Page 76 of The Ruthless and the Strong

I squirmed. “Not quite.”

He grinned. “Behave, my naughty girl.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, but then he was holding another forkful of the cheesecake in front of me. I ate it.

For the next several minutes, he continued to feed it to me, taking some for himself every other bite.

I turned away when we were about halfway done with it. “I can’t. I think my stomach will explode if I take any more.”

He nodded and ate a last bite, licking his lips when some cream got on the corner of his lips. I never thought I would be jealous of cream, but I was.

He smirked as if he knew just what I was thinking, and I looked away, checking in on Hunter. He was picking up dandelions and blowing them to make wishes. My little boy knew how to play by himself without any trouble. He had done so for most of our childhood. Sometimes I thought about getting pregnant again to give him someone to play with, but I never tried.

“Today was amazing,” I said.

“Good. I want to make you happy, Lizzie.”

I turned to Max. He grabbed my hand between his, his thumb moving back and forth on the back of my palm. “You do,” I said quietly, and that was true.

“You’re easy to please.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t say spending a whole day out with me and Hunter is easy.”

“No? Then you and I have very different definitions of the word.”

I didn’t think he understood. This wasn’t easy. People didn’t understand how hard it was to put in effort to hang out with their families until they had to do it.

“We didn’t get to do this kind of thing often in California,” I said.

“What? Having a picnic?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve done other things. There is probably a lot to do there.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. It was pretty lonely in California for me. I didn’t hang out with anyone. I didn’t even know anyone. I tried to make friends with some of the other moms at Hunter’s preschool, but they were all older than me by like a decade. Some of them even thought I was a single mom and they looked down on me for it. Not that there’s anything wrong about being a single mom, but those women really look down on you.”

When Max didn’t say anything after a moment, I looked up at him. “What about Sam?” he asked.

“What about Sam?”

“Didn’t he take you guys out?”

“Sam’s pretty busy with medical school, and then his internship at the hospital. We didn’t spend a lot of time.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

I looked down at the plate of fruit nearby. I grabbed a strawberry and put it in my mouth, chewing slowly. “No, I understood. His program is really rigorous. He was under a lot of pressure to do well.”

“It sounds like you’re making excuses for him, sweetheart.”

I shot him a sad smile. “Maybe that’s all I’ve been doing for the last six years. But then, he made a lot of excuses for me to his parents.”

He frowned. I reached up and rubbed my finger between his eyebrows, smoothing out the crease.

“Why did your marriage end?” he finally asked. I wondered how long that question had been stuck inside him. I opened my mouth—to tell him what, I didn’t know. I had been practicing giving him the answer for weeks, yet now that he finally asked, I didn’t know what to tell him.

“It’s my fault,” I said.

---