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“Sorry. I thought you heard me.” Jake shrugged, like the possibility of a crushed throat was no big deal. “So, what are you doing? Did you go run?”
“Not yet.”
All of a sudden, Jake looked very interested. “Wait a minute? You’re not…you know. Sneaking somebody out of the house, are you?”
“Sneaking someone out?” Nick repeated.
“You know. Like…a woman?”
“No, I am not sneaking a woman out of the house,” Nick said.
“’Cause, if you want somebody to sleep over, I’m fine with that. Is it that Audrey woman? The one with the giant—” Jake lifted his hands up and held them about a foot away from his chest. “And the really cute daughter? ’Cause, I’d really like to know the daughter.”
“No, it’s not her. It’s not anybody.”
“Not anybody I know, huh? Okay—” Jake looked way too interested.
“Not anyone at all. No one was here. I wouldn’t do that.”
Nick started to say not with Jake in the house, but that sounded a bit hypocritical. Was he supposed to pretend to be a monk? Just because he was single and raising a kid? One who happened to be a teenage boy, no doubt with raging hormones of his own?
Nick didn’t think so, but what did he know about the etiquette of single parents and their sex lives?
Not much.
He’d never been seriously involved with a woman with kids.
Hardly been seriously involved with any woman.
“So, you’re just going to do without until I’m eighteen?” Jake asked, like he couldn’t quite believe it. “’Cause I thought you’d be really cool about things like that. I thought…you know. You’d bring your ladies over here, and I’d bring mine, and we’d both be cool with that.”
Nick did a double take. “You have ladies? Plural?”
“Well, not exactly,” Jake said. “Not at the moment.”
“Okay, one? You have one? Who you intend to entertain in your bedroom? At fifteen?”
“Well…maybe.”
“No way that’s gonna happen,” Nick insisted.
“Really?” He looked crushed.
“Really,” Nick said, barking out the word.
“Jeez,” Jake grumbled, looking all put out. “I thought—”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
Jake grumbled as he made his way into the kitchen, no doubt hungry already. After all, it had been a whole six hours or so since he’d eaten. Nick had found him in the kitchen at midnight, gulping down a giant bowl of cereal. Now the kid was already up and hungry again.
Nick couldn’t sneak a woman into and out of this house, even if he’d wanted to. Jake got hungry too often to make that work.
And had ideas of entertaining, all of his own.
“Jesus!” Nick said, more of a prayer for help and understanding than anything else. “What am I supposed to do about that?”
And he couldn’t even go for a decent run, because when he opened up the door to do that, he saw Audrey lurking behind a tree at the house next door, looking for him, no doubt.
Nick slammed the door and wondered if he could wait her out.
Didn’t the woman have to go to work? Or take care of her kids? Did she have nothing better to do than stalk him?
He’d either have to find a way to avoid her, by finding out her schedule and running at a different time, or convince her he wasn’t interested, and he’d bet she hadn’t heard that from many red-blooded American males. It might be hard to convince her it was true.
“Damn,” he muttered.
He was mowing the grass later that morning when Lily pulled into her driveway and got out of her little SUV, neither of her kids in sight.
He waved and kept on mowing, wanting the job done before it got too hot. But then he saw her open the back of her SUV and start wresting with a pile of wooden trim, and he cut off the mower and went to help.
“Here,” he said, coming up behind her and catching an errant piece that was dragging on the ground. “Let me help.”
“Oh.” She whirled around, but the trim wasn’t all the way out of the vehicle and didn’t quite move with her.
Nick had to move fast to keep it from going all over the place and from hitting the ground and getting scuffed up.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, wondering if she was naturally jumpy or a bit of a klutz.
“No. You didn’t. I just…forgot I was holding all that and then…well, you know the rest.”
“I’ve got it. Let me carry it in for you,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face with his forearm and hoping the trim didn’t slide out of his hands.
“Okay. Thanks.”
She fished out her keys and headed for the back door, leading him through the kitchen and into the dining room, the top half of the walls freshly painted a muted gold tone and ready for the wide, white trim.
“Anywhere here is fine,” she told him.
He piled the wood in the far corner. “You doing all this work yourself?”
“Yes. I like it. I used to be an interior decorator, but I found out I liked making all the decorating decisions myself, much better than following someone else’s orders, and I like doing the physical work on a house myself. So after the girls were born, I started rehabbing houses and selling them.”
He looked around at the room in progress and the kitchen that she’d obviously already done. “You do good work, Lily,” he said.
“Thanks. How are you? How’s Jake?”
“Jake’s…as good as can be expected, I think,” he said. “But what do I know? How do you think he is?”
“Sweet. Smart. Eager to please,” she said. “He offered to mow my lawn in exchange for another batch of fudge.”
“Hey, sorry—”
“No, it’s great. I get tired of mowing the lawn, especially by this time of year. Believe me, it’s worth a lot more to me than a plate of fudge to have someone else do it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.” She walked into the kitchen and grabbed a couple of glasses from the cabinet. “Would you like something to drink? You look like you’ve been out there in the heat for a while.”
“Water. Thank you.”
She handed him a glass, which he downed in one, long swallow. She watched as he did it, looking like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him or if he made her uneasy or something.
But then she just smiled and refilled his glass again.
“So, if it’s all right with you, I’ll make a deal with Jake? Food in exchange for lawn-mowing duty?”
“Fine with me. Just don’t let him take advantage of you or your time.”
She shrugged, smiled a bit nervously. “I like to cook, and it’s just as easy to make something for five people as it is for me and the girls. What’s his favorite meal?”
“I don’t even know,” Nick said. One more thing he didn’t know about kids in general and this one in particular. “I mean, I haven’t found anything the kid won’t eat. I do remember being at my sister’s a year or so ago, and she’d made a pot roast. Jake ate plates full. I came into the kitchen not an hour and a half later to get something to drink and found the pan of leftovers still on the stove, cooling I guess, and Jake was eating out of the pan. Kid’s got no manners when it comes to food, and that he could be hungry again after eating so much at dinner…”
Nick just shook his head in wonder.
“Okay,” Lily said. “A pot roast, it is. Everything else going okay?”
Nick hesitated, needing to talk to someone, but…Lily?
He didn’t know her that well, and as open about their sexuality as some women were these days, he suspected Lily wasn’t one of them. She seemed sweet and a little shy, and Jake had volunteered that she hadn’t been divorced from her husband for that long.
Nick just couldn’t see asking her how she handled her sex life with two little girls in the house.
“I’d like to help, if I could,” she said, all sweetness and earnestness.
Nick frowned, thinking he could at least find out a little more about Audrey Graham to help him avoid her.
“Well…” He hesitated. “I don’t think there’s any easy way to say this, and I really don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but…”
Ahhh!
Lily thought she was going to die of embarrassment right there on the spot.
He knew!
He knew she’d been practically slobbering all over him, and he wanted to talk about it?
“Ahhh,” she whimpered.
She didn’t mean to. Not out loud at least, but she must have, because suddenly, he looked concerned. He took her by the arm and said, “Lily? You okay?”
“Yes,” she lied and not at all convincingly.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes. Really. Just go ahead. Tell me. It’s about—”
“Audrey Graham,” he said, looking like it pained him to even say the name to her.
“Oh! Audrey?” Lily smiled, so relieved she could have fallen to her knees and said a prayer of gratitude right then.
She’d been certain he knew she’d been all but drooling over him while he moved in and then while he’d been doing yard work the other day. She was so grateful it hadn’t gotten that hot yet, and he still had his shirt on this morning.
Him shirtless in her kitchen was probably more than she could have handled.
“Yes, Audrey. Did you say something about her running every morning?”
“Yes,” she said.
Did he want to watch?
Because the woman was certainly putting on a show.
Her outfits got skimpier by the day. She must have gone shopping after Nick moved in.
Someone had even said Nick and Audrey had run together the day before, and that when it was over, Audrey had followed Nick into his house. But people said a lot of things, and Lily made a policy to discount at least half of what she heard, just on principle alone, and it must have been one of the few occasions when Lily hadn’t been watching his house, because she hadn’t seen a thing.
“Do you know where she runs? Like how far and the route she takes?” Nick asked, looking really uncomfortable with the question.
“Not really. I’m not a runner. I mean, I see her go by our houses sometimes,” Lily said.
More often, now that Nick moved in.
Did that mean he hadn’t run with her the other day?
“And…uh…I guess there’s no easy way to say this, but…if I wanted to run without…running into her?”
“Oh,” Lily said, relieved, but puzzled.
He wanted to avoid a woman with a body like Audrey’s?
She didn’t think anybody who looked like him would want to avoid someone who looked like Audrey.
“I like to run alone,” he said. “That’s all. Really. It’s just time to clear my head, and she followed me the other day and…well, she talked the whole time.”
“Oh. Of course.” Lily nodded, gleeful at the thought of Audrey, half-dressed and nearly bouncing out of her bra and annoying Nick every step of the way.
It shouldn’t make Lily so happy, because Audrey’s husband had walked out on her just like Lily’s had, and Lily knew how awful that was. Lily felt bad for everything Audrey had gone through, but still…She didn’t want Audrey to have Nick.
