sort of fun. I think they assumed I wouldn’t be able to do much more than stack the wood. It was funny to see their faces after I broke the first log with one hit. Your dad just smiled.”
“Well, it could have been worse. When Scott proposed to Loretta, Billy and some of Scott’s cousins took him out in the woods and told him they were each gonna shoot, cook, and eat their own squirrel. Squirrels, for God’s sake. They ended up shooting coffee cans instead, thank goodness.”
Luc still had his eyes closed, his hand drawing lazy circles on my back. “So, the hazing, that’s something they do when you get engaged?”
