Page 65 of Sugar Baby Mine

He’s surprisingly content being carried as I walk us down the hallway, even when I pause at the sight in the kitchen of Ben cooking breakfast at the stove with his back to us. He’s got his apron on again, but no shirt, just the broad expanse of his backon display. My gaze flits over the numbers inked between his shoulder blades and the ones curving under his ribs. I’ve never been more interested in numerology.

Stepping quietly, I slide up behind him and hold out one of Pebbles’s paws to press into his back.

His reaction is exactly what I was looking for.

“Shit!” Ben flinches, whipping around with the spatula in his hand. I immediately step back, lest we get smacked with the hot utensil.

A splatter of scrambled eggs lands on Pebbles’s head, who immediately is pawing and licking at himself to catch a bite.

“Jesus Christ.” A sigh deflates his tense shoulders. “I need to put a bell on you or something.”

“You want to buy me a collar? I’d be down to wear one for you. Never done that before, but it sounds hot.”

His eyes roll, but there’s heat in the depth of that friendly brown as his gaze flicks down my body, all the way to my painted toes. He takes a step forward to bridge our gap, but then his grip tightens on the spatula and he turns back around to the stove where the skillet is sizzling.

“You’re young, I’m sure there’s a lot you haven’t done.”

I don’t know why that stings, but it does. Not like it isn’t true.

“Good thing I have such an experienced teacher, then.” I lower Pebbles to the floor, and he skitters off around the corner of the island to sit at his food and water bowls, taking the cue to eat his own breakfast.

Ben snorts. “There is plenty of shit I haven’t explored yet,” he says, moving the skillet off the burner and killing the flame. “I spent too long in a marriage with a wife who didn’t love me. And that hindered me in every aspect of my life.”

“Why didn’t you separate sooner?”

He’s plating the eggs and some crispy bacon as I peer around his shoulder, my fingers grazing the bare skin of his back justabove the dark blue pajama pants. I track the way he arranges everything on the plate so carefully, adding a scoop of fresh berries to round it out.

“Because I was desperate for it to work out. Like I could somehow convince her that she was in love with me just like I was with her.”

The quiet drop of his voice hurts my heart. Actual, physical pain.

I rub my fingers over my breastbone, like I can soothe it away.

“Did…did she ever love you? In the beginning?”

“If you asked me that two years ago, I probably would have said yes. But today, I’m pretty confident she never did.”

Ben turns and hands me a plate and fork before grabbing his own and nudging me to sit at the island. I hop onto the stool next to him as he settles down, swiveling in my seat so I’m turned toward him, enough that my knee presses into his thigh.

“But you loved her?” I ask, picking up a slice of bacon and crunching down on it. It’s crispy and on the edge of burnt, exactly the way I like it. “Mmm.”

“I think I was more in love with the idea of her. She was a childhood friend, and I connected a lot of her to memories of my father, something I was desperate to have when he passed away.”

Something settles in my stomach thick and heavy, and it’s not the bacon.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” he says while stabbing through two raspberries and bringing them up to his mouth. He chews carefully before saying more. “He’s been gone a long time now, but it still feels like yesterday sometimes.”

And here I am, having burned the bridges with both my parents and so glad for it. But there can be many types of family dynamics, and this is just where the dice have landed for me.Envy beats hard in my chest until I take a bite of the eggs, and they’re cheesy fluffy goodness.

“I fucking love breakfast.”

“Really?”

“Well”—I pause, taking another bite—“maybe it’s just your cooking. You could have sat a steak in front of me and I probably would have said I love dinner, despite it only being nine in the morning. I bet you can cook the hell out of a steak. Oh, we should have steak and eggs sometime. That’s a bomb breakfast. I don’t even actually eat breakfast all that often. But breakfast for dinner? Revolutionary. Even these berries taste better than usual. Did you sprinkle some crack on these?” I take a second bite of a strawberry, the juice running down my chin.

Ben reaches out and takes hold of my jaw, meeting me halfway as he brings me close and darts his tongue out to lick up my chin. He murmurs against my lips, “Why don’t you eat breakfast that often?”

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