I pushed away from the counter. “I’ll make toast.”

He nodded absently, adjusting the heat of my crappy electric burner. “Bitte.”

It was like in the restaurant, me working around him, playing prep cook. Only . . . different. I nudged him with my hip to get to the toaster. He patted my bottom, shifting out of my way. I was embarrassed by how much I liked it, that light, affectionate slap.

“No snotty comments about the bread?” I asked.

Eric’s lips quirked. “When Alec was five, he wanted peanut butter and jelly on plain white bread every damn day for lunch. With the crusts cut off. You cannot scare me with your bread.”

Aw. “That’s adorable.” I was pretty sure my father couldn’t name any of my favorite childhood foods. “You packed your son’s lunch?”

“Certainly not,” Eric said, squashing that little fantasy. “He was five. Old enough to pack his own lunch.”

I cocked my head. “But you trimmed the crusts.”

“No.”

“No?”

He expelled his breath. “I bought cookie cutters,” he admitted. “So he could do it himself. Stegosaurus, brontosaurus . . . He liked dinosaurs.”

A piece of my heart melted. Having seen how he dealt with the misfits in his kitchen—his tolerance and support for his makeshift family—it was easy to imagine him teaching a curly-haired five-year-old to cut sandwiches into dinosaur shapes.

“You must miss them,” I said. “Your sons.”

“Yes.” One word.

“Do they ever visit?” I said.

“Not often. It is difficult to find time.”

“Right.” I knew what it was like to have a father whose work took precedence over everything else.

“You must live to cook,” Eric had said.

He slid me a look. “You and your father . . . You are close?”

“Yes. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot. Because he was deployed.” I watched Eric fold eggs gently from the cooked edges to the center of the pan. “But this one time, in high school, I had this cross-country meet? And he was waiting for me at the finish line.” I flushed, embarrassed by the wave of remembered emotion. I’d cried. “Total surprise. I wasn’t expecting him until the next day. It was a moment. Like something on YouTube.”

“Bryan is on the football team. Soccer,” Eric corrected himself. “He has a tournament over the holidays, yeah? And Alec has play practice. The boys cannot come to me. So . . .” Eric shrugged his big shoulders. “I go to North Carolina.”

I was oddly breathless. “When?”

“Christmas.” He concentrated on the eggs. “Denise invited me to spend the holiday with them.”

Denise? His ex-wife. Oh.

Oh. Whatever stupid fantasies I might have entertained about seeing Eric at Christmas, introducing him to my family, died a swift, embarrassing death. Not that I was jealous or anything, but . . . Fine. I was totally jealous.

“That’s very . . . civilized.”

“We are parents, yeah? It is best for the boys if we get along.”

I nodded. That didn’t sound like he was still hung up on his ex. But what did I know?