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“So she wasn’t leaving you a house when she passed,” he said.
I smiled. “Nope. Daphne said I won’t get her house either because Richard will probably outlive her by twenty years.”
“Not a chance. That woman is a menace; she’ll live to be a hundred and twenty.”
My laughter was loud, but Burke didn’t seem to mind.
“Last week, I was ready to pluck my ears off when she started explaining why tantric sex was so underappreciated in Western cultures.”
“She didn’t,” I gasped.
He let his head rest back on the cabinets, his eyes closing as he did. “Twenty minutes, Charlotte. I couldn’t stop her for a solid twenty minutes.”
“Poor Burke.”
He grunted.
“I’m sure it was very educational.”
“I am not telling you the things I learned.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding yourself if you think I haven’t heard her talk about it too.” I gave him a sidelong look. “Who do you think taught me about the birds and bees?”
Burke grimaced.
“I wish my mom had done it, though,” I said quietly. “When I look back on it now, I think she offloaded that to Daphne because it was too hard for her to talk aboutanykind of relationship.”
He listened quietly.
My ribs squeezed when, yet again, I thought of how badly I wanted to know things as they filtered through his head.
Anything.
Everything.
“My dad was like that too,” he added.
The air froze in my lungs, and I kept so still. “Yeah?”
He nodded. “I don’t think I ever heard him talk about anything except football. My training. Practice. He never talked to me or Tansy about my mom. Never talked about their relationship. I think that’s why neither of us knew”—he paused, swallowing hard—“how to do it well.”
I turned my head and watched him carefully.
The brief news article I’d found mentioned his short-lived marriage. A college relationship, married for a couple of years after he went pro. Then nothing.
A hundred questions burned at the tip of my tongue.
Who was she?
How had they met?
What went wrong?
“Maybe he missed her,” I said. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to talk about the love they lost.”
His scrutiny was fierce in its intensity, seeking out meaning in my words. I wondered if he’d find what he was looking for.
“Is that supposed to remind me that I’m like my dad?”
