Scoring a Holiday Match (Mr. Match), Delancey Stewart [classic novels TXT] 📗

and sliding the dark jeans down his long powerful legs had been easy enough.

He’d lifted the sweater from my body and taken me right there on the couch, though I was not a girl who was easily taken. The whole scenario had ended on the floor between the couch and coffee table, me riding him until we both hollered our releases, and then repeating the whole thing upstairs in my bedroom. That time I let him stay on top.

It had been perfect—just as it had been almost every time between us since then.

And these last three weeks have been perfect too.

Ash had introduced me to his mother, and I immediately felt the weight of her expectations for him. And it was clear that while seeing him get serious about a strong Latino woman was not what she’d imagined for her only son, she was also a very warm and welcoming woman. We had become careful friends, and she had confided a bit in me about her fears and insecurities. Ash was right—some of them had to do with money—but he was also wrong. Most of them had to do with having no family except her son, and watching him leave time and again to risk his life in a job most people did because they had no other choice, or because they were seeking fortune. It was hard to understand why Ash did it.

“To prove I can,” he said in answer to that very question as we lay together in my bed two days before he was going to fly back again.

“You have nothing to prove,” I told him. “Or if you did, you just proved it to me a few minutes ago.”

“Need me to prove that again?” he asked, pulling me against him and nestling his nose into my hair.

“No,” I said, though it sounded good. “I need you to explain it to me. Why go risk your life over and over again when you don’t have to?”

“Why do surfers surf?” he returned. “Why do pilots fly? Why do climbers scale El Cap without a rope?”

“Because they have a death wish,” I said under my breath. This topic was one we’d avoided, kept tucked in the corners of our time together. But it was always there.

He sighed and rolled me in his arms so he could look down at me, and his face was a mix of resignation and pain. “I go away so I can’t disappoint my mother here.”

I almost laughed. Here was the biggest, strongest man I’d ever met, telling me he was worried about disappointing his mother. “Your mother isn’t disappointed,” I said. “She’s terrified you’re not going to come home.”

He gave me a sad smile. “I know she thinks that. It’s easier not to admit to herself that I’ll never be the guy she wants me to be.”

“And who do you think that is?” I asked.

“My father.” The word dropped between us, dark and full of venom. Ash didn’t talk about his father much, but he had told me that his mother had never been happy with the man, and that Ash had been terrified of him.

“Why would she want you to be like a man she didn’t like? And why would you want to be like him at all?” I pushed myself to sitting, genuinely confused. I didn’t have much family here, and I’d worked so much as an adult, the relationships I’d once had were distant now. I didn’t understand.

“I don’t want to be him. That’s why I left,” he said, rolling onto his back and dropping his big hands over his eyes. “And Mom hated him, but he was her version of what a man should be like. She might say she doesn’t want me to be like him, but then she spends all her time forcing me into suits and dragging me to the country club.”

“Maybe because that’s all she knows,” I suggested. “Your mother is a tentative woman. I don’t really see her changing her life drastically just because your dad is gone. She’s just following familiar patterns, clinging to what she knows.”

“Maybe I should take my mom fishing,” Ash joked.

“Maybe not in Alaska, but . . . Yeah.”

He dropped his hands to stare at me. “You want to see Caroline Bailey with bait in her hands on a boat?”

“You’re taking me too?”

“We are not going fishing.”

I reached for my phone and found a charter fishing service. “Let’s go fishing, Ash. Today.” I couldn’t have told you why this idea stuck in my mind the way it did, or why it felt like the right thing, but when the three of us were on a fishing boat, leaving San Diego Harbor later that morning, I knew it was perfect.

Caroline sat at one side of the boat, her huge sunglasses covering her face and a huge hat on her head. But the thing that convinced me this was right was the way she was looking at her son, an enormous smile on her face.

“Ash has never taken me fishing,” she told me as I sat beside her.

Ash was busy chatting up the captain, so it wasn’t until later that he noticed how different his mother was out here on the boat. Gone was the uncertain, tentative woman who floated from room to room in the mansion her husband had left her in. The woman on the boat was laughing heartily, drinking a can of beer as the captain told her a story about a group of golfers who had decided fishing was their real calling.

“She’s so different out here,” he said, coming to sit beside me. “I would never have expected it.”

I nodded at him, joy spreading through me at his nearness, his happiness. “I think at some point we trade places a little bit,” I said. “The adults raise us as kids, and we live in their worlds. But when we’re grown, if we want to keep them close, it’s our turn to show them our worlds, the ones we were able to make