Page 7 of Her Painter Bear Mate

She glanced up and realised Clarissa was still there, looking at her with half a smile. It was slightly uncomfortable, mostly because Dee didn't know what to say.

"So, trivia, huh?" Dee said in a feeble attempt to make conversation.

"There's a weekly game night in the pub," Clarissa said. "We're actually pretty good. We win regularly."

"And what do you win?"

"Free beer for the team. Glass of wine if they're feeling generous."

Dee's eyebrows raised. "Aha. How cliché. I’m guessing you have a lame team name, too?"

"The Trivia Musketeers."

"The Trivia Musketeers..."

"It's a pun," Clarissa said with that cheeky grin of hers.

"I got that, believe it or not. I'll reserve my thoughts because I happen to like Asim."

A twinkle appeared in Clarissa's eyes. "You should join us sometime. It's fun."

Dee couldn't think of anything worse than spending a night in a pub with strangers and feeling humiliated when she didn't know the answer.

"I'll pass, thank you," she said curtly.

"Really? That's a shame." Clarissa hesitated for a moment, like she had something important she wanted to say or ask. “Would you like to grab a coffee sometime? Maybe? To kind of catch up?”

Before Dee could reply, a loud bang came from the kitchen and Michael burst into tears. Almost instantly, Dee was swarmed with women trying to soothe her nephew. It overwhelmed her and the baby, causing him to cry even harder. She turned around to hand him back to her sister but Sissy was no longer on the couch.

"Just give them some space," Clarissa said, ushering the crowd away with an unusually firm voice.

Dee shot her a grateful smile while she kept soothing her nephew, not that it helped. Luckily, his crying summoned Sissy who arrived with her arms wide open.

"Can't even have a moment to pee in peace, can I?" she said as she took her baby. He nestled his head against her chest and like magic, stopped crying but his eyes remained wide open. Sissy stroked his head gently, clearly completely besotted with him. "Maybe it's time for a nap."

"I don't know how she does that," Dee mused, mostly to herself. "Maybe it comes automatically with motherhood."

Clarissa let out a light scoff. "Trust me, it doesn't." She said it with such conviction, it could only come from first-hand experience.

"Do you, umm...?" Dee wasn't quite sure how to ask. "Do you have kids?"

"God, no. But my mother was cold and frigid and walked out on us when I was still a child so it definitely doesn't come automatically with motherhood." The bitterness in Clarissa's voice was palpable.

Dee sucked in her lips. "Sorry, I didn't know that."

"There's a lot you don't know about me," she said before walking away without another word.

Guilt gnawed at Dee. She didn’t understand how she hadn’t noticed there was no Mrs Foster. She spent hours at the craft store, testing out pens and paints, asking a hundred questions about the brand, the make, the inks. It was the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else but he always patiently answered everything. Back then, she vaguely remembered thinking she hadn't met Mrs Foster but she never knew the woman just left.

She never bothered to ask. Either of them. She'd never really treated them as real people. In her mind, Mr Foster was just a nice man and Clarissa her rival, her competition.

As a child, that was excusable. But as an adult, she should've known better.

SIX

Clarissa

Clarissa nibbled on another biscuit while she kept her distance from Dee. If this had been any other event, she would've just left but that would raise more questions. Questions she didn't want to answer because frankly, she felt embarrassed. The burning pit of shame she wrestled with as a teenager was an all too familiar feeling.

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