Page 75 of Second Chance for the Single Mom

And he has your hair, I thought.

“He likes you,” I said.

“I’m easy to like,” Lucas said smoothly. “And I’m good with kids.”

I snickered.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded.

“You used to hate children!”

His dark eyes sparkled with humor. “I did not!”

“You most certainly did. You talked about it all the time. It was one of the things that pissed me off about you back then.”

He sipped his beer, then gave me a cutting smile. “I didn’t want children of my own, sure. But I always got along with other people’s kids. They’re easy to be around, unlike adults.”

Sensing an opening, I asked, “Do you still feel that way?”

“Oh, definitely,” he replied. “Adults suck.”

The two of us laughed. My foot brushed against his leg under the table as I adjusted my seat. He’d diverted the subject smoothly, but I wanted to hear a serious answer from him.

No, Ineededto hear it.

“All jokes aside,” I said casually, “now that you’re older, do you still not want kids of your own?”

Lucas frowned in concentration. The boy I dated in high school would have answered immediately, with a response that was either too blunt or not truthful. He had a way of lying back then, saying whatever it was that Iwantedto hear in order to get into my pants.

This time, I could tell he was legitimately thinking about the question. Searching his feelings.

“I think the reason I didn’t want kids back then,” he answered slowly, “was because I valued my independence above everything else.”

“Oh?”

He nodded slowly. “I grew up in a strict household. You remember how my dad was. He was in the Marines, and tried to run our family like it was Boot Camp. He told me when to wake up, what to eat, when to do my homework. He made arbitrary rules and enforced them by…”

He glanced out the window, and my heart went out to him. Lucas’s father was fond of using his belt as punishment, for crimes big and small.

Lucas cleared his throat. “He enforced them strictly. Looking back on it, I think that’s why I rebelled so much. Not trying to make excuses, but that’s just how it was. Because of that, independence was important to me. I didn’t want anyone else in my life controlling my schedule.” He smiled ruefully. “Including you.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied with my own smirk.

“But yeah, I think that was the root of my feelings about kids. Having yet another force in my life guiding my actions, siphoning away my independence. Now that I’m the wise old age of twenty-five,” he chuckled, “I don’t think I feel the same way. Yeah, independence is still important to me, tosomedegree. But life isn’t about doing whatever you want all the time. It’s about finding people who want to do the same things with you, and then doing them together.” His eyes bore into mine. “Like playing mini-golf on a Monday night and then getting beers afterward.”

It was the exact kind of answer I had been hoping to hear with all of my soul, and I didn’t realize it until he’d spoken the words out loud. It was the final bit of proof that Lucas hadn’t just gotten older—he’d matured into a thoughtful, introspectiveman.

“Cheers to that,” I said.

The waiter arrived with our food. Lucas gazed longingly at my plate.

“I can cut it in half if you want to share,” I teased. “But only if you admit you still like junk food.”

“I’m extremely pleased with my salad,” he said, sounding just like the stubborn teenager I remembered.

We chatted about Lucas’s time in Detroit while we ate, and about Bran’s newfound interest in baseball. The topic drifted all around—to the revitalized downtown Vancouver, and how bad the traffic had gotten across the bridges to Portland. Everything felt soeasy—there weren’t lulls in the conversation, and I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

It was just the two of us, together, being our authentic selves.

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