Page 5 of Service Included

“At Wiffle Waffle.” He shook his head. “I can’t even say that place’s name without smirking.”

Nico’s presence in this house was an epic setup, as far from coincidence as the secret back door to the Death Star had turned out to be. Her mother, always trying to encourage her still-seeking-other daughter, was presumably in full possession of pertinent details regarding her poker partner’s son. Megan was confident Nico was single, addiction-free, employed, and neither a narcissist nor a sociopath. She assumed her mother, sex podcast producer, was also fully aware of Nico’s appeal. What Megan didn’t know was how she should feel about this development. Or how he did.

“But there’s no Mrs. LaSorda in the Wiffle Waffle Librarians Social Club, is there?” Nico continued speaking almost as if he hadn’t recognized their mothers were casting a rom-com. “I had to engrave their names on that antique vase they use as a trophy.”

“The giant Moscow Mule pitcher?” Her mother’s crowd had become day drinkers after they retired. Night drinkers too, but she wasn’t going to police the woman who’d raised her.

He nodded. “That one.”

“LaSorda is my father’s last name. My mother’s Kathy Jensen.” She’d inherited more of her mother’s Scandinavian coloring than her father’s part-Italian heritage.

“Ms. Jensen? The one with the rainbow hair?”

Her turn to nod over the colorful changes her mother had embraced once she’d been liberated from materials acquisition budget meetings.

“My mother is Greta Galianakos,” he added.

Megan recalled the frizzy-haired lady with the loud hands who’d given her a high chair at the baby shower, and her son who’d caused such a— “Oh, are you the one…” She stopped.

She’d walled off most of the last months of her pregnancy, when she didn’t know how she was going to afford living in Seattle on a graduate student’s limited income while raising a baby whose father had left the country. The shower was one of the few times when she could recall laughing during that period.

He dipped his head apologetically. “Uh, yeah, we don’t need to…”

For an awkward moment, she wondered how to escape the sudden, yawning pit in the conversation.

“Come on, people.” Tyler, the other mover, looked up from reading his phone.

She’d forgotten he was there.

“You can’t quit now,” Tyler said. “What’d my boss do?”

“Nothing.” She flipped her hand vaguely. Flirting 101: Don’t talk about any baby shower, especially not your own, with a hot guy. “I don’t remember.”

Nico directed a look at Tyler that apparently conveyed silent guy communication, because the younger man said, “Guess I’ll go grab boxes from the truck,boss.”

“Good idea, you do that.”

The click of the door closing behind Tyler shouldn’t have startled her. She’d been watching, after all. But in the new silence, her attention centered on the deeper sounds of Nico breathing. Her shoulder muscles tensed, and she wondered if her pulse had skipped.

“Whatwasin that huge box my mother made me carry?”

She let out a breath, resigned to going there, at least briefly. “A high chair.”Yes, I had a baby who is now eight and, yes, I’m a single mom.

He rolled his shoulders, a move that flexed the fabric across his chest while she read the bad pun for at least the tenth time. Nico exuded the casual confidence inherent in good-looking men, ones who looked sexy enough to grace a magazine cover even when they scrubbed shower grout. No doubt his life was sufficiently charmed that he could run errands without his hair losing its touchability, pick up dry-cleaning without having the thin plastic bag cling around his legs, and open beer bottles without foam erupting from the top. Did he even know that his just-working-with-my-hands look was a magnet to women surrounded by office drones? Possibly not. He seemed too sincere.

Her plotting sex-talk podcaster mother, however, unquestionably knew that Greta’s son would tempt like a popsicle on a hot day.A-nee-thing, she’d said. Right.

“My mother still teases me about the flowers I knocked over.” His gaze flicked to a spot lower than her chest, then back to her face, too quickly to feel like he’d assessed her figure.

Comprehension of his swift glance arrived at her brain an instant later than it seemed to occur to the rest of her body, because her throat was paralyzed before she understood why: He’d checked her ring finger. Her empty ring finger.

“I'm sorry.” The expression in his eyes changed to contrition. “I must have reeked and been a total jerk. It was the morning after the game against the Huskies. I was nineteen, and I don't think I sobered up until at least five hours after the mess I made at your party. I was stupid and…" he took a deep breath. "Well, really stupid.”

“You were there five minutes at most.” The part of her mind that spun fantasies calculated his current age as twenty-seven to her own thirty-five, notnecessarilytoo young for her. And it wasn’t like she had snakes growing out of her head. She was better than passable. “Seriously, the vase was the type that comes free with every bouquet.”

“Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but I was obnoxious, and I’m sorry.”

Back then, the distance between a nineteen-year-old undergrad and a twenty-seven-year-old mom-to-be had meant all she’d noticed about him was his buffoonery, but now he was the age she’d been when she’d had Callie. The ocean of experience that had once separated them had shrunk to become a wide bay, crossable if they wanted.

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