Page 55 of The Homemaker (The Chain of Lakes #1)

Murphy

Since it takes a village,

don’t forget to form your village.

Eight Years Later …

“If you touch that, I will cut off your hand,” Alice says, holding a knife when I reach my finger for the bowl of chocolate frosting.

“Don’t cut off Daddy’s hand,” three-year-old Mia says while she and her five-year-old sister Sophie make friendship bracelets at the kitchen table.

“Then he needs to stay out of the frosting. It’s for Cam’s birthday cake.”

“You’re so sassy,” I whisper in Alice’s ear before sucking her earlobe between my teeth.

Her shoulder jumps. “Stop!” She laughs, cutting pineapple for the fruit kabobs Cam loves.

While we’ve made this our home and had two beautiful girls, Alice and I have always held our breath, praying that the Becketts don’t move.

Not only have we become close to Rose and Jonathan, we’ve formed lifelong bonds with Cameron and their girls.

Our families have vacationed together. I play golf with Jonathan.

And Rose and Alice are on a pickleball team at the rec center.

Jonathan sells life insurance, and Rose is a landscape architect who doesn’t enjoy cooking anything that can’t be thrown on the grill or tossed into a Crock-Pot.

So Cameron thinks Alice is the best neighbor ever because she bakes and cooks all the time.

Rose jokes that she’s going to divorce Jonathan and marry Alice.

“I’ll be in the garage,” I say.

“Save some wood for me,” Alice smirks.

Someday, our girls are going to realize their mom’s idea of wood and my woodturning hobby are two totally different things.

“I always do,” I say, filling a glass with sun tea before heading to the garage.

Since my art sells easily and quickly at several local galleries and shops, and I still do freelance technical writing, I make enough money to pay for a full-time homemaker who wears house dresses. However, I prefer her barefoot, traipsing through the grass yard to and from her garden.

No ponytail.

Wavy auburn hair flowing behind her.

It’s the best damn life.

As I cut new pieces of wood for my next project, Cameron opens the side door and closes it behind him .

“Hey, buddy. What’s up? You ready to turn sixteen tomorrow?”

His grin beams.

Neither Rose nor Jonathan have ever mentioned Cameron being adopted, so I’m not sure they’ll ever tell him.

But it doesn’t matter. He’s a spitting image of me when I was sixteen, and my mom has noticed it too.

Alice and I have agreed to never mention it unless Cameron has a medical emergency and would need something like a kidney donated or a bone marrow transplant.

“What do you think about this camp?” He shows me his phone and the email about a soccer camp in Atlanta.

“Hmm, what do your parents think?” I mount my blank to the lathe.

“They said to ask you.”

I laugh. “Forward it to me. I’ll read through it later.”

“Thanks.” He slides his phone into his pocket. “What are you making?”

“Well, I think I’m going to make a chess set for Alice’s dad.”

“That’s cool. Think sometime you could show me how to do that?”

I glance up at him. “You want to learn to turn wood?”

“Yeah.” He nods. “I mean, if you think I can learn it.”

My chest swells. “Of course you can. There are a lot of safety measures to learn, so I’ll run it by your parents, but I’d love to teach you.

” I fear I sound too excited, like he might piece together my enthusiasm with my involvement in his soccer, then look in the mirror and suddenly think, “Holy crap! I think I’m Murphy Paddon’s son. ”

It’s funny how much Alice and I fear he’ll find out before Rose and Jonathan tell him. And maybe they’ll never tell him he was adopted. That’s fine too.

“Can you keep a secret?” Cameron asks.

“I think so.”

“I want to ask this girl out, but I keep chickening out. My friends think she’ll say no. And when I mentioned it to my dad, he said she’d be crazy to say no. But that feels like a fatherly response. What do you think?”

I grab my face shield and fiddle with the strap.

“Well, I agree with your dad. She’d be crazy to say no.

But she could say no. And that will suck.

So you just have to decide if her saying no will suck more than never knowing if she would have said yes.

When I met Alice, she warned me not to fall in love with her.

But I did. So I poured my heart out to her. Nearly brought me to tears.”

“She stayed?” Cameron asks.

I smile. “No. I didn’t see her for eight years. But not once in those eight years did I regret a single word I said to her.”

“I don’t think I love this girl, yet. So …” He scrapes his teeth along his bottom lip and shrugs.

“Well, there you have it.”

“But,” he wrinkles his nose, “I really like her.”

“Then shoulders back, chin up. Brush and floss your teeth. Be confident until the last second, then give her the tiniest flash of vulnerability. Say something like, ‘I’m thinking about asking you out, but I can’t be the sole object of anyone’s affection at the moment, so I’ll let you know what I decide.

And by the way, you look beautiful today. ’”

A slow grin climbs up his face. “I don’t think I can say that. And I was just going to text her.”

I purse my lips and nod slowly. “Okay. That’s cool. But I’d stick with the same line and after you type ‘so I’ll let you know what I decide,’ end it with three dots and the sunglasses emoji.”

“Did that kind of line work for you?”

“Absolutely.”

Definitely not.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and I know he’s just being nice.

“Did you ask your mom or Alice?”

“No.” He picks at the tree stump on the workbench. “My mom will just give me condoms, and Alice probably will too.”

I clear my throat. “Well, condoms are a good idea if you uh, you know, think you’ll need them.”

Cameron lifts his gaze to me. “You know you can buy condoms before you’re eighteen, right?”

I do know that. I also know Cameron is standing in my garage having this conversation with me because Alice and I did not use condoms. “I know that sometimes you think you won’t need them … until you do. And I know it’s really hard to stop once you reach the point of?—”

“Dude, seriously. I have condoms.”

I nod a half dozen times. “Yep. Great. So uh … this is called a lathe.”

Cameron hangs out in the garage with me for over two hours, by the time I go into the house, the girls are in bed, and Alice is putting the finishing touches on Cameron’s sweet sixteen birthday cake.

The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” softly plays from my grandfather’s turntable in the living room .

“I sent a picture of the cake to Rose. She’s so in love with it, and she thinks Cam will love it too.”

I rest my forearms on the counter. “Baby, are those edible soccer balls?”

“Yes. I made fondant, bigger white balls then smaller white and black ones that I stuck to the outside of the big white one to give it the soccer ball pattern, gently rolling the whole thing just to slightly flatten and connect all the little balls. Aren’t they cool?”

Everything about my wife is cool, and wonderful, magnificent and awe-inspiring.

“It’s perfect. Wanna know what’s not perfect?”

She glances up, nose wrinkled while grinning. “What?”

I drop my head between my shoulders. “Cameron solicited my advice about asking a girl out on a date, and I fumbled the ball. I said some stupid shit then managed to segue it into a condom conversation that just got more and more awkward until I bailed.”

Alice giggles. “Aw, I’m jealous that you got to have the sex conversation with him.”

I jerk my head up. “Jealous? Baby, there’s nothing to be jealous about.

In fact, I think the best way to parent is to let someone else do it and just live next door and be more like grandparents that can spoil them, then hand them back.

Really, we should see if Rose and Jonathan want to raise Mia and Sophie. ”

“Stop!” She laughs, wiping her hands, then carrying the finished cake to the fridge. “You know what you need?”

“Lessons on how to be cool in a sixteen-year-old’s eyes?”

“Murph, you only have to be cool in my eyes.” She pulls something wrapped in butcher paper from the fridge, then she slides her favorite cast iron skillet to the front burner and ignites it.

Oil.

Garlic.

Rosemary.

Salt and pepper.

Once it’s heated, she tosses the steak into the pan to sear it. I can’t remember the last time she made steak at nine o’clock at night.

“You need a little of this.” She adjusts the heat a smidge. “And a little of this.” She gives me her hand. “I have one last slot on my dance card.”

I grin, sliding one hand behind my back while offering her my other on a slow bow.

When she accepts, I jerk her into my arms, making her gasp.

“I saw Hunter Morrison today,” she says.

“Oh?” I lift my eyebrows as we sway to the music.

“He was at the park. Apparently, he’s taken up drawing, so he was sketching a tree.”

“No Vera?”

She shakes her head. “Vera’s in New York watching her granddaughter while Blair opens a second gallery with her husband. That could have been you.”

“Hmm …” I twist my lips. “A stuffy life in New York or screwing my homemaker in a secluded area by the lake just after lunch every day.”

Alice laughs. “Not every day. The girls have early out on Wednesdays.” She teases the nape of my neck and stares at my mouth.

I duck my head to kiss her and she pulls away.

“I love you,” I whisper .

“I love you too.”

Again, I try to kiss her. Again, she pulls away.

“You have to say, ‘Hi.’”

We turn our heads toward the soft voice. Sophie peeks her head around the corner. “Say it and mommy will kiss you.”

“Why aren’t you in bed?” Alice asks.

“Because I’m too excited for Cam’s birthday party.” She wedges herself between us, stepping on my toes like her mom used to do as she hugs my legs.

We make a Sophie sandwich and continue to sway to the music.

“Say it, Daddy,” she whispers.

I frame Alice’s face and let my lips hover over hers because I know how much our girls love seeing our affection.

“Say. It.” Sophie’s whisper escalates to a hiss.

Alice grins.

“Hi,” I whisper, then press my lips to hers.

Do you want to fall in love with Hunter Morrison’s favorite fictional character, Jessica Day? Check out the Jack & Jill Series . Keep reading for a sneak peek at the first chapter.