His First Choice

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Jem had already been back at work, and the kitchen had been cleaned up, by the time she’d walked in, and rather than disturb him—or hope to glean any change in his demeanor that would indicate whether or not he’d enjoyed lunch alone with her sister—she joined Levi and Kacey in her craft room, at the multipurpose table she’d set up. Levi sat on his knees on a chair, leaning his elbows on the table—his fist, and cast, pointing straight up to the ceiling—and picked up puzzle pieces as soon as she’d dumped them.

  She took to her own task, as well. Leading his conversation, and letting him regale them with his imaginative tales. The puzzle was almost done and Levi was a happy, well-adjusted boy without a care in the world.

  If all they talked about was his life with his dad. Things he liked to do. And cars.

  “Did you notice that when you mentioned his mother his little lips got thin and he quit chattering?” Kacey asked softly when Levi left the room after announcing that he had to go potty.

  “Of course I did,” Lacey said. There was something about Tressa. The woman was genuinely caring. Sweet and loving. And volatile on occasion. A toxic mix.

  Of course, Lacey was also in the process of fighting the hots for Tressa’s ex, so she’d be more apt to find fault with the other woman. It was natural. Human nature. It was a good thing she was off the case.

  “Can we do another one?” Levi asked twenty minutes later as they took apart the car puzzle and put the pieces back into the box.

  “Sure!” Kacey told him. Lacey went to check on the pasta casserole she’d put in the oven, and to see how much longer Jem was going to be, and then went back to join them.

  Levi and Kacey were talking about their trip to the beach the day before. About sharks and boats and little-boy things.

  “Do you like to swim?” Lacey asked, rejoining them at the table. They already had the perimeter of the puzzle a quarter of the way done.

  Kacey seemed to be having as much fun as Levi was. She was a natural with him and would make a great mother. And...

  “Uh-huh.” Levi had answered her question about swimming.

  “Did your daddy teach you how?” Kacey asked. “Do you have a pool in your backyard?”

  Lacey could answer that one for her—they didn’t. But apparently they had a goldfish pond she had yet to see.

  “Mommy does,” Levi said. “She teached me.”

  Nice. Normal. Conscientious. Good mothering.

  “And you like it?”

  “Uh-huh.” The boy nodded while he picked up a piece and put it in its proper place. They were making a train with a smiling face on the front of the engine.

  He was concentrating. Showing no signs of discomfort or stress. But he was back to the same one-word answers he’d given her when she’d questioned him in the playroom at work. Not chattering on as she’d come to recognize as his normal way.

  Because he didn’t like being questioned? Was she making problems where there were none?

  The little cast came into view. And she thought of the unexplained bruises on his torso. Nightmares. A mother who chose to have her son immediately taken away when a social worker showed up at the door. The day care’s report of changed developmental performance and personality. One and a half known hospital visits for each year of his life.

  Normal or not?

  On a hunch, she asked, “How old were you when you learned to swim?”

  She didn’t expect him to know. Four-year-olds didn’t usually catalog in a time sequence.

  “I dunno.”

  “Did you take lessons besides with your mom?”

  “Nope.” He placed another piece.

  “Do you swim at your mom’s a lot?” Kacey asked, her tone completely different from Lacey’s.

  “I dunno.”

  Feeling guilty for the interrogation, Lacey decided to let the whole thing drop, to trust Sydney to do her job.

  She found an eyeball for the engine’s face and handed it to Levi. “Here, I think this goes in over there,” she said, not saying where “there” was.

  He put it immediately in place. “Did your mommy teach you to swim?” His soft r’s grabbed at Lacey.

  He wasn’t looking at either sister. They looked at each other. “Yes,” Lacey said when Kacey shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t want to answer.

  “She taught both of us at once,” Kacey added then. At which Levi looked up at her, cocking his head and frowning. “Does twins’ moms have four hands?”

  “Of course not, silly.” Lacey grinned at that. He was a normal, sweet little boy. She was giving him too much credit, thinking he was so completely advanced and purposely holding back.

  His face didn’t clear. “How does she hold two under at once?”

  “Hold two under?” Kacey asked the question. Lacey’s heart thrummed in overtime. She told herself not to jump to conclusions.

  “You know, hold you under so you don’t suck in your nose and then you come up again.” Kacey’s eyes widened.

  “Oh, you mean holding on to you and dunking you under to help you glide through the water and then bring you back up?” Lacey said, breathing easier. Toddler swim classes, at least in California, where children were around water frequently, were common. Drowning deaths among young children were, statistically, a high cause of death and the best protection for them was knowing how to swim.

  Levi had been placing a piece. It didn’t fit, though he tried to force it, and he finally gave up. Climbing down from his chair to stand on the floor, he said, “No, you know, like this.” He grabbed hold of his ribs and then squatted down, paused several seconds and then jumped up with both feet leaving the ground. As though springing up out of the water.

  “Oh,” Lacey said, glancing at Kacey and shaking her head.

  “No, our mom didn’t do that with us.”

  She was no longer on Levi’s case, but as a concerned citizen she could make another call. She could call every day if she had more to report.

  “Did you like it?” Kacey asked.

  “Nope. I cried.” His babyish r sounded more pronounced to Lacey. Could someone be mistreating him?

  “Then what did your mom do? Did she stop?”

  He shook his head. “She did this.” He put his hands back on his ribs, scrunched up his face like he was straining, and the knuckles on his good hand turned white at his ribs.

  She remembered the bruises Mara had noticed on Levi’s torso. Bruises Jem surely would have noticed when he picked the boy up after his weekend visit. Could it have been from the swimming “lesson”?

  “Was she mad at you?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Did you tell your dad about learning to swim?”

  “Uh-uh.” Levi shook his head, climbing back up on his chair to lean over the puzzle again. “Mommy did.”

  “When he came to pick you up?”

  “Uh-uh. On the phone. Dad was gone away a long time and we were playing a game.”

  “Who was playing a game?”

  “Mommy and me. After swimming we played a game and it was fun.”

  “Then your dad called and your mommy told him you’d learned to swim?”

  “Yep!” He put a piece in place—the nose of the engine face.

  “Did you tell him that you cried when you learned to swim?”

  “No.” Levi’s chin did a chest plant.

  “Why not?” Lacey’s instincts were driving her now. She gave them free rein.

  “I dunno.”

  Why wouldn’t Tressa have told her ex-husband that the swimming lesson made their son cry? A lesson that was memorable enough that a four-year-old could recount it months later.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. You can tell me why you didn’t tell your dad you cried. You won’t be in trouble, I
promise.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Did someone say you couldn’t tell?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” he said, climbing down from the table.

  “Hey, squirt.” Kacey grabbed him around the waist as he passed and pulled him up onto her lap. “You know that you can trust us, right? I promise you, we won’t let anyone hurt you. Ever. Okay?”

  Not at all what Lacey would have said, because the promise was empty. Sometimes she couldn’t prevent the hurt. And children in abusive situations were generally lied to. They needed honesty if they were ever going to learn to trust and grow up to have a healthy relationship...

  “I wanna go home.”

  “I thought we were having fun here.” Kacey smiled at him, gave him a little bounce on her knee.

  He just sat there.

  “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you like Lacey?”

  He nodded again.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “If I tell you, she can make me not live with my dad.” He whispered the words, looking Kacey straight in the eye. His lower lip trembled, but he didn’t cry. Then he turned a fearful gaze on Lacey.

  Had Tressa told him that Lacey was trying to take him away from his parents? Or was he asking Lacey for help?

  Either way, she was going to get it for him.

  Something was very, very wrong here and she wasn’t going to stop until she knew for certain that Levi Bridges was not being abused.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JEM WAS SITTING out back with the fountain on at the fish pond Sunday when his cell phone rang.

  Levi was asleep, exhausted from the weekend at Lacey’s. The monitor sat on the table beside him. His ringer sounded again, and a third time.

  His son was safe. He didn’t want to deal with Tressa. And there was no one else who’d be calling him on a Sunday night.

  Bridges Construction did not work on Sundays. Ever. It had been part of the policy under which he’d gone into business for himself.

  A throwback to his days growing up in the Bible Belt. The ringing stopped and then started again.

  He glanced at the caller ID and picked up.

  “What is it, Tressa?”

  “Did you talk to her, Jem? Did you talk to that Sydney woman?”

  “The office doesn’t open until tomorrow. I told you I’d call her then.”

  “She came here on a Friday night. She could have come to your house.”

  True. “I’d have called you if she had.”

  “So where were you?”

  Feet dropping from the boulder he’d had them resting on, Jem sat up. “What do you mean, where was I?”

  “All weekend. I stopped by. It is my weekend to see Levi, remember?”

  And Tressa had agreed never to come to his house. He’d needed space where he could be away from her drama. That was their agreement. If she needed him, she was to call and he’d come there. Not that he still didn’t half expect her to show up unannounced.

  “You were here?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know... Saturday.”

  “I thought you were going to the city with Amelia.”

  “We had a fight.”

  His gut clenched and he longed for the beer in his refrigerator.

  “I had errands to run yesterday.” The words burned his tongue. He couldn’t stand to lie. Ever. But to tell her the truth was just plumb dumb. He was not a masochist.

  “And today?”

  “You came by again today?”

  “Twice.”

  “Tressa.”

  “I know. But I needed you, Jem.”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I wanted to see Levi.”

  She was feeling insecure because she’d panicked and called him to pick up her son. She was afraid that it made her look like a bad mother. He understood. He just didn’t have patience for her at the moment.

  He had real problems to deal with.

  Like the fact that he was falling for a woman who didn’t appear to want a relationship with him.

  And a son who’d been clingy again that night, wanting Jem to lie with him in his bed until he fell asleep.

  Because of a weekend spent with Lacey?

  Tressa had intimated that Levi’s nightmare had been because of his visit with the other woman.

  But he begged to go see her. Hell, he’d practically thrown a tantrum on Friday when Kacey and Lacey had been gone.

  And while he was spending a good deal of his time with Kacey, he seemed to like Lacey equally...

  “Where were you, Jem?”

  “On a job. I thought I had the weekend free, remember?” He’d lived with her a long time. And knew that the only way to deal with her sometimes was to go on the defensive.

  “Where was Levi?”

  “At a sitter’s.”

  “Who? What sitter? I thought we talked to each other about his sitters. You don’t want me leaving him with just anyone, you said.”

  Shit. He stood up, paced the pond. He’d gotten soft. All this time spent with Lacey and her sister, he supposed. “The woman whose house I’m working on has a sister. She watched Levi while I worked. I was there the entire time.” Levi hadn’t been, but she didn’t need to know that. If she’d seen the boy out with someone else, he’d already have heard about it.

  “A woman? How old is she?”

  The tornado was back in his gut. He’d thought divorcing her would get rid of that at least. “I don’t know how old she is,” he said, letting his irritation show. Sometimes she’d back down if she knew she was pissing him off. “I don’t ask those kinds of questions. She wanted work done. I’m doing the work.”

  “You’re doing the work?” She squelched. “Why isn’t one of your crews doing it? What’s wrong, Jem, are you having problems with the business? You need to let me take over again.”

  When he’d first started the business, Tressa had been in charge of his finances, of investments and payroll. He’d run quotes through her, too, as together they’d found the most cost-efficient way of doing quality work. That had been a long time ago. He’d still viewed her as a life partner then.

  Before she’d started keeping tabs on every woman he talked to, seeing affairs where there were none. Before she’d accused him of taking cash from clients so he could go to strip clubs without her knowing where the money was going.

  As if he’d ever do either.

  “The business is doing fine,” he said now. There was no way she was coming back to work for him. Ever. “I’m doing this job on the side. As a favor. It’s just one room.”

  “A favor? Who is this woman? What do you owe her? Levi knows her, too? Who is she?”

  The string of words that went through his mind, self-directed, weren’t pretty. Or kind. “I don’t really know her,” he said now, thinking of Kacey. “We just met the day she asked me to do the job. She’s paying for a room to be built for her sister. As a birthday present.”

  “Is she young?”

  “You know I’m not a good judge of age, and I haven’t paid any attention, in any case.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Definitely not one of a kind, I can tell you that. I don’t know, Tress. If you want me to take notes next time I’m with her, I will. I really just want to get the work done and get out of there.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  He thought of Kacey. “Not that I’ve noticed.” Not like Lacey was.

  “Do you like her?”

  “I don’t know
her, Tress. Please, can we stop this? I’ll call Sydney tomorrow and find out what’s going on. I’m sure it’s just a routine follow-up,” he lied again. “Last time they visited both of us within hours of each other. I’m sure they’d have been here to question me this weekend if there was a problem.”

  Tressa’s silence was a blessing. Not only because she wasn’t coming at him, but because it meant she was calming down.

  Then she said, “I wonder what happened to that Lacey woman. Can you ask to have her put back on our case? I liked her.”

  He had a headache, thinking he’d forgo the beer for a couple of aspirin and bed. “I’ll ask,” he said and softened his tone. He told her to take a sleeping pill and get a good night’s rest. They knocked her out for a good eight hours.

  And then he went in for that beer. He’d gotten off lightly. She hadn’t accused him of screwing his client. Or called members of his crews to tell them that he was screwing a client. Both of which she’d done before.

  Not that any of that was her business anymore. She just thought it was, and went ballistic anytime she thought he might be seeing anyone.

  Unless she was in a relationship. Then it was okay.

  Shaking his head, he went back outside to his backlit pond and sent a silent plea to Amelia to call Tressa. She would. Eventually. She always did.

  He just had no idea why.

  * * *

  AFTER A BRIEF conversation with her sister about whether or not Lacey should call Jem—Kacey’s vote was an absolute yes—Kacey stopped Lacey before she picked up her phone Sunday night.

  “You didn’t ask about lunch today,” she said.

  Because she didn’t want to know the details. What was, was. She was okay with that.

  It wasn’t like she and Jem had done more than spend a little time together. He’d never led her to believe for one second that he was interested in her in any way other than a friend. One he wasn’t even sure he completely trusted.

  It wasn’t his fault she was drawn to him like some kind of pathetic groupie.

  “What’s there to ask about?” she said, wishing Kacey wasn’t standing in the archway that led from the living room to the hall. She wanted to be in the hall—walking down the hall—away from this conversation. And her sister’s discerning, loving gaze.