Her non-custodial weekend to-do list was crowded to overflowing. A couple extra work shifts to bank against her upcoming road trip. A few hours helping Mary Lynn box up fragile items and load them into Goldberg’s truck. Feeding Mary Lynn and Goldberg so they wouldn’t fret over cooking after packing all day. Groceries and laundry and an oil change and getting to the gas station in time to fuel up before going inside to wait for Sergei to drop Hannah back to her.
All in all, not a second to spare. Not to wonder if she should have called Theo. Or to debate if Sergei sending Theo to the gas station again would make her mad. Or to answer any of the insinuations in Gillian’s texts.
By Wednesday night, she gave up trying to fool herself. She likely couldn’t even fool Hannah, who kicked her heels against her car seat a good half-dozen times, sparking her light-up sandals, while Rachel slicked on bright lip gloss then fluffed out her curls.
She winked at her kiddo in the rearview mirror. “You ready to go find Daddy?” She didn’t add a word about Theo. That particular search was hers alone.
Months of Wednesday nights and every other weekends, a hefty percentage of them involving hand-offs at Elixir, and she’d never noticed Theo. Not until he’d turned up holding her daughter, and she’d mistaken him for her toasted turdball of an ex-husband.
Now if she didn’t quite seek him out at the brewery, she was aware he was there. Cognizant of his movements. Alert to the interplay of her pulse and his proximity.
Damned inconvenient, if she got right down to it. Hard to pretend someone was only there for casual sex if he inserted himself uninvited in all kinds of her thoughts.
She and Hannah hadn’t cleared the vestibule before she was facing a whole bad dream, good dream, nightmare trio of faces. Depy, Theo, and Sergei all approached. Hannah tugged loose of Rachel’s hand and wrapped her arms around Sergei’s legs, which diverted him before they had to make polite conversation for their daughter’s sake.
Another point in the ‘when Mama doesn’t treat Elixir like a house of horror, Hannah transitions are easy’ column.
Speaking of scary, Depy was visible behind Theo’s shoulder. She’d secured her wiry gray hair into her most disapproving bun, the one she fashioned to alert everyone to her dire mood. Even Sergei struggled to please her when she wore that bun. He’d trailed off mid-rant about needing an amniocentesis paternity test before the divorce was settled, merely because Depy collected her loose coil of hair and twisted it into the Bun of Displeasure.
It still marked the most in-her-favor statement Depy had ever made for Rachel.
But the woman was no longer her mother-in-law. No longer the provider of a roof over her and her infant’s heads.
Rachel ignored the bun, and the bristling woman wearing it. “Hi,” she said to Theo.
He rubbed the back of his neck. It was a feeble defense against the emotion-laden darts Depy was surely shooting at them both. “Hi.”
“How’ve you been?” She knew her voice was over-bright. Not much she could do about controlling it.
He shrugged, which gave her a nanosecond of Depy being invisible. “Good. Pretty good. You?”
When she pressed her lips together to mute her helpless giggle, the smooth glide of her gloss nearly undid her composure. “Not too bad. Want to duck away from prying ears and chat a minute?”
A damn cute blush bloomed on his cheekbones, and Rachel held herself still to absorb the sight. His hand dropped to reach towards her, and he was nodding.
She passed him the diaper bag. “Can you give that to Depy?”
His shoulders shook off his laugh, and he turned. “Here you go, Yia Yia.”
She muttered something too low and ungracious for Rachel to bother attending to it. Sergei was peering at the three of them like he was capable of solving the puzzle, so Rachel supposed his mother hadn’t gone straight to him after last week, telling tales. Interesting, but not her problem. She swooped in to give Hannah a good-bye kiss and headed out.
She didn’t have to look back to know Theo was following right behind her.
It was getting so he thought of the Elixir parking lot as ‘their’ place. So next time his cousin accused him of being an old romantic, Theo would call up the image of tire marks on pervious concrete bright with late-evening heat waves, and know Tomás was delusional.
She did shine, though, there with the sun bouncing off the hood of her car. “So I think Depy is on to us.”
She snorted. “Clever deduction. You must win every game of Clue.”
“Well, I don’t like to brag.”
If Tomás knew earning Rachel’s smile endeared the parking lot more to Theo, his cousin would fall about with mirth. Good thing he wasn’t a mind reader.
“So, listen.” Too brisk, too devoid of flirtatiousness.
He answered as if it would never occur to him she might blow him off. “Always happy to hear what you’re saying.”
Rachel crossed her arms, shrugging. “You’re right about Depy. I know it’s your place and you can do anything you want, but I’d prefer if you’re not right in the area when I bring Hannah in.”
“Okay.” He watched, but his quick reply didn’t get her to lower her shoulders. “I get it, I do. She reminds me enough of my great-aunts to keep me on my toes when you and I meet.”
She pursed her lips, but not in a sultry way.
“Hey,” he said, going for tempting, “how about dinner? You have any plans now?”
“Are you trying to distract me?”
“No.” He knew she knew it was a lie. Her shoulders shook, and she slipped her hands into her pockets.
“Don’t be cute.”
“You’re the cute one. We established that.” He watched, but she didn’t even blink at his words. Not a hint that she’d been mentally transported back to her bedroom with him.
“I’ve eaten.”
He glanced at his phone. It was early, but he didn’t live with a schedule that involved getting a kid to daycare first thing every morning.
She shrugged. “I was hungry.”
“Fair enough. How about we do something else? Or get dinner another time? Lunch, if that’s easier. So you don’t have to get a sitter.”
“Theo.”
“Casual. You said casual, and I’m being casual. Just, in a persistent way. Lunch is casual.”
At least he’d gotten another smile. “Lunch is only casual if it doesn’t mean all kinds of scheduling and dealing with the hospital parking garages and any number of other things.”
“Okay. No lunch. Want to bring Hannah over to swim at my place? Andres will be down in a couple of weeks, we can let them splash in the shallow end together.”
Rachel stepped back. “Are you feverish? Introducing each other to our kids is the very definition of not casual.”
He laughed. “I’ve known Hannah for months.”
“Still. That’s not the same as a play date. And she’s two; seven year olds don’t want to play with two year olds.”
“He’s six.”
“Still.” Her lips pressed like that was the last word on the subject.
Casual. Not while she was at work. Not with the kids. He drew a deep breath. “Coffee. Either before you go to work, or before you pick up Hannah at the end of the day. No big interruption to your schedule, no involving the kids. Just me, getting up early or bailing on this place at happy hour, driving to you and sharing some caffeine as we chat about our lives. Come on, Rachel. What do you say?”
Fresh haircut and new lip color aside, Theo was asking a lot of her.
Or, if not quite a lot, he was asking.
She somehow, in all her careful not thinking about him, hadn’t prepared for him to be asking.
Before he could finagle her work schedule and favorite latte flavor out of her, she said, “I’ve got an hour—seventy-eight minutes, maybe—before I pick Hannah up for bedtime. How far away is your place?”
That shut him up. Good. He cleared his throat. “Um, about two miles?”
“So it takes less time to get there than to mine?”
“Yeah.” Theo nodded, a promising half-grin stealing over his face. “About five minutes.”
“Great. You interested in spending a lot of minutes between now and seven twenty-five naked with me?”
She liked when he swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple shifted his beard around. She liked the flush of his warm skin and the heat of his eyes and the way her body sizzled when they were close to each other.
He dug his keys out of his pocket. “Want me to drive?”
She regarded him.
“Go on and text your friend first. Tell her where you’ll be.”
“Where will that be, exactly?” She tried to sound challenging. Not like his reading her mind and anticipating her need for safeguards was both a comfort and a turn-on.
Theo smiled like she’d fallen into a trap. Except not a trap, since he always left her feeling like there were plenty of escape routes if she needed them. “If only I had your cell number, I could text my address to you, and then you could forward it to her.” His raised brows and waggling phone and light tone squeegeed away any worries about how often he spoke to Sergei.
She’d shared the same info with Depy, after all, and heaven knew she trusted Theo three thousand times more than she did Depy. She recited her number, and swiped her screen to check the incoming message.
“Okay?”
She nodded. “You drive. I’ll text Serena and Gill.”
He held the car door for her. He closed it gently after she was seated. His jeans, now she got a view from the rear, seemed to have a crush on his ass.
It was possible they weren’t alone in that.