Page 64 of The Homemaker
“I mean,” she pauses with a nervous chuckle, “don’t respond so quickly.”
I lean forward to kiss her, but she pulls back. “Murphy, I’m serious. When did you know you loved me?”
“I don’t know. It just sort of happened. There wasn’t an exact moment that I knew.”
“Yet, you just said you fell for this woman in two weeks.”
“Blair,” I sigh, “why are we doing this?”
“Doing what? Talking? Opening up to each other?”
“Opening a can of worms.”
She frowns. “Why is it a can of worms? She’s gone, dead, or whatever. What’s wrong with knowing about your past?”
“Because you don’t just want to know about it. You want to compare everything to us. If I compared everything in your past to us, I probably wouldn’t marry you.”
She winces. “What’s that supposed to mean? Now you sound like my father. Do you think I’m going to break off the engagement?”
I rest my face in my hands and grumble. She pulls them away, forcing me to look at her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I shouldn’t have asked. But now I can’t un-know that you loved another woman more than you love me. And if she wouldn’t have left you, we probably wouldn’t be together.”
“That’s such a stretch, Blair. Why? What is the purpose?Morethan I love you? Why the sudden insecurity?”
She climbs off my lap. “Wow. That’s your response?”
I need to strangle something. Instead, I stretch an understanding smile across my face even though I don’t at all understand how we got on this topic. “What should my response be?”
“It should be something comforting, like how you were young and stupid, and what you thought was love was nothing more than bored infatuation with a stranger. And when you met me, that’s when you knew you had never really experienced love.” She crosses her arms over her chest.
“Blair, I have never asked you about your failed engagements. I fell in love with the person you are with me, not with them. But right now, I miss the self-assured artist I met at an art expo in San Francisco. The contagious smile. The flirty batting of your eyelashes, and your unassuming talent blended with just the right amount of confidence. I miss the way you giggled at everything and laughed at people who took life too seriously. That’s the woman I asked to marry me. So I don’t know if it’s just the stress of planning this wedding or your studio or what, but maybe you could use a few days away to clear your mind.”
“Yes, Murphy. Meeting with the contractor and apartment hunting without my fiancé seems like a great way to clear my mind.” She rolls her eyes and sulks out of the bedroom.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alice
Temptation is unavoidable,
but not uncontrollable.
Nurse Alice to the rescue.
Vera and Blair take a private jet to New York for the holiday while I stay here and take care of Mr. Morrison. He has a cold, and Vera says he’s the worst when he’s sick.
I’m fairly certain it was their wedding vows that contained the “in sickness and in health” clause, not my employment contract.
“Did you get that chicken from the coop out back? Chase it down? Break its neck? Pluck all the feathers from it?”
I smirk, keeping my attention on pulling the meat from the chicken bones as Murphy refills his coffee mug.
“Or is that just what you tell Hunter, like telling him you made his favorite hand soap?”
“What makes you think I didn’t make the hand soap?”
Murphy pulls out a barstool to the island and gets comfortable watching me work. “For starters, common sense tells me you didn’t make it. But I’ve seen you take it out of the sack from the store where you also buy the lavender linen spray that he thinks you make as well.”
