She wanted him again.
Rob wanted to cheer. Maybe he deserved a parade.
Kari sure deserved a parade. More than a parade. Good grief, she’d rocked his world, blown his mind.
And he had…questioned her integrity at the most vulnerable of moments.
Maybe he deserved a pillory, not a parade.
He eased out of her and moved to lie beside her, scanning her face for any clue to her feelings. Her eyes were watchful, her hair a pale tangle on the pillow and across her face. He teased the wayward strands away, tucking them behind her ear. “How are you?”
Her face softened. “You keep asking that.”
“I keep being interested in the answer. The conditions are variable. This is new to both of us. And I wasn’t the best guy today. In fact, I’m pretty ashamed of myself.”
One eyebrow arched. “You had a bad moment,” she said. “But we’re square. You weren’t considering all the variables. Like you said, this is new for both of us.” She sat up, slid off the bed, and walked to the bathroom, her previous self-consciousness apparently a thing of the past.
Rob rolled to his back, plucking tissues out of the box and cleaning himself up. He heard the toilet flush, then water running. He glanced at the time just as his stomach rumbled. “Dinner?” he asked as Kari came back into the room.
“Yes. I’m starving,” she said.
“Well, let’s get dressed and see what I might be able to rustle up.” Rob grabbed a clean tee shirt and a pair of gym shorts from a drawer and put them on. Kari crouched on the floor, rummaging in her bag, her back a tempting expanse of smooth skin. Rob wanted to run his fingers across it, trace every bump of her spine. To hell with being dressed.
Reluctantly, he resisted the urge and left her to find clothes. He headed for the kitchen, smiling as he passed her framed sketch on the wall. Kari on his wall, Kari in his bed…it was a lot all at once. If he had considered such a thing yesterday, he would have backpedaled away from the notion so fast he would have left skid marks.
So why did it feel so right today?
He shook his head at his own thoughts. Leave it. Just enjoy it.
In the kitchen, Rob found that a can of tomato soup and the makings for grilled cheese sandwiches were the best he could do in terms of a meal. Kari ambled in, back in her shorts and tee shirt. Rob was about to comment on the way the shorts made her long legs look fantastic, when he noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts swayed, nipples poking through the soft cotton.
Rational thought just wasn’t in the cards after that.
“Jesus, woman. Warn an old man if you’re going to do that.”
“Do what?” Kari’s eyebrows quirked.
“Waltz around my house all lanky and gorgeous and not wearing underwear.”
Kari snorted and glanced down at her chest. “Bras are the creation of the devil.”
“Hm.” Rob moved closer, until they were nearly touching. “They also say that idle hands are the devil’s playground…” He hovered his palms suggestively around her breasts and Kari laughed, swatting at his hands.
“Later. There’s a different part of my anatomy that needs satisfying now. And that would be my stomach.”
He lifted the can. “Soup and grilled cheese or ordering in, I think those are our options.”
“Soup and grilled cheese sounds perfect. Amazing. I love it.”
“Are you always this easy to have around?” Rob put the can down and slid his hands around her waist, pulling her to him. He was still astonished at how perfectly her body lined up with his, and the ease between them he wasn’t sure he had ever felt around anyone else.
Kari tilted her head, a tiny smile curving her lips. “I don’t know. I’m always around me. I find myself pretty easy to deal with, but that hasn’t always been the consensus opinion from everyone else.”
“Who are these cretins? Never mind. If they hadn’t been cretins, you wouldn’t be here.”
Kari’s mouth stretched into an uncertain smile. Rob was falling awfully easily into a very…couple-y rhythm. With anyone else she got along with this well, she would have been thrilled. But with the history Rob had, she was slightly worried.
“What’s with the furrowed brow?” he asked, stroking a thumb across her forehead.
“No furrows,” she said, pulling out of his arms. “Let me at the bread and cheese. You heat up the soup. A feast.”
“A nice division of labor,” he said, but now he had a definite crease between his eyebrows.
Kari moved to the counter where a half a loaf of wheat bread and a bag of deli-sliced cheese were lying. “Butter and a frying pan?” she asked. Rob supplied her with what she asked for without a word, silence stretching between them.
Kari assembled two sandwiches and heated some butter in the frying pan while Rob opened a can of soup and poured it into a saucepan. Kari bumped his hip with hers when they arrived at the stove together, giving him a little sideways smile as she put the two sandwiches in the pan to toast.
His smile in return was tight, absentminded.
Fighting the urge to just throw up her hands and go back to her house, paint smell be damned, Kari was about to ask Rob how his office decluttering was going just to put them back in more neutral territory— when the sound of the front door opening and closing made her stiffen.
“Dad?” Mia’s voice rang through the house.
“In the kitchen,” Rob called out.
Oh, crap. Kari looked down at her chest. The ancient tee shirt she was wearing draped way too softly and easily across her breasts that were far too obviously not supported by a bra. She folded her arms across her chest as quick footsteps pattered from the front door toward the kitchen.
“Hi Da—” Mia paused for a second in the doorway, her eyes scanning from Rob to Kari and back to Rob, bright smile getting brighter and taking on a sort of manic edge. “Kari, hi.”
“Hi Mia.” Kari tried to match the younger woman’s smile wattage and gave a tight little wave while keeping one arm wrapped around her. And all the while trying to figure out how she might get past Mia, down the hall, into her…father’s bedroom…and put on a bra.
Yeah, that wasn’t happening.
“Hey kiddo.” Rob ambled over to Mia and hugged her, bending to press a kiss to her forehead. “What brings you over?”
“Nothing urgent,” Mia said, backing out of the room. “We can talk later. I didn’t know you had a guest.”
Rob followed her, his voice trailing back into the kitchen. “You sure?”
“I’m sure. You have fun. Bye, Kari!” This last seemed to be tossed at velocity as Mia and Rob said a few more murmured words and Mia hustled out of the house, the front door closing softly behind her.
Rob re-entered the kitchen, a funny smile on his face. “I don’t think I’ve seen her exit a conversation that fast since when I tried to have a talk with her about puberty when she was twelve.”
Kari slapped a hand across her eyes, then peered at Rob through her fingers. “I don’t know what to do with myself just now.”
“Do what I always do with Mia. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Rob stirred the soup and shot her a resigned grin that made her want to dissolve into the floor.
“That would take a hell of a lot of work,” Kari said, flipping the grilled cheese. “Note to self: wear a bra at all times. Wear a bra to bed. Shower in a bra. Wear a bra over a bra.”
“Stop.” Rob abandoned the soup and took Kari’s shoulders in his hands. “Mia’s an adult. She even wanted this to happen, remember?”
“I don’t think she wanted to walk in on the aftermath and have it shoved in her face like that, though.” The entire scene was so inappropriate, Kari wanted to curl up in a ball and let the ground open up and swallow her whole.
“There was no shoving.”
“Well, she walked in on what must have looked like a pretty cozy scene, me hanging out in your kitchen without supportive undergarments. She must have been pretty uncomfortable.”
“She wasn’t uncomfortable.”
“She bolted out of here fast enough.”
“She told me she didn’t want to intrude.”
“How could I have made her feel like an intruder in her own home?” The rising tide of guilt sloshed through Kari, threatening to drown her.
Rob’s fingers flexed, giving her a gentle shake. “Stop. This isn’t her home anymore. Lord knows she took everything she owned out of it when she got her first place, just to make it clear that she was grown and on her own. Didn’t even leave so much as a Lego for me to step on barefoot in the middle of the night. Hugo has spent more nights here than she has since then and he’s not even two years old.”
The roiling in Kari began to ebb a bit as she considered Rob’s words. She had been thinking of Mia as a child—the little girl she sketched in her imagination, standing next to Rob at the lake’s edge. She wasn’t. She was a young woman with a life of her own and probably a love life of her own.
On second thought, Kari couldn’t decide if that made things better or worse.
“Seriously. It’s okay.” Rob turned from Kari’s guilt-stricken face, turned the stove off and plated the soup and grilled cheese. Emotions ping-ponged through his body. So much had happened so quickly. Friendship and laughter and camaraderie had turned into lust and excitement. And among it all, the chilly moment earlier in the kitchen sat like lead among the whirl.
They took their meals to the little breakfast nook and sat. Kari took a tiny bite of sandwich, a tiny sip of soup.
Rob dunked a corner of his sandwich in the warm soup and bit into it, the taste making him realize how hungry he really was. He kept himself from immediately wolfing everything down, but just barely, while Kari picked at her meal.
“Eat,” he said. “You told me you were starving.”
“My stomach is kind of jittery now,” Kari confessed, but she did spoon more soup into her mouth.
This whole…whatever it was that he was doing with Kari was a little more complicated than he had counted on when it started.
“Does me being a dad bother you?” he asked.
Her light blue gaze flicked up, surprise evident on her face. “Bother me? No. Why would you ask that?”
“This seems like a bit of a heavy freak-out based on one visit from my kid.”
“It’s just…new to me.”
“It’s new to me having some woman bedeviling my life and blowing my mind in bed. Or it might as well be.”
She gave him a level look. “What was dating like when you did date? When she was a kid?”
“Liz and I had fifty/fifty joint custody. One week on, one week off. So I would only go on dates when Mia was with her mother. It made dating awkward, trying to pack everything into every other week.”
“Mia never met anyone you were dating?”
“Not really. A couple of women when she was a teen, right before I stopped dating entirely.”
Kari rolled her eyes. “Oh, so now this is even more weird. I’m the first woman she’s seen you with in about ten years?”
Rob reached across the table and covered one of her hands with his. “Mia. Is. An. Adult. Trust me, back in the day, I didn’t want to come to grips with that reality. But I did. And you know what? I like my adult kid. She’s a pretty great person. The last few years I’ve been sorting out who I am without her around. It’s nice not to be responsible for someone else. Do I miss her? Sure, sometimes. Sometimes a lot. But that’s what you do when you’re a parent. Your entire job is to make sure that you help them grow and develop into people who, when they’re out on their own, they are independent and strong and don’t need you. And she doesn’t need me. At least, not like when she was living here half the time.”
Kari gave a little nod, her chin coming forward. “I guess I get it intellectually, but emotionally…I try to imagine my dad dating and my brain fritzes out.”
“But your parents never went through a divorce or separation, right?”
She nodded again. “Yeah. They were always crazy for each other.”
“Whereas Liz and I just made each other crazy. Divorce isn’t great. In fact, it’s awful and I don’t recommend trying it. But Mia always knew we were better off apart and she also knew that whatever Liz and I said or did or thought, we both love her very much. It’s the only thing Liz and I could ever agree on, even though we disagreed about how to go about accomplishing it. A lot.”
“Mia’s pretty lucky, then.”
“I hope so. Finish your dinner and I’ll take you out for ice cream.”
Kari shot him a wry smile. “I’ll be sure to put on a bra first, though.”
Kari winced as her bra band snapped against her back. Served her right, she guessed. Shoving her arms back into the tee shirt, she pulled it over her head, smoothing her hair back from her forehead as her face emerged from the cotton.
Ice cream. This whole situation was half adult movie and half teenage sock hop date. And half awkward she didn’t even know what to do with it because being braless in the presence of the adult daughter of the guy she had just had sex with.
That was too many halves.
Rob popped his head into the bedroom. “Ready to go?”
Kari picked up a sneaker and sat on the bed to put it on. “Almost.”
He propped a shoulder against the doorframe. “Still freaked out?”
She tied her laces and picked up her second sneaker, trying to put her finger on what bugged her about the scenario. “I guess I’m wondering why you’re not more freaked out. Your dating hiatus is a lot longer than mine, after all.”
Rob thought for a moment, rubbing his jaw. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the dating hiatus. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I’m comfortable with being a dad. And I know Mia. You don’t, so you’re reacting to a generic scenario, not a person.”
Kari paused in the action of looping a shoelace, her stomach plunging toward her toes. “God, you’re right. I’m sorry. That’s kind of shitty.”
Rob waved a hand. “Like you said before, this is new for both of us. But it does raise the question: how long was your dating hiatus?”
“Five years.”
“And why did your last relationship end?”
“His job. Moved across the country.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t dated since,” Rob shook his head, a flattering look of wonder spreading across his face.
“I think you’re rapidly becoming biased,” Kari said, getting to her feet and joining him at the doorway.
“No, I have assessed the data and found the conclusion inexplicable. You’re smart, determined, beautiful—”
“And also over forty, very tall, and usually very solitary. Not exactly a successful dating profile to put on one of those apps or anything.”
“Did you ever try that? The dating app scene?”
Kari shuddered. “No. Unlike you, I’m not into tech. I mean, I do the basics. I’m not a total Luddite. But dating was never important enough to me to sign up for a service or anything. And some of the stories I’ve heard sound like Stephen King wrote them.”
“And dating just wasn’t on my radar at all until a certain Viking Shield Maiden moved in next door.”
“My bad. Should I just go spend the night on my couch?”
Rob threaded his fingers through hers and pulled her to the front door. “Bite your tongue.”
“Ouch. Can I bite something else?”
He shot her a wicked smile. “I’ll draw up a list.”