Page 84 of A Love Most Fatal
“Nate, will you go check on the garden?” My mom asks.
He stops with his coffee cup at his mouth and I give him a look that I hope he reads assave yourself from the grueling conversation that is about to ensue.
“If we’re sending Nate on errands, go remind Leo that he owes me forty dollars,” Mary pats his shoulder. The two of them haven’t been chummy per se, but they exchange a dozen words sometimes now, which is big progress.
Nate flips the black iPad case back over the screen and offers a salute before slipping out of the back door, promptly putting his hands in his pockets as he strolls away from the house.
“Sweetie,” Mom starts.
“What?” I snap, a little too harsh. I slump my shoulders, immediately contrite.
“How long is this going to go on?” She’s so gentle with me, not judgmental, just worried.
“I don’t know, probably until he pulls a husband out of a hat?” I take a sip from my green mug on the counter only to wince at how absurdly sugary it is. Nate couldn’t drink black coffee to save his life. “It’s not safe for him to leave yet. Plus, there are still a few more men to interview.”
I don’t miss the looks Mary and Mom share across the island.
“What?”
Mom looks uncomfortable, like she’s trying to find a way to phrase this nicely. Mary has no such reservations.
“Why not Nate?” She asks, point blank.
“What?”
“Well, why not him? You’re fucking him?—”
“Mary,” Mom chides.
“I’m not fucking him,” I defend. “We’re just. . .”
Mary raises her eyebrows.
“Okay, yeah, I’ve been fucking him,” I say. Mom throws up her hands, any attempts to police our cursing futile. “But it’s not like that, we aren’t together.”
“And what’s so wrong with him?” Mary asks.
I never expected to greet a morning where Mary would be defending a guy, much less Nate, who she has on many occasions called a ‘weak, strange little man.’
“What happened to you hating him?” I ask the traitor.
“That was before,” Mary says. She puts a big bite of oatmeal in her mouth before speaking again. “He’s okay now.”
“Before what?”
“Before,” Mary shrugs. “Before he got good at shooting. Before he got a haircut.”
I thought sending her to teach him how to shoot was a bad idea for his safety. I could not have cooked up the possibility of them becoming friendly from this. What alternate world am I living in right now?
“There’s nothing wrong with him, he just. . . isn’t meant for this life. He’s said so himself plenty of times.”
“He could learn,” Mom says.
“He’sbeenlearning,” Mary points out.
“I just worry that you aren’t being careful, baby,” Mom brushes a hand over my hair in soothing strokes.
“Of course we’re careful,” I say. Nate has faithfully worn condoms because while Idoneed an heir, a baby out of wedlock might be just the thing that makes the Mothers attack me themselves.