Danielle "Dani" Joyce has been working long hours and living paycheck to paycheck to keep her bakery, The Dough Divas, open. Spending all her time at the store, her only romantic outlet is to crush on regulars like Justin Waverly. She keeps her flir...
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"This looks great, mom." Justin he pulled out my chair and then reclaimed his own seat. "I don't know how you got by cooking for such a large family."
"Oh, well," said Betty as she dished out a heaping spoonful of bread pudding and then a dollop of vanilla ice cream, "after having fed three teenage boys, I think I can handle just about anything. Lucy is a walk in the park at this point."
She patted her daughter's shoulder as the young girl dug into her dessert with ravenous gusto. Betty sighed, looking at her casserole dish that was already looking quite bare before setting it down in the middle of the table.
"Well, I'm not much of a cook, but at least I know Dani has the skills for keeping a small army fed so long as they're happy with bread."
"And donuts," Brendan pointed out with a mouth full of syrupy dough.
"Yes, donuts too," said Justin with a smile that would have felt comfortable on a used car salesman. "Of course," he continued, shifting in his seat and glancing over my way, "I'm thinking four kids may still be too many. Probably more like three will do. Don't you agree, Dani?"
He positioned his smile towards the table, flashing his teeth at his family, while his eyes slid to their corners and watched me with anxious anticipation. He set the ball up, sending it flying over the net, and now I had to bat it back.
"I, um, don't want that."
I looked down at my bowl, feeling the shift in the air around me as my words dissipated and filled the room.
"Oh," said Justin with a touch too much drama in his voice, "I didn't know..."
"I'm thinking more like two, maybe even just one."
The words flew out of my mouth, but I did not try to bite them back. I sent the ball careening towards Justin's side of the playing field and pelted him straight in the chest. When I looked over at him, he was just a crumpled mannequin in his chair, his eyes glazed and his mouth half open. I couldn't look at him for long and so instead I turned to Wes, who, like the rest of the family, was completely oblivious to my unsportsmanlike conduct.
"I want to keep my family small since I know it will be difficult to find time with my work schedule," I said with an even monotone and a steady chin. "But I want a family, even if work makes me an untraditional mom."
Wes held my gaze, but eventually put down his spoon and leaned back into his chair with his eyes directed to the windows.
"You'll make it work," said Randall, as if nothing transpired between me and his two eldest children. "I had some long shifts back when I was a paramedic and I missed most of Wes's first year when I was in the army."
"I'm not going to even have kids," said Brendan in between mouth fulls. "I'm going to own a yacht and sail the world. Kids would just weigh me down."
"Well, you'd need a woman to have kids with in the first place, so I don't think it's really a worry for you."
