Every year she bought him a ticket, reserved a room for him and pretended that she didn’t hear him when he told her that he didn’t want to go. He never went and she always seemed to forget that he never showed up the next year when she started to plan their trip.

“Your Uncle Jared already said that he’d approved your time off so you can go,” his mother said with a pleased smile.

He nodded, never taking his eyes off his mother, because he’d learned long ago never to show weakness to this woman when she was busy meddling with his life. “I took the time off, but I’m not going on the trip.”

“Of course you are,” his mother said, quickly dismissing him as she refocused all of her attention back on Jodi, who was sitting there, clearly trying to resist the urge to get up and flee from the table. “Now, how about you, dear? Do you think you’ll be able to get the time off from work?”

“Ummm,” she licked her lips nervously as she shifted in her chair, throwing him a pleading look that he was helpless to ignore, but he knew that there was nothing that he could say that would save Jodi from this line of interrogation.

“Mom, we can’t go,” he said, but not surprisingly, she ignored him and continued.

“Since the ban has been removed,” she said, pausing to shoot Jason and Trevor a pointed look, “at least for some of us, we’ve decided to take a trip to Disneyworld.”

“Ban?” Jodi asked, squishing her face up adorably as everyone at the table suddenly became occupied with their food again.

His mother waved it off. “The point is that we’re heading down there in a month and we’d love it if you could join us.”

“Thank you very much for the invitation, but I haven’t been working at the library long enough to get vacation time,” his little Tinkerbelle explained with a blush and a smile.

“But, if you were able to get time off?” his mother asked with a familiar gleam in her eyes that he knew all too well.

“Then I would still have to decline, because a trip to Florida is out of my budget at the moment,” she said with that same smile, but that blush……

It deepened.

“Oh, sweetie, we wouldn’t expect you to buy your own ticket,” his mother said with a reassuring smile.

“I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that,” Jodi said softly, shifting her attention down to her plate in an attempt to hide her embarrassment, but he saw it.

He saw everything.

He knew that she made good money, was frugal, never so much as bought a candy bar without planning it into her budget, but he also knew that she was broke. She was barely getting by and was living paycheck to paycheck. She made every cent count, but she was still struggling and he didn’t know why.

“Neither would I,” he said, picking his fork back up to push a corn kernel around his plate. “I’m more than capable of taking care of our tickets.”

“So, you’ll go?” his mother asked, perking up.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Then why are you taking the time off?” Aidan, the bastard, asked.

Because he’d been looking forward to two weeks without his family, without anyone fussing over him, calling him a thousand times a day to make sure that he was okay, that he was eating enough, that he was taking his medication and getting enough sleep. As soon as his mother had announced their annual family trip, he’d gone to Uncle Jared and requested the time off with plans on staying in his apartment with his books and beautiful silence. But now….

Now he wanted to spend those two weeks in bed with Tinkerbelle, but that wasn’t going to happen. They were taking things slow….very slow…… No matter how much it was killing him or how badly he needed to tear her clothes off and slide inside her, he was going to take this slow and do this right. Just thinking about all the things that he wasn’t allowing himself to do to her had him shifting discreetly in his chair.

“I made plans,” he said, looking up to give his mother an apologetic smile and wishing that he hadn’t seen the hurt expression on his mother’s face.

“Oh,” his mother said, giving him a trembling smile as she looked away, but not before the expression on her face made him feel like the biggest asshole to ever walk the face of the planet.

He ignored the way that his brothers, sister and cousins were looking at him and focused on the woman that had cried over him, held his hand, wiped his face and arms down with a cold cloth when his fever got too high and the medication stopped working. This was his mother and he was breaking her heart.

He sighed heavily, already regretting what he was about to say before the words left his mouth.

“We’d be more than happy to go, Mom.”

*-*-*-*

“Danny, I-”

“I have to go, Tinkerbelle,” he sighed, throwing the truck into park.

“Yes, but I don’t,” she said, opening her door and jumped out.

She still couldn’t believe that he’d done this to her, putting her on the spot like that in front of his family. What was she supposed to say when his mother suddenly burst into tears? Say no? Seriously? The woman had practically tackled her and strangled the life out of her when she’d reluctantly agreed to go.

She also couldn’t afford this trip or to take any time off.

God, what the hell was she supposed to do? She’d told Danny’s mother that she would go, but she had no money, no time off and a large credit card payment to make at the end of the month. She wasn’t going to be able to go, which meant that she’d lied to her boyfriend’s mother the first night that she’d met her. This did not bode well for their relationship.