For Better or Worse

Heather broke off. How did one explain Alexis Morgan?

“Complicated,” she said.

“Is that your girl way of saying you don’t like her?”

“No, I love her!” Heather said, scooping up a handful of the sliced berries and dropping them into the bowl. “I mean, yeah, she’s my boss, but she’s become a friend, too. When I say she’s complicated, I just mean more . . . I sometimes think that I don’t know her. I’m not sure that anybody does.”

“A mystery woman,” Josh said as he began slicing mushrooms. “That’s hot.”

“Says the man whose bedmates are all giggles and lip gloss.”

“You bashing your fellow kind, 4C?” he asked.

“Absolutely not, 4A. I’ve been known to giggle and rock the lip gloss myself. To be clear, I was bashing you.”

He nodded. “Sure, sure. Gotta keep up your walls, I get it.”

“Oh, I’m not the one with walls,” she said confidently as she opened the container of blueberries and went to the sink to rinse them.

To Heather’s surprise, Josh came back with neither a defensive remark nor a quip. Instead he kept his focus on his mushrooms, almost as though relying on the fungi to provide a buffer from whatever dark thoughts had caused a little line to form between his eyebrows. Heather bit her lip as she studied his profile, torn between the urge to dig a little and the desire to respect his privacy.

She’d hardly spilled her guts to him; it’s not as though she could fairly expect him to do the same. And yet, the more she got to know him, the more she wanted to really know him.

Because she suspected Josh was just as much as a mystery as Alexis. He just was a hell of a lot better at hiding it than Heather’s reticent boss.

They fell into companionable silence as she finished up the fruit salad, and he set out the rest of the ingredients for the eggs. It wouldn’t be quiche, but as far as scrambled eggs went, they’d be the high-class variety. Mixed mushrooms, scallions, and some grated Swiss cheese.

“Yes or no on the bacon?” Heather asked, holding up the package as she glanced nervously at the clock. There were only twenty minutes left.

“Seriously?” he asked, plucking the package from her hand. “The answer is always yes to bacon. Do you have a cookie sheet?”

Heather blinked. “For what?”

“The bacon.”

“You don’t cook bacon on a cookie sheet.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Josh said, shoving at her hip as he correctly guessed which cupboard she kept the cookie sheets in.

Heather watched skeptically as he placed foil on the cookie sheet, then placed a cooling rack on top of that before laying out the bacon in neat strips.

“You forgot to preheat it,” she said as he opened her oven door and slid the sheet in.

“It goes into a cold oven. Set it for four hundred degrees. Check on it in twelve to fifteen minutes.”

“Are you trying to sabotage my brunch?” Heather asked. Her mother had never cooked bacon—or much of anything—but when Heather’s grandmother had been alive, she’d always done it in a cast-iron skillet on the stove.

“Guess you’ll have to trust me,” he said, fishing a grape out of her fruit salad, popping it into his mouth, and giving her a maddeningly smug grin.

“Yeah, because that’s what smart women in New York City do. Trust strange men who prefer to walk around naked and bed a new woman every other night.”

Josh hoisted himself onto her counter. “Strange? Really? You’ve seen me in my underwear, you’ve listened to my band practice, I just went grocery shopping for you, and you’ve met my mother. I’d say we’re well beyond being strangers, 4C.”

“True,” Heather said as she arranged the ingredients for her coffee cake. It wouldn’t be done by the time they got here, but she could pop it into the oven after the bacon came out. “You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think a boyfriend has ever done my grocery shopping. And I’ve certainly never met a guy’s mother.”

“Really?” he asked.

She glanced at him as she measured out sugar. “You seem surprised.”