Page 49 of Writing Mr. Wrong

He must have caught her expression, because his eyes widened. “Just because you don’t have them doesn’t mean you didn’t want… Fuck. I put my foot into it, didn’t I?”

She squeezed his hand, still resting on her knee. “It’s okay. Yes, I wanted kids. We both did. I had… a few miscarriages, and the doctor suggested we take a break and consider other solutions, which, apparently, Alan did without me.”

Mason’s grip tightened. “Bastard.” His head leaned against hers. “My mom lost a few pregnancies. That’s why I’m an only child. I remember how hard it was on her. She cried a lot, but only when she thought no one could hear. Otherwise, everyone acted like nothing happened. One day there was a baby coming and the next there wasn’t, and everyone behaved as if there’d never been one in the first place.”

Gemma leaned into him, letting his arm tighten around her shoulders. “We have a weird way of dealing with miscarriages, and I never realized that until it happened to me. I don’t think of them as lost children. They were never born. I never held them in myarms, but…” Her voice caught. “They had names. Hopes. Plans. Even if those only existed in my head. And then they were gone, and I got a day off work to recover, as if I’d had food poisoning. My family was different—they grieved with me—but Alan? He treated it the way you said, like they’d never been there at all, and maybe that was his way of coping, but…”

She took a deep breath, her chest constricting. “I’m sorry. This is way more than a simple explanation about why I gave up motorcycles, isn’t it?”

His hands went under her, and before she knew what he was doing, she was on his lap, his arms tight around her.

She tried to force a smile and gripped his lapels. “This is a very expensive jacket, and you do not want the leather ruined by salty tears.”

He didn’t return her smile. Didn’t say a word. Just pulled her to him and patted her back, and she tried to hold out, she really did, but then the dam burst and she started to cry.

MASON

Mason could say the universe had taken pity on him for last night, but without even trying—too hard—he had made Gemma happy. She’d cried, too, but it wasn’t because of anything he’d done, which was a refreshing change of pace.

She’d opened up to him, and now he understood what she’d gone through with that absolute bastard of a husband, and he could rest easy in the confidence that he could clear that low bar without even breaking a sweat.

Now they were walking along the beach, holding hands. He’d taken hers when she’d been crying, and then he just kept holding it when she said she’d like to walk. He’d waited for her to shake him loose. She hadn’t. Which was a damn good omen, if you believed in shit like that. He was going to start believing in shit like that.

He liked this, walking and sipping their hot chocolate. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d held someone’s hand. Grown men put their arm around a woman. But that felt like saying,This is mine, while holding hands felt like saying,I’m with her.

Sure, this technically wasn’t a date—even if he’d decided it absolutely was. Picking their way along the rocky beach hand in hand felt like being a kid and holding tight so you don’t get lost. So the tide doesn’t sweep either of you out to sea. It was comforting and reassuring and just… nice. Really nice.

They’d navigated to a stretch of beach where pockets of sand dotted the rocky shore. The wind whistling past made his eyes sting, but he lifted his face to it and let the mist spray him as he inhaled the briny smell of the sea. They couldn’t talk over the crash of waves, but that was fine. It was peaceful.

When Gemma paused to look into a tidal pool, her curls whipped in the wind. She tucked hair behind her ears and glanced over at him and smiled, and his heart did a weird squeeze.

He shoved the insulated mug into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and snapped the photo while she was looking away. Then he tugged her over and got a couple of selfies of them both before they resumed walking.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MASON

Mason had dropped Gemma off at her place. He’d offered dinner, but she had work to do, so he sent steak to make up for her missing the rib eye last night.

He parked in the back lot at Nonna Jean’s. His grandmother was always there on Saturdays. It let her pretend that she hung out at the restaurant to avoid cooking during Shabbat, but really she was there to putter and to terrorize.

Mason snuck in the rear door and nearly mowed down a server he didn’t recognize. The young woman backed up fast with a yelped “Oh! Mr. Moretti!” He waved without looking back and continued to the kitchen, where he found his eighty-two-year-old grandmother on a stool, peering into a simmering pot.

Even this early, the kitchen was pure chaos. Or it looked that way, though Mason knew the chaos was as synchronized as a clock. Prep cooks zipped about but never got in each other’s way. The two chefs guarded their stations. Pots clattered, someone shouted orders, food sizzled and popped and boiled. It smelled like Mason’s childhood—olive oil and balsamic vinegar and garlic—and he could taste zucchini carbonara in the air.

He slipped past a station where a few misshapen pieces of deep-fried artichoke had been rejected. He popped one still-hot piece into his mouth and then headed for his grandmother’s station. When one of the line cooks glanced over, Mason raised a finger and she quickly looked away. Then he crept up and put his cold hands over his grandmother’s eyes, making her yelp.

She turned around and swatted him. “You want to give me a heart attack?”

“Testing your ticker. Seems okay.”

She swatted him again, and then gestured at his boots with a string of Italian for tracking in dirt. So he removed them right there, which earned him a third swat. He grinned and went to pick up the dirty boots, but she stopped him, catching his face between her hands, turning it this way and that as if examining him for signs of illness.

“What?”

“You look happy,” she said. “I should take a picture. I don’t see that very often these days.”

He rolled his eyes and squeezed her hands before moving his boots to the back. When he returned, he grabbed a bowl and headed for a pan of Pharaoh’s Wheel, but Nonna stopped him and, out of sight of the cooks, made a face. In other words, the baked pasta dish wasn’t up to her standards. That always made him laugh because ifhe’dcooked it, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good, but it would still be perfect to her.

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