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Not liking where that train of thought was leading, I slid out of bed and found my boxers in the pile of clothes we’d thrown on the floor. I tiptoed out of Oscar’s room, retracing my steps down the hallway in search of the kitchen.
The first door I opened led to a half bath with marble floors and a floating stone vanity. The next door was to the laundry room, which was almost larger than the bedroom in my apartment. The next door looked to be a pantry of some sort, every wall lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves. But it was unlike any pantry I’d ever seen because every shelf was filled with Girl Scout Cookies. And not just a few boxes. Given that each shelf had to be seven boxes deep and three boxes high, there had to be hundreds, if not thousands of them.
I let out a laugh. What the hell? I liked a good Thin Mint when cookie-ordering season came around, but this was unreal. Who knew Oscar was such a cookie fiend?
I noticed cards tucked between several of the boxes and pulled one out. It was a note penned in very neat cursive from a girl thanking him for buying enough boxes that she could join her fellow troop mates on a field trip to a local horse barn. I pulled down another card. This one was another thank-you note for buying enough boxes that she qualified for a scholarship to a nearby summer camp. Several notes were collected in a large glass jar set among the stacks of boxes, all of the notes from Troop 6000 with heartfelt messages about him being their first sale and how much that meant to them.
I heard something behind me and turned to find Oscar leaning against the wall across the hall. “I see you found my secret stash,” he said. He’d pulled on thin cotton pajama pants that hung low on his hips, revealing his perfectly toned abdomen. He did not have the physique of a man who regularly overly indulged in cookies.
“Preparing for the apocalypse?” I asked him, a little breathless. “With a dedicated cookie closet?”
“It was a selling feature when I bought the place last year,” he said solemnly. “I told the listing agent if I was going through the hassle of moving out of Brooklyn, it would only be to a property with a cookie closet. Resale value, you know?”
“Last year,” I repeated. “I don’t remember you mentioning a move.”
“It was right around the time of Wells’s wedding. Lesya handled most of the details, and I did my best to stay away until everything was set up.” He looked at me curiously. “Did you never wonder why I was staying at the hotel when I had a perfectly nice place with a cookie closet just a few blocks away?”
“I… I never considered it.” It had all been part of the mystery of Oscar Overton—a mystery I still hadn’t fully unraveled… and might never since the man was so damn good at deflecting questions he didn’t want to answer. “But back to the cookies, Oscar,” I said pointedly.
He sighed. “You try saying no to a little girl in her uniform asking you to buy cookies,” he grumbled. “It’s impossible. If you meet Rosette tomorrow at my mother’s brunch, then you’ll see how impossible it is to deny her anything.”
He bought the cookies for his niece’s troop? My heart melted.
“You could just donate to the troop,” I pointed out. “Then you wouldn’t end up with so many cookies.”
“It’s not the same. It’s not about the money for a lot of them; it’s about the pride in accomplishing something. It’s learning that you can do hard things. It’s encouraging them to keep going and keep trying.” Oscar rubbed at the back of his neck a bit sheepishly. “But this is just temporary. Lesya is making arrangements to donate the cookies to a few local food banks this week. Well, most of the cookies,” he amended. “I think I need to keep a few, don’t you?”
Sometimes this man made it too easy to want to fall in love with him. What had Abby said in her HEA video? That the only scary thing about the future was spending a minute away from Dex that she could have spent with him? I thought I was starting to understand that now. “You’re a good man, Oscar Overton.”
His eyes raked over my bare torso and down to the boxer briefs that felt tighter than they had a few minutes earlier.
“Not that good.”
I thought about this contradiction of a man, all the various pieces and parts of him.
“You have hidden depths,” I teased, enjoying the dichotomy between his obvious lust and his embarrassment over the Girl Scout stash. “Cookie depths.”
“Get in the bedroom,” he grumbled through a smile. “Apparently, I didn’t wear you out properly before, and I aim to do just that with the next round.”
17
OSCAR
Other than Boone, I’d never deliberately introduced a man—a date—to my family.
And this was why.
“Oh my gosh, look at you,” my mother cried with flapping air hands and eyes suspiciously shiny. “Get in here, both of you. Oscar, introduce me to your gentleman friend. Sage told us you were bringing someone special.” She whispered the last word as if it was too good to be true.
Marigold shoved herself into the conversation as usual. “Because someone didn’t bother to tell us the truth of his relationship status last month.”
“Someone is going to get a knuckle sandwich if she doesn’t back off,” I grumbled.
Birch raced over to stand next to my mother, his hand protectively on her back and his face a welcoming smile as usual. “We’re Oscar’s parents, Birch and Gloria, but you can call her Gladiolus if you’d like. She’s used to it.”
Hugh shook their hands, almost losing a few digits in the sudden crush of my mother’s hug. He laughed at her exuberance as if it wasn’t horrifying.
“Thanks for having me. Oscar’s told me about all of you.”
