On the Fly

by Catherine Gayle

  I didn’t particularly want to be her keeper, even though she definitely needed one. The way she’d completely overreacted to her daughter’s cut, to the point that she seriously hurt herself, proved that to me. I was way more attracted to her than I could understand. Whether I wanted to be that for her or not, she didn’t want it. At least not from me. That would mean struggling with her every step of the way, and all because she was too scared or proud or whatever to accept help when it was offered. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I probably should be her keeper. That thought opened up a whole new bucket of trouble, one that I wasn’t ready to look inside.

  By the time I’d put my suitcase away and changed clothes—I’d gotten some blood on the knees of my jeans while I was cleaning Rachel up—Babs was dressed and ready. We went across the hall and knocked.

  Tuck opened the door with a huge grin. “I’m ready, Mr. Jamie!” he shouted. He had put on pants and a T-shirt. He hadn’t even attempted to zip his pants, showing off his Spiderman Underoos. At least he had underwear on. His sneakers weren’t tied, either, and the tongues were hanging out. Amid all that, he’d already pulled on his coat.

  Babs picked him up, tossed him over his shoulder, and carried him back inside. “Not quite,” he said, laughing. He tossed Tuck down on the sofa and set to work straightening out the mess of his clothes.

  I followed them in and closed the door behind me so the cat wouldn’t escape again.

  The set-up of their place was exactly like ours, with the master bedroom on one end and the other bedrooms on the opposite end. The open living and dining area was in the middle of it all.

  Maddie stood off by the hallway to what I assumed to be the kids’ rooms, fully dressed but with that wary look in her eyes. I still hadn’t gotten over her calling me Mr. Soupy. I wasn’t sure what to do with that, let alone with her shyness. When we were kids, Zee and Dana and I, we’d all been boisterous and energetic and all up in everybody’s business. Maddie Shaw was nothing like we had been.

  I smiled, thinking maybe that would help. “Is your mom ready?” I asked her.

  She shrugged her shoulders in lieu of answering me, then hurried past me into the master. A minute later, she came back holding her mother’s hand…but it was Rachel I was more focused on. Every step she took had her wincing and grimacing, and she kept sucking in quick breaths of air.

  I should have taken her to the emergency room like I’d initially thought to do. I probably should do that now.

  Instead, I crossed over to her and picked her up. She was tiny—couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds or so—and she felt way too good being right up next to me like that.

  This could be dangerous, letting myself think about how nice it felt to hold her. She was a single mom. I had to remember that.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, sounding all sorts of breathless and sexy, even though I was positive the breathlessness was because of pain.

  Her question was a good one because I was having a really hard time looking away from her cute button nose and the smattering of freckles that fell across it. Until I looked at her lips. Then I couldn’t look anywhere else.

  Tuck’s giggles finally caught my attention and reminded me that we weren’t alone—far from it. I looked over. Babs had finished straightening his clothes.

  I cleared my throat and returned my gaze to Rachel. “I’m carrying you because your feet are too torn up. You need to stay off them.”

  “I can’t stay off them,” she said. “I’m a mom. I have to take care of my kids. I have to start a new job tomorrow.”

  Why did she always feel the need to argue with me? Or maybe it just seemed like she was always arguing with me.

  “You can stay off them any time I can pick you up.” I didn’t want to let the implications of that sink in. “Come on. Let’s go eat.” I took her out the door, grabbing her coat from the hall closet, and taking her keys from the hook just inside the door.

  Babs followed behind us, holding onto Tuck’s hand. He held his other out for Maddie, but she hurried forward and took her brother’s instead. Then I locked the door.

  By the time we got down to the parking garage, Rachel had given up on whatever had kept her tense in my arms and put her arm around my shoulder for support. I liked it a lot. Too much.

  I opened the passenger side door to my SUV and started to put her in it, but she squirmed to get out.

  “The kids’ booster seats. They have to have them.”

  “Give me her keys and I’ll get them,” Babs said.

  I tossed them his way. “You don’t have to do everything yourself,” I said to her once he headed over to her car, both kids in tow.

  She let out a little laugh, but she definitely wasn’t amused. I shut her door, but I caught her rolling her eyes through the window.

  Babs returned and started getting the kids situated in the back, and Rachel moved as though to get out again.

  I turned around to block her. “What now?”

  “My purse. I didn’t bring my purse.”

  All she needed was a damn key to get back in her place, which I’d grabbed for her on the way out. “You don’t need your purse,” I said. I probably sounded a little too gruff. I couldn’t help it. She was frustrating me, and I didn’t like that it was so easy for her to frustrate me.

  “To pay.” She said it as though that should explain everything.

  I backed her into her seat again and pulled her seatbelt, securing it in place around her. “You aren’t paying, so you don’t need to worry about it. You don’t need your purse.” I let my hand linger a little too long by her hip before I jerked it away.

  “But—”

  “No buts. You fed Babs and Razor the other day. You intended to feed Babs again this morning. You’re not going to pay.” Then I closed her door and went around to the driver’s side. By the time I got there, Babs had both kids and himself in place in the back.

  I climbed in and fastened my belt, trying to ignore her sexy pout.

  Yeah, Rachel Shaw definitely needed a keeper, or a helper…or I didn’t know what. But she needed something. And damn if I didn’t want that something to be me.

  “Yes! I beated you! Woo woo!” Tuck’s victorious squeal bounced around to fill every corner of Brenden and Jamie’s shared living room. He dropped his controller and leaped up from the floor, both hands fisted as he punched them through the air in time with the goofy dance of his feet. “I beated Mr. Jamie! I beated Mr. Jamie!” he chanted in a sing-songy voice.

  He continued pumping his fists into the sky while he raced circles around Jamie, who was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV in a posture that made him look like an overgrown boy, and Maddie, who was lounging back on a beanbag chair. Both of them held video game controllers in their hands.

  I hadn’t intended to come to the guys’ place after we’d finished eating. I’d meant to take Tuck and Maddie back to our condo and go on with our lives as though the disaster of our surprise breakfast for Jamie had never happened, but halfway between the diner and our building, Jamie had asked the kids if they wanted to come over and play Mario Kart with him. Tuck’s excitement had been so great, and even Maddie had seemed interested in playing, so I hadn’t been able to tell them no.

  And now, here we were. Exactly where I didn’t want to be.

  “I want a rematch,” Jamie said. “Maddie and I both want one, don’t we?”

  Maddie’s beanbag chair was far enough away from Jamie that she could feel safe. Or maybe it was far enough away that I felt she was safe. Whichever. He’d brought the chair out from his room and set it up for her without even batting an eye as soon as we’d come back to the building. It was just something he’d thought to do without any sort of prompting. Like it was natural for him.

  Maddie had never been much of a video game player before. She’d always stayed back and watched as other kids played. But not today. At first she’d held her controller like it was a foreign object, something
she wasn’t comfortable with, but she’d gradually become more accustomed to how it worked. Right now, the ghost of a smile crossed her face as she nodded in agreement.

  That brief smile, if nothing else, made me glad I’d relented and let the kids come to play. It was a very rare thing of late to see my little girl happy. I’d give anything to see those little smiles more often.

  The heated expression on Brenden’s face, however—and even the simple fact that he was so close to me on his couch—made me wish I’d held my ground. He kept acting like he wanted to be with me, but at the same time it felt as though everything I did upset him. I didn’t know what to do with that. It seemed a little unstable, and I had already experienced more than enough instability for one life, thank you very much. The few years I’d spent married to Jason had been all I could handle and more, and things had only grown increasingly out of control in recent months.

  I shifted my weight, trying to get more comfortable. The problem with that idea was that my body wasn’t uncomfortable; it was my mind. I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around why he had been so determined to pay for our meal, why he had believed he needed to tend my feet earlier, why he’d been carrying me around ever since. Was he just being a nice guy, like Jamie with the beanbag chair, or was there something he expected in return for his kindness?

  I’d made it pretty clear that I had no intention of dating him. Barring me changing my mind, I couldn’t imagine what he thought he would get from helping me. In my life, there had been very few people who’d done nice things simply for the sake of being nice. It was such a rarity that I had a hard time believing that could possibly be the reason for his recent behavior.

  We hadn’t talked much over breakfast, Brenden and I. Jamie and Tuck had kept us all in stitches, making goofy faces at each other and other silly things like that. Jamie seemed to really bring out Tuck’s true nature in a way that I hadn’t seen enough of for too long.

  When we had talked, it had mainly been to respond to the two of them. Nonetheless, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from noticing all the times that Brenden’s gaze had fallen to me. He’d stared so much it had made me squirm.

  Had he been serious about wanting to date me? Really, truly serious? Why would he want that? It was difficult to fathom, considering how much he was glaring at me today. But what if his glares were because I’d rejected him? Could I have hurt his pride? I supposed it was possible, albeit unlikely.

  None of it made any sense to me. I mean, I could never be the sort of woman who would attract the attention of a man like him. I was a single mom with two kids, and most of my life I’d barely managed to scrape by. He was a professional athlete, probably a multimillionaire. Weren’t they all? He could have any woman he wanted.

  Except me. If he did want me, not that I believed that he could. But even if he did want me, I couldn’t take the risk of letting someone—anyone—that close to me because it would mean letting them close to my kids.

  “I’m gonna catch you,” Jamie said, setting off a series of Tuck’s giggles. My eyes flitted over to the two of them and Maddie. I had to force away the unwanted thought that I was already letting Jamie close to my kids.

  Whether I let Jamie in or not, that didn’t mean I should let Brenden close.

  I looked up at him now under the intensifying heat of his stare. His eyes were fixed on me like they had been so often at the diner, not on the kids or Jamie or the video game. The brown of his eyes was so dark that it blended into his pupils until the colored part of his eye was a single entity. He pushed to his feet, and I was once more astounded by his size. Jason had been nearly six feet, but Brenden would make him look small in comparison.

  I shivered at the thought.

  He stalked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Can I bring you anything?” he called out over his shoulder. “Water? Coffee?”

  His question had to be intended for me. Jamie and the kids had already started their rematch and were immersed in their race, oblivious to the adults in the room.

  It struck me as odd that I hadn’t included Jamie as one of the adults—but he’d latched onto Tuck, and Tuck onto him, so quickly and so completely that I had a hard time seeing him as the man he was and not simply a teenaged boy.

  I didn’t want Brenden to do anything else for me, not even something as simple as bringing me water. Maybe he was trying to do nice things for me so I’d feel compelled to go out with him. Or maybe he had something more sinister in mind. You couldn’t tell what a man was really like in the short amount of time we’d known one another. I hadn’t been able to see Jason for the monster he was even though I’d known him for more than a decade.

  “No, I’m fine,” I finally replied. “Thanks.”

  He grunted, his head still buried in the refrigerator while he searched through it.

  I needed to use the restroom even if I didn’t want Brenden to bring me a drink. I stood up quickly, before he could come back and glare at me or try to carry me to the bathroom despite the fact that I could walk there perfectly well on my own.

  Then I had to bite down hard on my tongue. It was the only way I could keep myself from making some inhuman, pained sound. I couldn’t stop my sharp hiss of breath, but I hoped it would be quiet enough not to draw Brenden’s attention.

  It wasn’t.

  He spun around with two bottles of water in a single hand, his eyes landing on me with the same scowl I was coming to equate with him. Granted, it was entirely possible that he didn’t scowl all the time when he wasn’t in my presence.

  “What are you doing?” he grumbled, an accusation evident in his tone and the narrowing of his eyes. In two steps, he crossed to the bar and set the bottles down, and it only took him two more lengthy strides to reach me.

  Why was he being so surly? It wasn’t like I had done anything to him. There was no call for him to be upset. “I just have to use the bathroom,” I said, trying to skirt around him so I could do exactly that. All the while, I attempted and failed to ignore the stinging pain in my feet. His arm snaked out and wrapped around my waist, stopping my progress before I’d really made any.

  As easy as could be, he had my feet out from under me again, lifting me into his arms. “You have to quit walking around,” he groused, stomping out of the living room.

  “I can get to the bathroom on my own.”

  How was it possible that one man could make me sound like an overworked teacher? He was bringing out the worst in me, and that drove me bonkers.

  If I couldn’t even get to the bathroom on my own, how the hell was I going to get through a day at my new job tomorrow? Yeah, it was an office job—at a desk—but I had to park my car, get into the building, walk to my desk, leave for lunch. For all I knew, I would be delivering memos throughout the office or doing any number of other tasks I’d need my feet for. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that I’d have to be on them more often than not. I might as well start getting used to the sensation now so at least I would be prepared for whatever pain I had in store.

  I was so confused over his sullen behavior, my sourpuss responses, and the fact that I enjoyed the play of his muscles beneath me, that I almost didn’t realize he was carrying me down the hall angled off the main room toward the master bedroom. His bedroom, since Jamie had fetched the beanbag chair from the bedroom on the opposite end of the apartment.

  “Maybe you can walk,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you should.”

  He didn’t even seem to be exerting himself carrying me. I had never weighed much, only about 115 pounds these days, but that ought to cause him at least some strain. Shouldn’t it? But it seemed like he could carry me around all day without even breaking a sweat.

  And that was the last thing I needed to be thinking about—how strong he was, the tone of his muscled chest.

  I didn’t want or need him to carry me around all day, even if I liked to be in his arms. I definitely didn’t need to use the en suite in his room. It felt all kinds of inva
sive, and I’d much rather use the more public bathroom in the main part of the condo, one I wouldn’t have to traipse through his bedroom in order to reach. “I thought I’d use the front bathroom,” I mumbled.

  Brenden shook his head. “I don’t trust that Babs has kept it clean.” When we arrived at his private bathroom, he set me on the floor.

  I had two kids, for God’s sake. Messy bathrooms weren’t going to faze me in the slightest. Not like being alone with him—that was something I wasn’t at all sure how to handle.

  I bit down on my tongue to keep from hissing at the pain of being on my feet, not wanting to let on that he was right. I closed the door in his face before limping gingerly to take care of my business. At least he didn’t insist on helping me with anything other than actually getting to the bathroom. I didn’t want to be rude, but there were some things I just couldn’t tolerate.

  When I opened the door, he hadn’t moved a muscle, not even to back away a few steps to give me some privacy. I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of him, tall and imposing on the other side of the doorframe, his dark hair and dark eyes combining to leave me breathless.

  “All done?” he asked idly. Nothing that had come from his mouth in our brief acquaintance had ever sounded lazy until this moment. He had both his arms crossed over his chest, and it looked almost like he’d been tapping his foot while waiting for me.

  How could he seem both bored and impatient all at once?

  I nodded. I figured he’d pick me up and return me to the living room, but he didn’t. Nor did he move out of my way so I could go back on my own. I craned my neck, trying to get a good look at him, see what was going on in his eyes in case it could give me a clue to his thoughts, but I couldn’t see him without taking a step backward.

  So, I did.