Page 9 of This Time Around (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #3)

He nodded and picked up the whipped cream can again. He tilted his head back and took another hit, and Allie felt her shoulders relax for the first time since she’d gotten the call about her grandma.

When they looked at each other again, something felt different between them. Allie couldn’t put her finger on it, but it seemed like something had shifted.

“So ... Wade—” Jack prompted. “Not your fiancé after all?”

Allie shook her head, grateful to the green goo for hiding her flaming cheeks. “Not my fiancé. Sorry. I spent yesterday evening worrying you’d notice the engagement ring I was wearing was an old pinkie ring my grandmother used to wear.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I kept close track of your grandmother’s pinkie rings.

” He picked up her left hand, an absent gesture, but one that sent goose bumps up Allie’s arm.

He studied her bare hand, turning it from side to side before setting it back on the sofa.

His palm rested lightly on the back of her hand, and Allie wondered if it was force of habit or something else that left his fingers touching hers.

“So Wade’s just a friend, then?”

Allie hesitated, then nodded. “Yep. Just a friend.”

“So you’re not sleeping with him?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Hey, we’re putting it all out there, right?”

Allie shrugged and took the whipped cream from him. She fiddled with the nozzle. “Wade’s just a great friend. The two of us have zero chemistry.”

“I kinda noticed.”

Allie snorted. “Thanks.”

He shrugged and took another hit of whipped cream. “Figured we’re being open and honest and everything.”

She sighed. “He’s been an absolute godsend helping my parents navigate a potential film deal, so please don’t?—”

“Your parents have a film deal?”

Allie shook her head. “I talked them out of it. Wade and I did. It was a documentary about women in the prison system that a friend of mine from summer camp was trying to develop, but it never got off the ground.”

“Amy?”

“Yes, Amy.” She couldn’t believe he remembered her summer camp bestie’s name, much less her profession. “She’s an assistant producer now, and I’m sure she would have done a great job. But it would have caused more problems for my parents. I’m glad Wade was able to convince them of that.”

A tiny muscle ticked in Jack’s jaw. “Good ol’ Wade to the rescue.”

Allie glared at him, though she wasn’t actually annoyed. Mostly just ready to move on with the conversation. “So who is Lacey, anyway?”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “You told me last night that you didn’t care.”

“I don’t,” she said, pretty sure that was true.

“She’s not my girlfriend, like I said.”

“That’s fine.” Allie shrugged with as much nonchalance as she could muster. “It’s really none of my?—”

“But that’s because she doesn’t want anything serious, so we’ve had a friends-with-benefits thing going for about a year now, which is obviously something I’m not willing to explain to my daughter.”

Allie cleared her throat and nodded, loathe to admit how much it annoyed her to think of Jack having sex with some leggy blonde whose casual attitudes about sex probably meant she was amazing at it. Really, it meant nothing to Allie. Nothing at all.

“So you’ve moved to Portland.” She wasn’t sure if she meant it as a subject change or a question about whether the friends-with-benefits thing would endure a six-hundred-mile move.

“Yep. The rest of my team will be making the move over the next several weeks, but I’ve already started getting the company up and running in its new location. And we visited Paige’s new school yesterday, so she’ll start next week.”

“It’s so strange seeing you as a dad,” she admitted, looking down at her lap again. “I guess I didn’t expect that.”

He laughed and took another hit of whipped cream. “Neither did I. Wasn’t exactly planned, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.” Allie kept her expression guarded, not sure if that tidbit of information made her feel better or worse.

“But I love being a father. She’s the best damn thing that ever happened to me. Gave me a reason to be a better guy than I had been.” He cleared his throat and set the whipped cream down. “Enough about me. You said your grandma left you the bed and breakfast?”

Allie nodded and took a shaky breath. “Yes. My grandparents started it back in 1949. It used to get written up in all kinds of travel books.”

“I remember it. Yellow, right? With those fancy arch-top plantation shutters you always loved. And there was that huge table they always bragged about importing from France or Italy or someplace like that.”

Allie nodded, surprised he’d remembered any of that. “Right. Only it’s not actually functioning as a B&B now. Just a home for about six hundred mutant-toed cats.”

Jack blinked. “Come again?”

“Mutant cats. The place is overrun with them.”

“What do you mean mutant ? Like radioactive or something?”

Allie laughed and shook her head. “They have all these extra toes. It makes their paws look like catcher’s mitts.”

“Oh, you mean Hemingway cats?”

“What?”

“That’s what they’re called, I think. Ernest Hemingway used to own a bunch of extra-toed cats, so that’s where the name comes from.”

“I guess so. I didn’t know that.” She shook her head, pretty sure the fact that they’d spent this long discussing cats officially qualified her for crazy cat lady status.

As if owning fourteen felines hadn’t already accomplished that for her.

“So it sounds like your job’s been going great,” she said, eager to steer the subject away from felines. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I had a few years of being a lazy dumbass before I met Caroline. She urged me to get my shit together, so I went back to school and had just about finished the degree when we found out she was pregnant with Paige.”

“Wow.” Allie kicked herself for not formulating a better response, but that was all she could come up with. The back of her throat started stinging, and she wasn’t sure if it was the knowledge that he’d been willing to shape up for another woman, or something else entirely.

Something else entirely , her subconscious said, but Allie ordered herself not to go there. She grabbed the can of whipped cream and took a hit.

“So are you a lawyer now or what?” he asked. “I tried to stalk your social media over the years, but you never really posted much. I couldn’t make it to our ten-year high school reunion, so I’ll admit I’m kind of clueless what you do for a living.”

Allie laughed and swallowed the whipped cream. “You and most people.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a Certified Association Executive,” she said. “I know it sounds like a made-up job, or like a glorified secretary or something.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“It’s okay, I get it a lot.”

“So what does a Certified Association Executive do?”

“I oversee a state medical association, organizing membership campaigns and public advocacy and planning education events. That might sound boring, but I really love it. No two days are the same, and I get to use a lot of negotiation and people management skills. It’s so much better than the political campaign stuff I was doing before. ”

“So did you finish your poli-sci degree?”

“Undergrad, yes. But I only got through one year of law school before I quit.”

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever said those words— I quit— out loud before, and she braced herself for Jack to say something snarky. To rib her for not being able to hack it or to give her crap for not heading down the path she’d been so certain was meant for her.

Instead, he reached for her. Well, not for her. For the whipped cream can in her hand. He pulled it from her grip, tilted his head back, and took a hit. “Delicious,” he said.

Allie smiled. “Thank you.”

“Why? Did you can it yourself?”

“No. I mean—thank you for not being a dick about me dropping out of school. Or faking a fiancé or having jailbird parents or?—”

She stopped there, not sure how much he knew about that. Not sure how much she wanted him to know.

“So it sounds like life didn’t turn out quite like either of us expected sixteen years ago,” he said at last.

“Nope.” Allie pressed her lips together, then nodded. “I guess not.”

“And we’re also not exactly who we pretended to be last night.”

“Guilty as charged.” Allie shifted on the sofa, bumping his knee with hers. “So where does that leave us?”

“Friends?” There was a hopeful note in his voice, a tone Allie recognized from a long time ago. Years before they’d even dated, back when Jack was the sweet boy in math class with sad eyes. The boy whose father had walked out and left him alone with his mom and a whole heap of trust issues.

She wondered if he’d ever gotten over that.

“Friends,” she repeated, nodding a little. “That sounds good.”

“Excellent.” He leaned back against the cushions, splaying his arms out across the back of the sofa. “So is there anything else you want to confess?”

“What?” Her voice cracked just a little, but she forced herself not to flinch. “What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve kinda opened all the floodgates here. The fake fiancé, the career paths that didn’t go like we expected. Your law-breaking parents, my shotgun marriage—it’s been very therapeutic getting it all out in the open.”

“Oh. Right. Yes, it has.”

“So I just wondered if there’s anything else either of us wanted to share.”

Her cheeks heated up, and Allie prayed he wouldn’t notice. “You’ve seen plenty of embarrassing stuff from me tonight. Speaking of which, I need to go rinse off this mud mask.”

“And I should probably get this crap off my teeth. Is there more than one bathroom in this place?”

“Yeah, go ahead and use the guest bath you used last night. I’ll wash up in the primary.”