Page 24 of Finding Forever

Her thoughtfulness was still something I was getting used to. She did stuff like this often. With no preamble. It wasn’t extravagant gifts or grand gestures, but just enough to make me feel like somebody cared. I wasn’t used to that. It intensified my desire to give her whatever she wanted.

“Drink?” I asked my brother, headed for the wet bar across from the massive pantry.

“I’ll pass,” Enrick replied, but still followed me to the bar.

Going through the motions of preparing a whiskey neat, I felt his eyes clocking my every movement which let me know he had something on his mind and was trying to decide how to say it. My baby brother was one of my closest friends, aside from Leon. They couldn’t have been more different. Enrick was a lot like me, but maybe more reserved, if that was possible. While Leon liked to shoot straight from the hip and ask questions later, Enrick chose his words carefully and only commented on things he cared about.

“Spill,” I directed, after taking my first sip. It went down smooth and burned in the best way after the day I’d had.

“You like her,” he said quietly.

“I told you that much already.”

“No, I mean, youreallylike her.”

For the second time today, my feelings for Gina were written all over my face. Why else would two different people confront me about them?

“She’s easy to like,” I said before taking another pull of my drink. Was I wearing it on my sleeve? How much I liked her?

“You feel ready for this?” he asked in his usual enigmatic way. I knew without asking what “this” meant.

He’d lived with me while I was married to Victoria and had a front-row seat to most of our marital woes. Victoria was also the only woman he’d seen me with.

“We’re taking it day by day,” I tried to deflect.

“I know that look. You’re already in deep. Don’t try to deny it. Just because I’m ten years younger doesn’t mean I don’t know the signs.”

A dry chuckle left my lips at his disclaimer. He was younger, but most days I thought he was a hell of a lot wiser.

“You should have seen your face when you walked into the kitchen and saw her just now. You looked like a kid on Christmas morning.”

If it was anyone else, I might have tried to deny it. But I knew it was no point with Enrick. He knew me too well.

“It’s a good thing she’s just as crazy about you,” he followed up.

Now, I wanted to know how he’d come to that conclusion. I set down my drink to ask him and suddenly heard the patter of small feet racing towards me.

“Daddy, you’re home!” I heard, right before a small body crashed into my legs.

Scooping Penny up, I rained kisses all over her face while Enrick inched away from us. I wasn’t done with our conversation, but he was bowing out for now.

“I’ll work on getting dinner on the table.”

He left me with Penny and a mind full of questions about what he could have meant.

∞∞∞

“That was incredible.” I pushed back from the table to stop stuffing my face with all the food Gina’s mom had sent our way. “Send my love to your mom.”

It felt weird having feasted on her creations multiple times but never meeting the woman herself. But were we at the point where we could meet each other’s family? I guessed it was a moot point in some respects since she’d already met Penny and Enrick, the two most important people to me.

Penny was across the table, licking her fingers with a satisfied expression on her face. It was safe to say she loved the food, too. After clearing the table, Gina and I got to work putting the minimal dishes in the dishwasher and storing the rest of the food in the fridge. Whenever we did things like this together, I was reminded of our time at the beach. How we’d bonded over the simplest things.

In the last few weeks, I had trained my heart not to beat out of my chest whenever she was near, but I still got an intense rush just from her proximity. Enrick appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. I thought he was about to excuse himself to go study, but he surprised me instead.

“I can take it from here if you two want some alone time.”

Less than five minutes later, Gina was beside me on the back deck with a glass of wine. I’d refilled my drink from earlier and was sipping it slowly.

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