Chapter Seventy-Four

Safiya

"H old on to that honesty, beautiful." Dropping his hand from my cheek, he tipped his chin toward the kitchen and raised his voice just enough for his mother to hear. "Go."

"I see he's bossing you around already."

My heart pounding an erratic beat, my face already flushed, an entirely new wave of heat flooded through my veins and sank to the fluttering mess low in my belly as an ache between my legs throbbed. Embarrassed and breathless, I glanced at his mother.

Holding on to the counter with one hand, she smiled knowingly at me. "I may be old, but I know my son."

"You had me when you were eighteen. You're not old, Mom." Moving around both of us, Grayson filled the entire kitchen as he grabbed a bowl of blueberries off the counter and turned on the sink's faucet.

It suddenly occurred to me that I did not know his age. It also occurred to me that I had never seen him do anything as domestic as what he was doing now. "How old are you?" Seeing his large hands gently sifting through the berries as he washed them sent shivers up my spine that curled around the deepest longings in my soul that I was too terrified to acknowledge.

Oblivious to my sudden and immutable fall into desolate pining, Grayson answered, "Thirty-eight," at the same time his mother said, "Fifty-six."

Grayson strained the berries through his deft, long fingers.

His mother raised an eyebrow at me. "How many turns around the sun have you had, Safiya?"

With his back to us both, Grayson answered before I could. "She's twenty-five, Mom." He glanced over his shoulder. "Almost twenty-six." His expression didn't change, and yet, it did. Commanding, governing, effective, his darkly dominant gaze landed on me as his voice lowered so slightly, I was not sure his mother noticed it. "We'll discuss your birthday when we discuss our marital status."

His mother shook her head, but then she laughed. Light and almost like the flittering music of wind chimes, it was so ethereal, the sound so magical, I could almost see how she must have been as a young woman. "Oh, Grayson. I do hope you know what you're doing." She smiled at me with the innocence of a woman who had known love young and had held on to it. "Because this one is going to break your heart." She smiled warmly at me. "No offense meant, Safiya. I already love you. Whatever will happen, will happen." She reached for the cabinet above her, but Grayson was already there.

Opening the cupboard door and pulling down tins of flour and sugar like he had done it thousands of times, he verbally sparred with his mother. "One of us has to know what they're doing." Grayson glanced at the flour tin. "When was the last time you checked an expiration date on this shit? When I was fifteen?"

"It's not shit, and you ate me out of house and home when you were fifteen. The flour's fine." Raine glanced at me and winked. "It can't be older than the day you left for boot camp."

"That was twenty fucking years ago, Mom." He looked inside the tin. "I'm not smelling this shit for viability."

Raine raised an eyebrow at me in the exact same manner as her son had. "Does he purposely swear around you, too, so he can get a reaction?"

I did not have time to answer.

"No," Grayson interjected. "I'm a perfect gentlemen around her." He glanced at me and winked. "When she isn't wearing a bikini."

I blushed hard, and Raine shook her head. "I swear, I raised him better than this." She reached inside a lower cabinet and came away with a muffin pan.

"Who raised me?" Grayson took a bowl out of a cupboard.

Raine handed me the muffin pan before opening a drawer. "Strap in. You're about to hear how my son magically raised himself, took care of the house, and kept us fed." She handed me a small container of paper muffin liners. "But only one of those things is true."

"They're all true." Grayson took a glass bottle from the fridge. "My first job was when I was eight. I still hate mowing lawns."

Raine sighed as she sat down at the kitchen table. "Okay, fine. But who taught you how to shoot?"

"The Navy." Grayson placed the bowl, a mixing spoon, the glass bottle, the blueberries, and the baking supplies in front of his mother. "Slingshots don't count."

Raine gave her son an affronted look. "Slingshots more than count. You handled that bully picking on the neighbor's boy."

Grayson's expression turned to that of a lethal SEAL. "Not with a slingshot, I didn't."