Page 54 of Not Quite Perfect

“No. Give me the goddamn key.”

After a few seconds spent in a silent face off, he blew out a breath and reached into his pocket. Pulling out his keychain, he removed the key and passed it to me. “This was my house too, you know.”

I scoffed. “Yeah, until you cheated on my mother and she left you.”

“That doesn’t make the memories I’ve got of this place any less real.”

I rolled my eyes. “Would those be the memories of you bringing your mistress out here so Mom wouldn’t find out? Or when you showed up unannounced and stole my girlfriend from me?”

His face turned red. “She wasn’t your girlfriend, and I didn’t steal her from you. You can’t steal something you never had.”

I clenched my fingers around the key until the metal bit painfully into my skin. “Get out.”

He bent forward at the waist, glancing down the hall toward where my girlfriend and his wife had disappeared. I didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that we couldn’t hear what was happening back there.

“We don’t have anywhere to go,” he said straightening and looking me dead in the eye. The next ferry out isn’t until the morning.”

“Not my problem.”

“You’d throw us out into the cold?”

We squared off against one another. As much as I might have wanted to kick them out, if the inn was without heat as well, they really didn’t have anywhere else to go. It wasn’t like my dad had any friends left on the island after the way he’d abandoned my mom all those years ago.

“We need wood. The furnace is on the fritz.”

“Roni and I will drive into town and pick some up.” He reached forward to lay his hand on my shoulder, but I moved out of the way. This wasn’t some precious bonding experience that we’d all laugh about later.

“And get your wife under control,” I barked, cringing as I heard the words leave my mouth. The notion that a man needed to control his woman went against everything I believed about equality, butsomeonehad to try and bring Victoria’s mother to heel. She obviously wasn’t going to do it herself. “I don’t want to hear one negative word out of her mouth about Victoria and me. If she so much as raises her voice in my presence, I will throw you both out. Do you understand?”

He stared at me for a beat, his lips thinning into a tight, unhappy line. Finally, he nodded, a small dropping of his chin toward his chest. “Understood.” He circled around me, moving toward the back of the house to collect his wife and head to the store for firewood.

* * *

“Oh my god.”Victoria rocked back and forth on the sofa, her elbows on her knees and her face buried in her palms. “My mother saw me naked.”

“She gave birth to you,” I said, using my most soothing voice as I rubbed circles over her back. “She bathed you as a baby.”

Her hands dropped away and she speared me with a disbelieving look. “Yes, but I wasn’tcovered in semenat the time, was I?”

My neck grew hot and my gaze bounced away. When she put it like that, yeah. Not exactly your finest mother-daughter bonding moment.

“And your dad! Now he’s seen me naked too!” She surged to her feet and paced the length of the room before turning around and marching back toward me.

“He assures me he didn’t see anything.”

She shot me another look. This one said, “If you believe that I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.”

Victoria reached for her purse and pulled out her phone. Stabbing her fingers against the glass screen, she brought it to her ear.

“Who are you calling?”

She held up a finger in the universal gesture forgive me a goddamned minuteand then started speaking when someone picked up on the other end. “Um, yes. Hello. My mother is a guest at your inn, but she just showed up at my boyfriend’s house saying the heat is out there.” Victoria tapped her foot as she listened to the other person’s voice. “Mmm-hmm. Yes, I see. Okay. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.” She ended the call and tossed her phone onto the couch.

“They’re not staying here with us,” she said, joining the device on the sofa.

“What?” She huffed and pulled her legs up under her, sitting cross-legged facing me. “Was my dad lying?”

Honestly, it was hard to tell with him sometimes. There was a reason he’d been the best salesperson in his division for nearly a decade before he’d retired a couple of years ago.

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