“Do you need anything else, Mom?” he asked, his brown eyes wide with concern.
“No. I think it’s time you and Shay go, though. I’m getting tired and the doctors will be furious if I don’t follow their silly rules.”
He leaned down to give her a kiss goodbye. “Okay. Call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”
Cradling his face in her hands, she smiled up at him. “Thank you, Stefan. Don’t worry about me. Everything will be okay.”
“Okay, Mom. Love you. I’ll see you later.”
I stood from my chair and held my hand out to shake Alexandria’s, but she gently pulled me into a hug and whispered low in my ear, “It was so nice to meet you, Shay. Think about what I said.”
When she released me, I saw Stefan come to stand behind me. “I hope you feel better soon.”
“Come back to see me again and next time I’ll tell you about the time Stefan and Cassian thought it would be nice to surprise me for Mother’s Day and nearly demolished my kitchen.”
Stefan shook his head and laughed. “We were just trying to do something nice. Now we know that flour makes a mess when two boys get into it.”
“He told me about how much he loves your meatloaf,” I said with a smile.
“He did?” she said looking up at him with a look of pure motherly love. “He’s the only person in the world who even likes my meatloaf, Shay. Maybe someday I can make it for the two of you and I can get another fan.”
“That would be nice. Thank you, Alexandria.”
“You’ll be coming to Cassian and Olivia’s engagement party, won’t you? I don’t know if Stefan showed you the inside of the house when you were at the beach, but I’d love for you to see it.”
“She’s coming, Mom. You’ll get to show her the scene of the great flour crime of 1996.”
“Good. Now you two get going and do something fun.”
Stefan and I walked out of the room and when we were far enough away from the door for her to hear what he had to say, he stopped and turned toward me with a look of worry on his face. “I hope she didn’t say anything to make you not want to be around me.”
“Not at all. She’s your biggest fan.”
“That’s good. I was worried she’d give you a rundown of every girl I’ve ever dated since the seventh grade.”
“That would be a long list, I would think,” I said jokingly. “We’d be in there for days talking.”
“Funny, but something tells me I shouldn’t have left you in there alone with her.”
I poked him in the side and smiled. “I wouldn’t worry. It was just the woman who knows more about you than anyone else talking to the woman you just began sleeping with. What could go wrong?”
BY THE time I arrived at the club that night, I’d thought about my conversation with Alexandria about a hundred times and come up with dozens of conclusions and even more questions. Had Stefan told her we were serious? Or had she just assumed that when he brought me there with him? Why had she told me about his father, another notorious man whore, if the stories I heard were correct? Didn’t she worry I’d think he was as bad as his father and want to run in the other direction?
Regardless of anything she’d said, I couldn’t help feel good about being there for Stefan. He practically beamed when he first saw me at the hospital, and after leaving his mother’s room he couldn’t thank me enough for coming.
Whatever we were doing together, it was all happening so quickly. My first instinct told me to slow down with him. So carefree, he had a way about him that took hold of you and didn’t let go, taking you along with him. I had no idea where all this with him would end, but in my heart, I knew it would someday end.
I just prayed that it ended because of my leaving and not something he did.
The club appeared empty as I set myself up at the front bar and began to prepare for the evening, but within minutes Cassian and Olivia walked out of their offices in the back. For the first time since I’d begun working at Club X, they stopped to speak to me, likely thinking Stefan and I were far more serious than in reality we were.
Always professional, Cassian March had an air of coolness that his brothers simply didn’t possess. His blue eyes, like Kane’s, were so different than Stefan’s deep brown eyes that always gave the impression that he was always on the lookout for fun. Cassian’s eyes looked like he was studying you and behind them his mind was choosing whether or not to like you. The few times I’d seen him out in the club, he didn’t intimidate me so much as make me wonder how someone so attractive could be so aloof. The idea of him hitting on me or any other bartender seemed preposterous, yet Lola had told me all about the story she’d heard from one of the other bartenders that Olivia had been his assistant before she and Cassian became involved and supposedly their romance had begun up in one of the fantasy rooms.
The idea that the very sweet yet very businesslike Olivia had gotten freaky with her boss made her all the more likeable to me. Maybe it was because I was screwing around with one of the owners, but after seeing her at the hospital earlier that day, we seemed to have more in common. I imagined she thought so too since she stopped for the first time as they walked out tonight.
Cassian saw me standing behind the bar and made a point to speak to me. “Shay, I wanted to thank you for visiting my mother this afternoon. That was very nice of you.”
“I was happy to, Cassian. She’s a lovely woman.”
“Well, I spoke to her a short while ago and she couldn’t say enough about you. It seems you made quite an impression on her.”
I chuckled at how gossipy the March family was. “We had a very nice talk. She promised to show me the scene of the crime from when you and Stefan blew up her kitchen with flour.”
For the first time, Cassian’s deep blue gaze softened as his smile went all the way up to his eyes. “Ah, she told you about that.”
“I love that story!” Olivia said and kissed Cassian on the cheek. “She loves to tell that story. It’s so cute to think of Cash and Stefan as little boys trying to make their mother something special for Mother’s Day. What were you trying to make again?”
“Pancakes. I was ten and Stefan was eight. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out well.”
“Well, you meant well,” she said with a giggle.
Cassian smiled and said his goodbye, but Olivia hung back for a moment and I saw she had something to say. Leaning over the bar, she whispered, “Stefan told me he liked someone, but I had no idea it was you.”