Page 35 of Faking It With the Grumpy Single Dad

It’s the worst time for me to become speechless, but I can’t help it.

The truth is that I wasn’t faking it. Not with the lingering touches and attentive glances. It was the only way I knew how to let her know that I was there, that I wasn’t leaving her, and that she wasn’t alone in dealing with that pompous brat.

I can’t tell her that, though. An admission like that would shift things between us. It’d cross a line.

Because, at the end of the day, she’s paying me to renovate her house. She’s the client and I’m the laborer.

I can’t be feeling anything even close to attraction for her.

I don’t know what to do, so I nod goodbye to her and leave the room. A moment later, I hear theclick-clackof her heels as she makes her way toward the back of the house. The swish of the back doors opening echoes down into the foyer, and then she disappears into the dunes.

When I join the rest of the guys, Eric claps a hand on my shoulder and raises his eyebrows.

“Everything okay?”

“Yep. Why wouldn’t it be?”

He gives me a look. The kind of look that tells me that he and everyone else can tell that something weird just happened between me and our client.

“It’s fine,” I insist, maybe a little too harshly. “Let’s just focus on what needs to get done today, okay?”

“Roger that, boss,” Eric replies.

Thisis what I’m here to do, after all. I’m here to fix up an old cottage according to my customer’s specifications. I’mnothere to rescue a damsel in distress, no matter how much she consumes my every waking thought.

The truth is, I think being Poppy’s knight in shining armor is way above my pay grade and far beyond my skill level. I’m not going to don a suit and take her to the ball. I’m going to stay right here where I belong in the dirt and sawdust, and mind my own business.

Chapter Eleven: Poppy

“Steamed clams, scalloped potatoes, and grilled asparagus fresh from the garden,” Sabrina announces with a proud smile, waving her arms at the dishes spread across the table in front of us like a glitzy game-show host.

Despite my sour mood, I laugh. She has a way of making everything feel like a celebration, even if this is just a normal Friday night. It reminds me of the family dinners I’ve only ever seen in the movies. Spending most of my childhood on the road meant that nice dinners were usually held in exclusive restaurants with the band, the critical staff, and a few executives from the record label.

And after my father passed away and Deb, the band’s manager and my mom-on-the-road, became my guardian, life was too chaotic and depressing for the both of us to even try to pretend at belonging to a normal family. Not that those years with Deb were terrible. They were just… different.

Not only that, they were also tinged with the shame that came with being completely unwanted by my actual mother.

I usually try to avoid thinking about Dahlia Mendez, but it’s moments like these when I’m painfully reminded of her without warning.

My mother was a bit of a stereotype. Pretty, glamorous, and spoiled. Born and raised in Los Angeles as the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood executive and a beautiful starlet of the silver screen. By the time she was twenty, she was known as America’s loveliest party girl—a fashionable socialite who was often photographed with some of the most famous people in the entertainment industry.

She met my father when she was twenty-one. He was only a couple years older than her, and Schism was just barely starting to gain traction on the music charts. As Randall, Schism’s drummer, once told me, it was one of those love-at-first-sight situations.

But experiencing love at first sight doesn’t mean that the love will last.

Long story short: for a couple years, my mother was Jack Minton’s beloved girlfriendandfamous in her own right, too. Half the world was completely obsessed with both of them. But things were already starting to sour by the time she became pregnant with me. My dad was a workaholic; he was deeply serious about his craft despite his public rockstar persona. He was married to the music, and had no intention of settling down to give Dahlia Mendez the chic housewife lifestyle she craved.

So, she left. She left both of us.

Nowadays, she’s living a cookie-cutter life in Glendale, California with her normal, accountant husband and their two perfect honor roll children. I’m pretty sure they have a golden retriever and a white picket fence, too, if you can believe it.

When my father died and I needed a guardian, the obvious first option that the court explored was sending me back to my mother.

Dahlia refused, though. She signed over full custody to my father a decade prior to his death and had no interest in letting a ghost from her past destroy her flawless suburban life.

So, I went to stay with my grandmother in London for a little while. Then, when it became clear that I wasn’t doing well in that environment, Deb brought me back to LA.

I’ve never had a normal family. Never had a normal life. Aiden and Sabrina have no idea how lucky they are that they were raised in such regular, uninteresting households with limited complications. I’m not spiteful of them in the slightest, but it is always painfully obvious to me how bizarre my life has been when I’m confronted with something as normal as a home-cooked dinner at a friend’s house.

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