“Hi.” She reached up and kissed him, her arms slipping around his neck. “Have a good day?” Bella leaned into him.
“Busy. You?”
“Kind of. I crawled out of bed late this morning. Don’t think I’ve ever slept for so long or so well.” She laughed and the sound blew apart all the words he’d planned on saying. His willpower wasn’t going to hold up. He knew it when he walked in the door.
“Thank you for putting me to bed last night. It was really sweet of you.” She reached up and kissed the tip of his nose. “I need to talk to you but can we have dinner first and then chat before you do anything rash like tell me you don’t care about me anymore because my lifestyle sucks?”
She could read him. He hated that.
“Please, Jake. I’ll beg if I have to.”
Way to make him feel like an insufferable heel. “Sure. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.” He gave her a smile and she relaxed in his arms. “I missed you today.”
Her eyes misted up and he was lost.
“Come in and sit down. I’ve got a cold beer for you. Dinner won’t be long. Now you’re here I can put on the grill and do the steak.” She pulled him in and pushed him into a comfy chair that angled toward the kitchen so he could talk to her while she worked.
“Sounds good to me.” He laid his head back and closed his eyes and tried to unsee the carnage from today. It was bad enough when children were involved—ten times worse when it was someone he knew. Thankfully they would all be fine but it would be a long road to recovery for the mother and her two toddlers.
“Here you are.” Bella pushed a cold beer into his hands and perched on his knee.
“Thanks. I really need this.” He took a long drink and told her about his day. By the time he’d finished, his father and Cory arrived home from soccer training.
“Hey, Dad, Bella. Something smells good.” Cory headed straight for the kitchen and opened oven doors, looked in pots, dipped his finger into the dessert chilling in the refrigerator and generally checked dinner out.
“Excuse my son for his bad manners.” He frowned in Cory’s direction.
“It’s okay. He can have the dessert with the dirty fingerprint in it.” Bella laughed when Cory screwed up his face. “You don’t expect us to eat it, do you?”
The teen shrugged his shoulders. “Nah, guess not. How long ’til we eat?”
“There’s a platter of olives and cheese in the refrigerator if you’re dying of starvation. You can nibble on that if you like. I wouldn’t mind some with a glass of wine.” She got off his knee and walked into the kitchen. “Woodsie, how about you?”
“Not right now, thanks anyway. I need a shower. Been mowing lawns all day. Not fit for company until I get rid of the dirt and sweat.” He hurried away to the bathroom.
Jake watched his family and wondered how he hadn’t missed this kind of normal before.
Chapter Nineteen
They’d taken a walk after dinner, just the two of them, and Bella got her chance to apologize. “I’m sorry. It all got out of hand when all I wanted to do was curl up on your knee and fall asleep.”
“You came here for a rest. Now I can see why your producer insisted on it. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t listen, why you thought you had to keep working so hard. I hated seeing you so worn out last night.”
She huffed out a sigh. “I’m sorry. It’s my own fault, I get that. You know my sisters and I competed in everything and I mean everything!” She laughed and squeezed his fingers, wanting the contact more now than ever while she opened her soul to him. “You know, Dakota is brilliant with her jewelry, my love is cooking, and April can do anything she puts her mind to. She can spout off a poem or a song at the drop of a hat. She’s magic with words that girl as well as anything else she lends her hand to. I just wish she’d make up her mind what she wants to do and stick with something instead of flitting from project to project. The parents indulge her something shocking being the youngest.”
“It happens with the baby in the family, I hear. If you all have different talents, why the competition then?”
“I’m not really sure. In my case, I think I was trying to prove myself. Being the middle child can be daunting for anyone. Dakota is the oldest if you don’t count Mari into the mix. First to do everything! And April is the baby so she gets away with whatever she does. I kind of got lost in the middle somehow.”
“I believe it’s actually a thing.” He smiled.
“Yeah, I know and I’ve tried not to let it get to me but at every opportunity it rears its ugly head. Like I don’t even have a say in what I’m doing.”
“You’re very driven but where does it end, Bella? When do you look at what’s going on and say that’s it? I’ve achieved everything I set out to do. Do you have to have a full-on collapse to realize that you’ve achieved your goals?”
She stopped and looked at him with her mouth open. “Say that again.”
“You’ve achieved everything you set out to do. That part?”
A sense of achievement came over her. “I have, haven’t I?”
“You tell me. When you first looked at entering Masterchef, what was your goal?”
“To be the best. To have my name plastered over merchandise and cookbooks.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “And you have that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Yeah I do.”
“So why keep pushing then?”
“The competitive me always has to slap back the timid, quiet me and take over. I guess I never really felt I was satisfied with what I’d achieved.”
Jake roared with laughter. “You, timid?
