by Tracy Wolff
As Kyle circled like his brother had before him, going faster and faster, Jack knew that was exactly what he was going to attempt. And since Sophie didn’t seem to be coming to put a stop to it, Jack rushed toward the door himself. Maybe it was none of his business, but the kid was going to—
He was too late. Unable to complete the jump, Kyle crashed into the curb and went down hard in the middle of the street—at the same time a car sped around the corner. Jack started running, his heart pumping triple time as he cursed his bum leg and the fact that he was nowhere near as fast as he used to be. Noah screamed and dove into the street after his brother and for five of the longest seconds of his life, Jack was terrified they’d both be hit.
The car, blasting loud music and driven by a teenager holding a cell phone, swerved at the last second, honking loudly as it passed the boys. Jack stumbled as relief swept through him.
By the time he reached them, a visibly shaken Noah had helped a crying Kyle out of the street. The poor kid was all torn up—elbows and knees skinned and what looked like the beginning of a black eye from where handlebars had probably hit him in the face.
“Hey, now, you’re okay,” Jack said, ignoring the burning in his leg to squat down so that he was face to face with Kyle.
“It hurts!” the little boy wailed.
“I know it does. What do you say we go to my house and I’ll clean you up.”
Noah eyed him suspiciously and he couldn’t help grinning. He really liked this kid and the fierceness he brought to every situation. “My mom says we shouldn’t go to anybody’s house when she’s not home.”
He lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “Your mom’s not home?”
“No. She’s still at work.”
“What about your babysitter?”
“She didn’t meet us at the bus stop today so we walked home alone.”
And had been alone ever since, Jack surmised. Three hours was long enough for two little boys to get themselves into trouble.
Kyle, sensing he’d lost both of their attention, started to wail louder. Jack scooped him into a hug and then stood, the boy still in his arms. He turned to Noah.
“While I agree that you shouldn’t ever go anywhere your mom doesn’t know about, I’m going to make a case for breaking that rule just this once. One, because I live right next door and we can watch for your mom out the window. And two, because I’m a doctor and I’d really like to check and clean out Kyle’s scrapes.” Not to mention get the boy to calm down long enough for him to get a good look in his eyes. If a shiner was already appearing, the kid must have hit his head pretty hard. He could have a concussion.
Kyle quit screaming and asked, “You’re a doctor?”
“I am.”
Noah considered carefully before agreeing with Jack. “And if you could do something about his black eye before Mom gets home, that’d be great. ’Cuz she’s going to flip when she sees it.”
Jack had a feeling Sophie was going to flip about lots of things, but he could understand Noah’s concern. He had started the whole curb jumping thing, and he was the oldest, so he was going to be in for it when Sophie got a look at Kyle.
“What time does your mom usually get home?” he asked.
“Five on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. Six-thirty on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
He glanced at his watch. “That gives us about twenty minutes. I’ll do my best to play down the war wounds in that time. Sound good?”
“Sounds great,” was Noah’s heartfelt answer. Even Kyle nodded along from where he nestled his head against Jack’s shoulder.
Jack carried Kyle into his kitchen, where he set up a makeshift infirmary consisting of gauze, peroxide, antibiotic ointment, band-aids, a flashlight and ice. Kyle’s eyes widened when he saw the line-up of medical supplies and he forgot to cry in his fascination. “What’s the flashlight for?” he asked.
“To look in your eyes.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I need to know if the fall shook your brain up a little bit.”
“You can see that in my eyes?”
“Cool!” Noah exclaimed. “Kyle’s brains are leaking into his eyes!”
“What? No!” Kyle squeezed his good eye shut as tightly as he could.
“What are you doing?” Jack asked.
“Keeping my brains from leaking out.”
Jack couldn’t help it. He laughed.
“It’s not funny. I need my brains,” Kyle howled. “I don’t want them to leak out. Don’t let them leak out, Dr. Jack.”
“They’re not going to, I promise. First of all, one of your eyes is almost completely swollen shut, so nothing is leaking out that one. And if you’ll open the second and let me get a good look, I’ll prove to you that nothing’s leaking there, either.”
Kyle slit his good eye open barely, but Jack could nonetheless see the doubt shining from it. “What kind of doctor are you again?”
“The kind who can check for brain leakage.”
The eye opened a little more. “Anything there, Doc?”
This time Jack held the laughter that was welling up inside him long enough to say, “Nothing so far. I think we’re safe.”
“Schwoo,” Kyle sighed heavily, wiping one little hand across his forehead. But he dropped it when Jack reached for the flashlight. “I thought you said we were safe.”
“On the brain leaking part. But I still need to make sure your brains didn’t get spun around like a milkshake in there. So open up for a second.”
Kyle did as he was told, and Jack watched as the boy’s pupil shrank in reaction to the light. He glanced over at the other eye. He really wanted a look at that pupil too, to ensure both were the same size. But trying to pry it open would hurt Kyle and he really didn’t want to do that—the kid was being such a trooper.
“No milkshake?” Kyle asked as he put the flashlight down.
“No milkshake.” He held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three!” Noah crowed.
“Good, though I wasn’t exactly asking you. This is more milkshake brain stuff.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Jack turned back to Kyle, this time only holding up one finger. “How many?”
Kyle gave the right answer and after a couple more questions to rule out the likelihood of a concussion, Jack moved on to the various cuts and scrapes.
“You know,” he said, checking the worst of the bunch out first, “There are easier ways to injure yourself than kamikaze biking.”
“We were practicing for the X games. We want to be alternative sports heroes.”
“Alternative sports, huh?” He was trying to distract the patient from what he was doing, but it didn’t work. Kyle cried out as he poured peroxide over the scrapes, and Jack winced a little himself. The kid was really being a trooper and he hated to hurt him, even if it was for his own good.
“Yeah,” Noah said, “We want to be snowboarders.”
“Good luck with that. I didn’t realize Atlanta was known for its prime snowboarding slopes.” He squeezed some ointment onto the wound before moving on to the next.
Kyle sighed. “That’s what Mom says. But she promised she’d get us skateboards for our birthdays.”
“Excellent. Do you know what kind of skateboards you want?”
As the boys babbled out long, convoluted answers that dealt with colors and brand names and wheel types, Jack grabbed tweezers from his medical bag and extracted a few pieces of gravel from Kyle’s skinned knee. The boy was so wrapped up in discussing his future skateboard that he didn’t even notice, which was exactly what Jack had intended.
The boys kept up a steady stream of chatter for the next ten minutes with very little prompting from him. By the time they’d wound down, th
ey’d covered everything from famous skateboarders to their new video game to who the best superhero villain combo was and Jack had finished cleaning all of Kyle’s scrapes.
When he started gathering up the detritus from the great-bicycle-wound operation, however, Kyle’s lower lip started to tremble a little. “What’s wrong, buddy?”
“My knee hurts.”
“I know it does. But the ointment had some special pain killing stuff in it, so give it a few minutes to work. It’ll feel much better.”
“Mommy always kisses my boo-boos.”
“I bet she does.” He checked the clock across the room, which read six-thirty. “She’ll probably be home in a few minutes and then she can kiss it better.”
Kyle’s lip shook even more as tears bloomed in his eyes. “It won’t feel better without a kiss!”
It took him a minute, but Jack finally figured out what Kyle was getting at. “You want me to kiss your boo-boo?” He felt a little ridiculous using the word boo-boo, but Kyle nodded vigorously. Which is how Jack found himself leaning down and kissing the band-aid over Kyle’s right knee. It was the first time in his life he could ever remember doing such a thing, but surprisingly, it didn’t feel nearly as strange as he would have thought.
“Noah, why don’t you go look out the window in the living room and watch for your mom while I make us some hot chocolate. I don’t want her to come home and find you missing.”
“You have hot chocolate?” Kyle said, eyes suddenly wide as saucers. He bounded up from the chair, injuries forgotten. “I love hot chocolate!”
“How about marshmallows? Do you have those?” Noah asked.
“I don’t, sorry.” The only reason he even had hot chocolate was because it was Amanda’s favorite. He’d picked a box up at the store the other day so he’d have it for her the next time she came by—which he knew was stupid and smacked vaguely of emotional suicide, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. “Do you want something else?”
Noah’s sigh was long. “No, that’s okay.”
Jack turned to hide his smile. He didn’t want the kid to think he was laughing at him. “Go check on your mom, okay? And I promise, next time I’ll have marshmallows and whipped cream!”
“Yay!” Noah galloped down the hallway to the front window, rejoicing the entire way.
Jack winked at Kyle, then crossed to the stove where he set water to boil. Before he could even get the hot chocolate out of the pantry, though, Noah came rushing back in. “Mom’s home. Mom’s home.”
“Oh.” He was surprised to realize he was vaguely disappointed. He’d been looking forward to spending a little more time with the boys—their boundless energy kept him from brooding. “I guess you should head on home, then.”
“Will you come with us?” Noah looked at him pleadingly.
Jack tempered his first thought, which was no way in hell! Sophie Connor might be a very nice woman—and God knew, she was raising two adorable little boys—but that didn’t mean he wanted anything to do with her. Not after her weird interrogation the other night. The last thing he needed was more prodding, especially after talking to his mother.
“You go ahead. Try and catch her before she gets to the house.”
“Too late. She must have gotten home early because every light in the house is on.”
Shit. His plan for Noah to keep watch obviously hadn’t been as good as he’d thought it was. Sophie was probably frantic after coming home to an empty house.
He switched off the stove, then began herding the boys toward the front door. “Come on. We need to let her know where you are.”
Jack moved them along as quickly as he could, but the task of getting them from his house to hers wasn’t nearly as easy as he’d expected it to be. Every time he thought he had them under control, one of them would get distracted and wander off so that by the time they made it to their porch—which was lit up as brightly as the rest of the house—he felt like he’d run a marathon.
The boys bounded up the stairs and through the front door, laughing and chattering, and Jack figured his chances of slipping away unnoticed were pretty good. At least until he glanced through the door and saw Sophie’s tear-stained, panic-stricken face.
* * *
SOPHIE’S RELIEF at seeing her boys bounding through the front door, happy and healthy, was so overwhelming that her knees nearly collapsed beneath her. She’d been home for twenty minutes, freaking out because her babysitter and sons were nowhere to be found.
At first she’d thought Grace, the college student who watched them after school, had taken them to the park for some exercise. But then she’d called Grace on her cell phone and found out that the girl had forgotten to call and let her know she wasn’t showing up. That was when she lost it. After checking every room in the house, twice, she’d ended up running around the neighborhood like a crazy woman, screaming for her children. When that hadn’t worked, she’d started dialing the numbers of everyone she could possibly imagine them going to for help—all to no avail.
But she’d missed someone, she realized, as Dr. Jack Alexander warily climbed the stairs behind her sons. Suddenly conscious of the tears on her cheeks, she dashed her hands across her face. She’d already interrogated him like a crazy person. The last thing she needed was for him to think she was a crybaby, too.
“Hi, Mom,” Noah said, and hearing his little voice—so safe and happy—melted any shot she had at maintaining a stiff upper lip. A sob welled up inside of her and she dropped to her knees beside the two of them, pulling them into her arms as she tried to get control of her wildly fragmented emotions.
She buried her face in Kyle’s neck, breathing in his little boy scent, and once again reached for control. “I’m sorry,” she told them. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Noah let himself get hugged for a minute before struggling to break her too-tight grip. “It was fun. We had chips and salsa and played games and rode our bikes. That’s how Dr. Jack found us, when Kyle fell off his bike.”
He ran the last few words together, like he was hoping she wouldn’t notice them if he said them really fast. Pulling back, she looked at Kyle’s face for the first time and saw the black eye she had missed as she had pulled them close.
“What happened?” she demanded, listening intently as the whole, jumbled story came piling out of the boys. By the time they were done, she was shaken up all over again. Her baby had been hurt and she hadn’t been here. They’d been home alone and she’d been at work, blissfully immersed in her latest case, never thinking of how much danger—or how much trouble—her kids could get into. The thought was a dagger through her heart.
She didn’t do this. She simply wasn’t a mother who left her boys alone. She worked to support her family and that meant she couldn’t always be with her boys when they might need her. But she always made sure they were taken care of, that someone was there for them when she couldn’t be. Because she knew what it was like to be alone, with no one to turn to for help when you needed it.
She’d spent most of her life being shipped from foster home to foster home, doing whatever she wanted because most of the people hadn’t cared nearly as much about her as they had about the money that came with her. Oh, there’d been exceptions—Mama Maria, who taught her to cook Italian food and Rose, the councilor who had inspired her own interest in the law—but for the most part she’d raised herself. More than once she’d gotten into trouble simply because she’d been unsupervised and in the wrong place at the wrong time. The idea that her boys, even inadvertently, had been in the same position today, shamed her in a way not much else could.
“You’re squeezing me too tight, Mommy!” Kyle complained. “And I’m starving! What’s for dinner?”
She brushed tears off her cheeks once again. “I was thinking Rosa’s,” she said, naming their fav
orite Mexican restaurant. “And then ice cream for dessert?”
“Yay! That’s even better than hot chocolate,” Noah cheered.
“Hot chocolate?” she asked, a whole new panic invading. “You know you’re not supposed to touch the stove unless I’m in the same room with you.”
“Dr. Jack was going to make it for us,” Kyle said. “To make my boo-boos feel better.”
“Oh, well, that was very nice of Dr. Jack.” Climbing back to her feet, she told them, “Go wash your hands and faces and we’ll head out.
“Don’t run,” she called down the hall seconds later when the stampede began.
As soon as the boys were otherwise occupied, she turned to Jack. “Thank you for taking care of them,” she told him. “I had no idea they were home alone.”
His lips turned up in a lazy half smile that made her stomach flutter. “I figured you didn’t. I’m sorry I didn’t get to them sooner. I was watching them play, at least until they ventured into the street. Then I was worried, so I started outside to get them back on the sidewalk when Kyle fell.” He smiled a little. “But, on the bright side, he did do one hell of a wheelie on his way down.”
“Wow. That thought is so reassuring to me.”
“Sorry. I forget moms have their own standards for what’s cool.”
“We do. And wheelies that end in black eyes don’t even make the bottom of the list.”
“He’ll be fine. I checked him over. No sign of a concussion or anything like that.”
“Thank God. Again, thanks so much for taking care of my kids. I promise, it won’t happen again.”
“I told you, it was no big deal. They’re great kids.”
Her heart warmed at his obvious affection for her sons. “They really are, aren’t they? I can’t believe they handled being home alone so well. But I’m going to have to get a new babysitter. Grace totally flaked, didn’t even bother to let me know she wasn’t going to be here today. That’s just not cool.”
