My stomach squeezes at that, and I grin and nod.

I’m both nervous and excited for him to be here. “Remember you promised not to drill him with questions, okay, Mother?”

“Of course!” my mother says as she heads back to the kitchen.

Oh god. Please let them like each other.

Pulling back the gauze curtain, I peer out the window to see his Pagani Huayra slide to a screeching halt before our home.

Oh, Sin. Speeding. Really?

I’m smiling, but I pretend that I’m not as I swing open the door and shake my head in disapproval while I watch him get out of the car. He’s wearing a black cashmere sweater and a pair of dark-wash jeans, a bottle of wine firm in his hand, and he’s making my heart race as he eats up the distance between us.

Sin is absolutely at home in the night, though it feels like every streetlight nearby is fawning on him, casting attractive shadows on his face and body.

He looks irresistible.

Dangerous.

Delicious.

“Hey,” I greet him as I step outside and impulsively press my lips to his rock-like jaw. “You get a kiss for coming.”

He draws me close to his body and speaks in my ear. “I have one for you too but it’s not fit for public.” His eyes shine devilishly as he watches me go red.

He follows me with one step, and then he’s inside. And he looks so very dark in my doorway. Darker than his hair, than the air he emanates. Bigger, somehow, as he takes another step inside, where my mother waits with a beaming smile.

“Malcolm, this is my mother—”

“Kelly,” she eagerly interrupts. She seems to want to give him a hug but she stops herself; Saint seems too larger-than-life for that.

He reaches out and gently squeezes her shoulder as he hands her the wine. I watch Mother make a desperate attempt to resist that captivating smile. And I notice his deep voice doesn’t help matters. “A pleasure to be in your home, Kelly. With your daughter.”

Gushing with gratitude over the bottle of wine, my mother heads over to set it in ice.

He touches my cheek for only a second, that one second enough to fluster me even more.

Damn him.

“You’re the first man Rachel ever brought home,” my mother tells him.

“This is the first time I’ve actually gone.”

He winks at me and my mother and I both kind of smile. We both mooned over him just seconds ago as he opened the wine in a way only a man who’s uncorked dozens of wine bottles can.

Now we’re all enjoying dinner, wine, and conversation.

“I always thought she’d have had more friends if she hadn’t had an imaginary friend. Monica,” my mother says.

“Matilda,” I correct my mother.

My poor mom, she’s so excited and so flustered she can’t even keep her facts straight.

“Matilda. Right. She’d blame everything on Matilda. Rachel doesn’t like screwing up in any way, you see,” she says. “She’s a bit of a perfectionist and it makes her mad at herself, so she used to blame Matilda when things didn’t go the way she wanted.”

I groan and roll my eyes. “This would be so so much easier to bear if Matilda were sitting here now.”

Saint leans over. “I wouldn’t have come here for Matilda. Only for you.”

His lips quirk when I redden.

“Rachel tells me you paint?” he asks my mother.

“I do. I like color on everything,” she says and proudly signals to her strawberry spinach salad. “Rachel used to paint too—that one’s hers.” She points at a small frame with my handprint on it.

“I did not paint that. I just set my hand there. Saint has one of those, Mother. A big one.”

“Oh, he does?” Her eyes widen in awe. “Those are sold, but in this case, it was a gift from End the Violence for her support.”

As we head into the main course, my mother tells Saint all about my involvement with End the Violence—nothing Saint doesn’t really know except perhaps that I’ve been doing it for a decade—while Saint listens attentively as he cleans his plate.

He listens to her tell him about the stories I used to tell as a kid . . .

Me and how End the Violence really made an impact on helping my mother and me cope . . .

Me and my dreams of having a career where I could both love what I do and earn a living at it . . .

Me and how I’ve wished to make her dream come true of working at what she loves . . .

“Her life has been full of other people’s stories,” she adds.

“Even mine,” he whispers with a sharp gleam in his eye aimed in my direction. He is not mad, just calm as he finishes his wine. Calm, and something else. He seems . . . illuminated. As if my mother’s stories have shed light on something that had been eluding him for a while.

I kind of think he looks even more comfortable than he did seconds ago, his attention unwavering as he crosses his utensils over his empty plate, leans back in his chair and cups his hands behind his head, laughing at my mother’s stories about young Rachel’s antics.

He looks . . . at home, here with my mother and me.

It does something to me. I suddenly feel very vulnerable.

I wonder about his mother as he talks with mine. As he talks with mine and occasionally ends her anecdotes with, “Did she really?” in amusement.

And my mom won’t shut up about me!

I feel extremely, intimately bared to Malcolm right now.

Malcolm already knows so much about me. What I like and fear and want. That I hope to do good things, but I sometimes do bad. He knows how I taste.

And now, having the man of my dreams know me through my mother’s stories, I feel completely exposed. As if I have no more secrets from him, while he, somehow, is a box of them that I might never fully open.

Gina’s right: maybe I do have a few walls up to protect myself. But I feel them all about to topple.

“Now, Rachel had very few friends when she was younger,” she says as she brings over my favorite dessert from the kitchen, a chocolate peppermint pie. “She was reserved and of course it was a concern of mine, as you can imagine. The only people Rachel allowed to know that she didn’t have a father were those we met through End the Violence. People like her, who’ve known loss. She just didn’t feel comfortable sharing that loss with anyone else, whom she thought wouldn’t understand.”

I try to laugh it off, but my laugh wavers. It’s only after Saint reaches for my hand under the table and squeezes it that I exhale.

Because he’s not judging me.