My mom eyed my athletic shorts and shirt, shaking her head. “Maybe you’d like to wear something a little nicer for a change?”

“Nah, I’d just get it all dirty.” I jogged over and gave her a kiss on the cheek before dropping down onto the bottom step to pull on my shoes and lace them up. “Dad and I are going outside to throw the football around for a bit before you need our help.”

“Help,” she snorted. “Is that what we’re calling it when you two sneak turkey from the carcass and devour an entire can of black olives before I can even get the food on the table?”

“Hey! We help you bring everything from the kitchen to the dining room table,” I reminded her.

“True.”

“It’s not like you’d let us do any more than that.”

“Also true,” she agreed.

“And we both know Dad would just set something on fire if you let him help with the turkey.”

Our gazes met, identical brown eyes widening, and we both burst into laughter as we thought about how my dad tried to deep fry a turkey last year. We’d been lucky that he’d set everything up in the backyard, or else he would’ve burned the whole house down. As it was, he’d had to hire a landscaper to come in and redo a huge section of the yard because he’d scorched the grass so badly that no amount of water and sunshine would have fixed it. It’d been one hell of a mess, and we’d ended up eating Chinese takeout for dinner because we didn’t have a backup turkey and the side dishes my mom had made wouldn’t have been enough for a whole meal.

“I’m so glad we can laugh about it now.” My mom wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Because we certainly didn’t back then.”

“Yeah, you were beyond pissed that he didn’t just let you make it the way you always did.” I rubbed my abs. “And my mom and I weren’t happy to miss out on our all-time favorite meal.”

“I think I was angrier with myself for not just buying a second turkey the minute he suggested deep frying it. I should have known better.”

“Yeah, you should have,” I teased.

“It’s not like you’re any better in the kitchen than your father.”

“Nope, but I blame my mom for that.”

She took the dish towel she’d been holding and snapped me with it in the leg.

“Hey!” I complained.

“I don’t want to hear it. Go grab your father and throw the football around so he doesn’t get it in his head that he should come and help me with dinner.”

“Aye aye, Captain!” I stood up from the stairs and saluted her before heading towards the family room off the back porch.

“Maybe Faith will be better in the kitchen than the two of you.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and swiveled around to stare at my mom after what she’d said registered in my brain. “Faith?”

“Yes, I invited her to join us today.”

“You invited her to Thanksgiving?” For as much as my mom loved to entertain, she’d always kept the major holidays to family only.

“I know,” she sighed, offering me an apologetic smile as she held her hands up in surrender. “It’s horribly hypocritical of me to have invited her over when I’m the one who set the no guests rule, but I like to think you would have done the same thing if you’d heard her plans for the day.”

“What was she going to do?”

“Stay on campus, eat in the cafeteria while it was open during the day, and microwave something later on! I couldn’t let her do that, could I? Not on Thanksgiving.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I reassured, moving close enough to wrap her up in a hug.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” she mumbled against my shirt.

I let her go and moved back so I could look down at her face. “Not even a little bit. If I wasn’t such a dumbass, I would’ve thought to ask her about her plans and then I could’ve just asked her to come over myself.”

The worry left my mom’s eyes, only to be replaced by speculation. “Dumbass, huh?”

“Mom,” I groaned, quickly regretting my choice of words because I knew what that look meant for me. She was going into matchmaker mode, which never seemed to go well for me. It should’ve been a good thing this time around since her sights were finally set on a girl I was actually interested in, but I wasn’t sure how Faith would react to my mom’s prodding. She was already hesitant enough as it was.

Our schedules had been at odds with each other over the past couple of weeks, and I hadn’t seen her since I’d dropped her off at her dorm after we had dinner. We’d texted some and talked on the phone a few times, though. I felt like I was getting to know her, but slowly because she didn’t seem big on letting people in. It made sense considering her background, but having my mom interfere could undo the small amount of progress I’d made with her.

“What? You could do a lot worse than Faith. She’s beautiful, kind, smart, caring—”

“I know all that, Mom.”

“Oh, you do?” She looked confused when I nodded. “Then what’s the problem? Are you just not that into her?”

My head dropped and I stared at my feet, rubbing a hand over my head. “You really need to stop reading books, watching reality television, or whatever it was where you heard that saying.”

She didn’t seem bothered by my complaint. At all. She laughed before she raised her eyebrow and gestured with her hand in a circle that was probably intended to tell me to get on with it because she wasn’t going to let me get away with not answering her question. “The problem is that I don’t need my mom to help me get the girl I’m interested in. You’re bound to do more harm than good since she’s more skittish than that colt you and Dad bought when I was six.”

Her brown eyes were hopeful as she stared up at me. “So what you’re saying is that you’re interested in Faith?”

Of course that was the part she zeroed in on. I hated admitting it to her because she was the most stubborn person I knew once she got something into her head, but there was no point denying the truth when it was already obvious what my answer was. “Yes.”

“Okay, then I’ll just have to trust you to do what you need to do to get the girl.” I was mid-way through a sigh of relief when she added, “Unless I decide you need a little help.”

“No help, Mom,” I growled.

She gave me her patented puppy dog look; the one that always worked on my dad. “Not even a tiny bit?”

That look worked on me almost as well as my dad, but I couldn’t afford to fall for it this time. I knew if I didn’t put my foot down now, she was going to have our wedding planned and Faith at the altar with a shotgun before I knew it. “Absolutely no help at all. Not even a tiny bit.”

“Fine,” she sighed. “I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with getting her here so the two of you can spend your first holiday together.”

It was so like her to point out that she’d already helped me with Faith in the hope that I’d back off and let her do it again. And although I was grateful for her interference in this one instance, I couldn’t say so. It would only egg her on, and she didn’t need any help with that. It didn’t matter if I’d made it blatantly clear that I didn’t want her help and she’d said she would leave it at what she’d already done, she couldn’t stop there. “Maybe I should cancel the return trip for the car I hired so you can be the one to drop her off at campus instead.”

“Car? What car? Why isn’t she driving herself over?”

“Guys and their selective hearing,” she sighed, shaking her head.

“Mom!” I snapped. “I don’t need another lecture about listening. I need to know what you meant about Faith and the car.”

“Okay. Okay.” She held her hands up. “I’ll explain it again since you obviously weren’t paying close enough attention when I asked you to pick Faith up when the two of you went to her old high school a couple of weeks ago.”

I was close to losing my patience, and my mom was enjoying every moment she could drag this out and torture me. It was payback for insisting she back off, most likely. “And?”

“She doesn’t have a car, Dillon.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Faith is a former foster kid. She doesn’t have any family to help out. The only reason she’s been able to attend Southeastern is because of the tuition waiver program she talks to all those high school students about. Your dumbass comment from earlier? It was more on the mark than I realized when it comes to Faith or else you would have already figured out that she can’t afford to buy a car.”

The implication behind her explanation rocked me. “Then how does she get to the schools she visits?”

“Some rideshare app on her phone, which is why I hired a car for her to use today, because I didn’t feel right about having her accepting a ride from some random stranger to come over to our house. Not when I could send a town car instead.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“Language.” My dad lightly smacked me on the backside of my head when he walked up behind me.

“It’s not directed at me, honey,” my mom reassured him.

“It better not be,” he grumbled as he moved to her side and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close like he always did whenever she was near.

“I think our boy finally met a girl who makes him feel all protective, like you are with me.”

“Oh really?” My dad’s grin matched my mom’s when his attention switched back to me. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

My mom answered for me. “Faith.”

“The girl you’ve been working with on that project over at the college? The one with all the foster kids?”

“Yes, she’s the one they wrote the newspaper article about because she started the whole thing.”

“There’s an article about her?” I asked, pulling my phone out of my pocket to look it up on the internet. “When?”

“About four months ago, right before the school year started.”

“The same program you suggested Dillon could help with as part of our agreement with him after the black eye incident earlier this month?” My gaze jerked up from the screen of my phone to find my dad staring at my mom with narrowed eyes.

“Yes.”

His head cocked to the side. “Started by the same girl you invited over to celebrate Thanksgiving with us?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Elaine! Have you been planning this all along?”

She blinked her eyes in a gesture that was meant to make her look innocent but failed because we both knew her too well.

“How long, Mom?” I wouldn’t put it past her if she’d been planning it from the moment she read the article about Faith.

“Since I met her for lunch,” she admitted sheepishly. “What can I say? She was pretty, smart, and kind. Plus, we hit it off so well. I figured if there was a way for me to arrange for the two of you to meet, maybe I’d luck out.”

“You’re the worst,” I chuckled, shaking my head.

“Or the best,” she corrected as the doorbell rang. “Since there’s your girl right now.”

Damn. It was hard to disagree with her logic when she was right...something I should’ve learned by now since she liked to tell us she was always right.