Page 76 of His Secret Obsession

I give her a tight smirk. “No need to go easy on my account. You never have before. Why start now?”

She sighs, giving me a look I can’t decipher. “I’m not kicking you when you’re already down. And I’m not here to bicker, I just came by to check on you.”

“Well,” I say, rubbing the back of my neck, “I appreciate that, but I’m doing fine. I’m actually kind of busy so…”

She gives me a look that clearly says she doesn’t believe me. “Humor an old lady and have lunch with me.”

“I’m not really hungry.”

She nods before giving me a flippant shrug. When she heads towards the kitchen doorway, I sigh with relief and begin following her through the living room. She peers over her shoulder at me, speaking casually. “Well, I’ll leave you then, and let you get back to whatever you were doing before. I’ll just call Maddison instead, and she can tell me what’s going on.”

I freeze. “What?”

She stops at the front door, giving me a knowing smile as she pulls it open. My heart begins to thump in my ears.

“I’ll just see you later, I suppose,” she says.

I squeeze my eyes shut. “I—no, wait.”

She turns back around, flashing a triumphant grin.

Dammit. I fell right into her trap. I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose as she closes the front door and breezes past me.

“Do you always get what you want?” I follow her back into the kitchen.

She smiles, gesturing towards the table while pointedly ignoring my question. “Sit down. We’ll eat lunch together, and you can tell me what happened.” When I make no move to sit,she gives me a saccharine smile. “Humor an old lady, Jax. At my age, it’s not like I have much time left.” She bats her eyelashes at me and I glower at her but find myself lowering into an empty chair.

“You are far too manipulative for an eighty-year-old woman,” I mutter.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She hums, making herself right at home as she moves around. Grabbing a few empty plates and silverware, she pours two glasses of sweet tea and sits a steaming plate full of food in front of me. When my stomach gives another angry rumble, I give up and dig in. The chicken nearly melts on my tongue, the cheese baked into the broccoli warm and gooey. I shovel large bites into my mouth, and I’m nearly half-way through my first plate when she speaks again.

“Talk.”

I sigh, swallowing a bite of food that suddenly holds less appeal. But I tell her everything: how I evacuated an entire building because I was jealous of her date, our agreement, how good things were between us, how I was falling deeper in love with her…how Luke proposed. I tell her how jealous and inadequate I felt as I stood behind her, watching my baby brother get down on one knee. How I couldn’t stay and watch without wanting to destroy everything around me. Luke walking in and looking at me like he hated me.

My Maddie looking heartbroken.

“That’s quite the story.” Mary is silent for a long minute, a thoughtful expression on her face as she dabs a napkin at the corner of her mouth. She sets it on her empty plate, leaning back to study me.

“I should have never gone near her,” I mumble, staring down at my own empty plate.

She makes some non-committal sound under her breath as she leans forward to scoop more food onto my plate. “Why not?”

“I had no right.” I take another bite, watching her forehead wrinkle.

“You were both consenting adults.”

“Luke is always going to feel like I betrayed him.” I scrub a hand over my face. “He thinks I took away his second chance with her. Like I stole her or some shit.”

Eyeing me over the rim of her glass, she takes a sip of tea before setting it down with a deep sigh. “You may have broken some kind of ‘bro code,’” she says, making air quotes. I can’t help but snicker at hearing an eighty-year-old woman use the wordsbroandcodetogether in a sentence. “But you didn’t steal her. She wasn’t his, and their relationship was over before anything happened between you two.” Heat creeps across my cheeks, and she frowns. “It was over, right?”

“Basically.” I take a sip of sweet tea before returning to my food, studiously avoiding her gaze. The time I jerked off in the doorway of her bedroom doesn’t really count…right? “That’s really not the point though.”

“Maybe if he knew—”

My head snaps back up. “No, no, even she doesn’t know everything, and I...no, that’s not going to fix anything.”

Her eyes harden, and she leans forward with pursed lips. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen her to being angry with me. “It might not fix anything,” she agrees. “But I think if he had a little more perspective, he would be more willing to extend you some grace. And I think she deserves to know.”

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