Page 58 of Mace

“Did I interrupt something?” He grins like he swallowed a boomerang.

“No,” I say at the same time as Mace answers, “Yes.”

Toby slips around me, beaming. “I’m Toby,” he says, offering Mace his hand.

“Mace.”

My brother’s eyes narrow on him. “How do you know Maylie?”

Before he can answer, I grab my brother’s arm, tugging him towards the door. “Okay, since you’re not a detective, and I don’t need you to interrogate my life, time to go back inside.”

“The fact you won’t tell me only adds fuel to the fire,” he says.

I relent, knowing my brother is going to be an annoying little brat if I don’t. “He’s a colleague from work, and this is not a conversation for you to be involved in. Please go back inside.” He smirks, but thankfully, Toby lets me off the hook, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that tells me he is not going to drop this.Great. The last thing I want to explain to him is who Mace is to me because then I have to admit it to myself.

And then I have to admit he can’t be mine.

Right now, that’s still a possibility.

I close the door behind my brother and take a steadying breath. How am I going to explain this?

Plastering on a smile, I turn to Mace, who is staring at me with an intense look I can’t read.

“I better sort the milk situation,” I say. “Don’t want him to stage a revolution because he can’t have cereal this morning.”

“He’s too old to be your kid,” he muses.

I frown. He wouldn’t suggest that if he knew that I’d never so much as been touched by the opposite sex. “No, he’s not. Toby is my brother.”

“You still live with your parents?”

I can’t tell if the thought of this is a turn-off for him, but I’d imagine it is. Mace doesn’t look like the kind of guy who stayed living in his old bedroom until he was wellinto his twenties. “I’ll see you tonight,” I tell him, sidestepping the question, my chest heavy.

“Rather than face a revolution over cereal, why don’t you both have breakfast with me?”

I don’t know why, but the fact he invites my little brother to breakfast makes my chest feel warm. But he’s going to run as soon as he knows the truth, so I might as well rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with.

“Well, it’s not just Toby. There’s also Ivy, my little sister, and I use ‘little’ in the loosest sense of the term. She’s almost eighteen and going through a phase,” which is the greatest understatement on the planet. “And I don’t live with my parents. Our mother is dead. Cancer got her good and proper about four years ago. It was rough, I’m not gonna lie, though at the end, it was almost a blessing when she went. At least all the suffering was done, until I remembered she left behind two young kids. So, I did the only thing I could and took guardianship of them, because there was no way in hell I was letting them go into foster care, which was looking like the only option since we don’t really have any family. None that care anyway.

“Dad took off like a whippet the moment Mum was given that terminal diagnosis. He said he didn’t want to watch her die, but I think it was just an excuse. He’d always had one foot out the door ever since Toby was born. Which means I’ve been a parent the last four years of my life, so when there’s no milk in the fridge, unfortunately, that’s my problem to deal with. And I’m not joking when I say he will stage a revolution—growing preteen boys are a nightmare. So, enjoy your breakfast, and I’ll see you back at work maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, if you’re there.”

What in the infodump was that, Maylie?

At least now he’s going to see how shitty my life is and he’ll lose interest. Better now than when I’m more besotted than I am already.

As I turn to head back inside, I’m mindful of the fact his expression never changed or flickered for even a second during my entire ramble, and that makes me nervous. I don’t like not knowing what he’s thinking, and it makes my tongue want to loosen more than it already did in an attempt to explain myself.

“Maylie.” My name rolling in that deep voice of his sends a wave of deliciousness through me.

How does he make that sound so good?

He moves in behind me, and I’m aware of his huge frame at my back, but I’m too cowardly to turn to face him. I don’t want to see his rejection of me.

“They can come too.”

I turn to him, trying to read his expression. Is he just saying what he thinks I want to hear? “Eating out is expensive, Mace. A pint of milk is not. And I’m not exactly getting paid while I’m off work.”

He scoffs. “You ain’t paying,” he says, sounding offended. “I’ll wait downstairs.”

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