Page 14 of His to Cherish
My stomach rumbled. I’d just entered a carb-loaded nirvana.
“Didn’t know what you liked.”
He helped himself to three pieces, and I dove in after him. I bit back the commentYou could have just asked. The food smelled too good. “It all looks delicious.”
I was drooling over the pizza. He couldn’t know it was my weak spot and an indulgence I rarely allowed myself. I worked hard and ran to keep my body healthy and fit.
But I’d worked hard the last two days in my yard, and, frankly, I didn’t care.
I loaded my plate with three different pizza slices, loving that one of the halves was a taco pizza. After drizzling on the taco sauce, I took a large bite.
A moan escaped my mouth and I closed my eyes, relishing the spicy flavor.
When I opened them, Aidan’s eyes were locked on my mouth. I reached for a napkin, pressed it to my lips, and when I did, he looked back down to his own plate.
“Sorry.”
He made a grunting sound with his mouth full of food and pointed to my yard. When he swallowed, he asked, “You do all this work yourself?”
I leaned back in the chair and smiled wide. It was my oasis. Growing up on a farm, I was a country girl at heart. When Cory and I got married, I told him I had always wanted to live in the country on acres of land, possibly with my own self-sustaining vegetable garden and enough chickens for both eggs and poultry.
Cory thought that was insane when we could live in town with a grocery store just down the street.
Our compromise was a house with a private backyard. But since we couldn’t find that, he had a privacy fence installed. I thought it was romantic and sweet at the time. Now it annoyed me that I had constantly caved on what I wanted for a man who ended up being a lousy jerk.
I shook the thoughts away and saw Aidan shoot me a strange look.
“Therapy.”
He gave me an even stranger look. Before I could stop myself, I found myself explaining, even though I had never told anyone the real reason why I did so much work in my yard.
“I can’t have kids. It took me a long time to get over that; part of why I work at a school, though. I’ve always wanted to have someone to care for, take care of.” I shrugged, as if it were no big deal. In reality, I was fighting back tears from the memories of years we’d tried to have a baby and it never worked. How Cory walked away from me. My voice was thick with unshed tears when I said, “I can take care of plants and my yard, though.”
It sounded so stupid. Made me feel so pathetic. That familiar feeling of being a complete failure as a woman began to build inside me, and I stared at the pizza on my plate. I waited for the awkward silence or the pitiful look I was so used to getting when I told someone that I couldn’t have kids.
Admitting I built a garden just to have something to take care of made me feel about two feet tall.
When I found the courage to glance at Aidan, he was chewing his pizza, looking thoughtfully at my empty vegetable garden that I hadn’t yet planted for the upcoming growing season.
“Anyway.” I waved my hand in the air. “It gave me something to do…something to focus on when the house got too quiet.”
He grunted again and took another bite. “My house is too quiet.”
My heart clenched in pain and I opened my mouth to tell him I understood, but I didn’t—not really.
Losing a jerk of a cheating husband and a dream I’d had since I was a child was nothing compared to losing a son.
He swallowed his food. “And your ex is a dick.”
I snorted and took a bite of pizza. I hid my mouth full of food while I grinned. “Tell me about it.”
But my stomach and heart were fluttering with excess speed. Everyone loved Cory. He had the ability to walk into a room and command attention. I’d always enjoyed being the wallflower, but I liked how Cory dragged me out of my shell, promising to lay the world at my feet if I’d just follow him.
I never wanted to play follow the leader again.
