Single (Single Dads Book 1)

by RJ Scott

  Single

  Single Dads, book 1

  RJ Scott

  Copyright

  Copyright ©2019 RJ Scott

  Cover design by RJ Scott

  Edited by Sue Laybourn

  Published by Love Lane Books Ltd

  ISBN 978-1-78564-170-1

  This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission. This book cannot be copied in any format, sold, or otherwise transferred from your computer to another through upload to a file sharing peer-to-peer program, for free or for a fee. Such action is illegal and in violation of Copyright Law.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Dedication

  Always for my family

  Also… For Laurie Peterson who wanted my first responder guys to take the kids from a group home on a camping/fishing trip.

  Sorry, Laurie - you’ll have to wait for book 2, but I promise this is exactly what Eric, Leo, and Sean will do.

  Contents

  Single

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Asher

  Sean

  Epilogue

  What’s next in single Dads?

  What’s next for RJ Scott

  Newsletter

  Cowboys Ranchers Family - Romance

  Action Adventure Romance

  Hockey Romance

  Small Town / First Responders Romance

  Christmas Romance

  Standalone Romance Stories

  Co-Authored Romance

  Paranormal Romance

  Meet RJ Scott

  Asher

  Vin Diesel is outside my house.

  It’s two a.m., Mia is asleep, and I’m hallucinating that a Hollywood actor is outside my house in the San Diego suburbs.

  “Open the door!” the big man bellowed, banging on the wood. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find to use as a weapon, then switched on the porch light that illuminated the area with the light of a hundred suns, and wrenched open the door. My attempt at acting like a hard-ass was undermined by the fact that my weapon was a citrus-yellow bowl my twin sister had made. It didn’t help that I was wearing pajama bottoms that barely sat on my hips and a T-shirt emblazoned with a farting unicorn, but still I growled.

  And there stood Vin Diesel himself.

  Now that I was up close I could see it wasn’t the real actor. Just someone who, in my state of exhaustion, appeared a hell of a lot like him. In my defense, my vision was blurry. This was my first night being completely and utterly alone with my brand-new baby daughter. No more sister backing me up, no more getting a few hours’ sleep. Actually, I’d had no more than an hour’s sleep at a time in the past three days. Too late to do anything about it, I wondered if this behemoth might have a weapon, because it was two a.m., he was swaying, and he was obviously off his head on something. Drugs. This had to be something to do with drugs.

  Why didn’t I pick up my cell phone first?

  I’d forgotten my damn phone, and I’d only opened the door so the banging wouldn’t wake Mia up, and I hadn’t even considered this guy could be an armed intruder.

  An armed intruder isn’t likely to knock or shout so loud the whole neighborhood is probably peering out of their windows.

  Also, I lived in a small house in a peaceful San Diego suburb, in a quiet cul-de-sac, where excitement was what happened last month when the guy at number six lost his garage remote.

  Fake-Diesel stumbled back a little and winced up at the porch light, shielding his eyes and cursing.

  “My keys,” he mumbled and patted his pockets, pulling out a bunch of keys with a joyful whoop, then immediately dropping them on the ground.

  “Who are you?” I stood right in the doorway and kept my voice low; anything not to wake Mia. I’d just gotten her to sleep, and if this Diesel wannabe woke her up with his asshole banging on my freaking door, then I would shove a dirty diaper in his face before calling the entire police department down on him. Or maybe a SWAT team consisting of parents who knew what it was to have a new baby who refused to sleep. An entire armed force of sleep-deprived adults would end up killing him.

  Now, that would get him the fuck off my porch.

  He straightened and blinked. Then he cruised me. Or at least it seemed as if he might have. Right here on my property, clearly stoned, he raked his gaze from my head to my toes and lingered in the middle for way too long.

  “You’re not them.”

  Oh, so he wasn’t cruising me unless he identified his friends by staring at their crotches.

  He swayed toward me, his eyes glassy, his hand outstretched.

  “You have the wrong house,” I shoved the hand away and stepped outside, before pulling the door half closed behind me.

  The guy was big, way bigger than me but he was so unbalanced I thought I could take him down if he tried anything.

  Fake-Diesel spaced out in an instant, and for a brief shining moment, I genuinely thought that he understood what I was saying. Then he began to cry, great rivers of silent tears running down his face.

  “Jesus,” I said, unsure what to do next. Should I comfort the complete stranger crying on my doorstep or call the cops or what?

  “Sean!” the stranger yelled through the open part of the door. “Leo!”

  What the fuck? You’ll wake the baby.

  “Shut up!” I snapped as loudly as I dared, and hoped to hell his shouting hadn’t reached through the house and up to the very light sleeper that was my daughter.

  “GUYS!” he yelled again, and this time, he pushed it too far. So I did what every sleep-deprived adult would do in my situation. I lost my cool and snapped.

  Luckily, for him, the extent of my snapping was thrusting the fruit bowl toward him in the most threatening way I could imagine.

  “You. Stop. Go. Away. Or I’m calling the cops.”

  He took a step back. Wide-eyed. “What? Who? Where’s Sean? Is Leo home yet?”

  “My name is Asher,” I snapped.

  “Why are you in our house?” The guy looked so confused. “Are you Sean’s latest hookup? He likes pretty boys…” He stopped, blinking back tears. Should I be offended? At thirty-one, I was a long way past a boy or being called pretty, for fuck’s sake. One more step back and my visitor would be tumbling down the steps from my wraparound porch. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out an old flip phone, and stared at the screen before punching at buttons with his big fingers.

  “Sean? Leo? Guys?” he pleaded and then took that one fatal step back, tumbling down the steps and into a chaparral broom so overgrown it gave him a soft landing. I toed off one of my fuzzy duck slippers, a gift from Siobhan last Christmas, and wedged my front door open before going toward the idiot. Before I reached him, he’d jumped up, swayed, and then was violently sick in the same bush he’d landed in. His cell was on the grass, still lit up, and a tinny voice was calling loudly for someone called Eric.

  I assumed the guy decorating my chaparral broom was Eric, and I picked up the phone. “I don’t know who the fuck you are or who Eric is, but I’m at 23 Birds View Court, La Jolla, and you need to get your ass over here now to get him before I call the damned
police.”

  “Sorry? What was the address?” the man at the other end of the call asked.

  What the hell?

  “San Diego, La Jolla, 23 Birds View Court.” He’d better not be living hundreds of miles away.

  “I’ll be there in… shit… will you look at that?”

  I held the phone away from my ear, some kind of weird echo made it sound like the voice was coming from right behind me. Then, with a flurry of movement, someone walked past, scaring the shit out of me, and went straight to fake-Diesel-Eric.

  “Eric?”

  “I couldn’t help any of them,” the big guy said, and then, in my front yard, with puke down his shirt, he started to cry again. “We tried, but the doors…”

  The man who’d appeared from the darkness gripped his shoulder. “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  I still couldn’t get a good look at the second man or understand why either of them was hugging it out in my yard, Eric deadly quiet, and the other man holding him upright.

  “Sean, I couldn’t do a thing…”

  Evidently, the guy holding Eric up was the Sean who he’d had been calling for, the one who seemed to live in my yard somewhere and liked pretty boys.

  Maybe this is a dream? Maybe I’m still asleep. This is a whopping Alice in Wonderland kind of nightmare.

  “Let’s get you home, okay?” Sean said.

  Eric pulled back, swayed a little, and Sean grabbed him. Then he turned to face me.

  “Sean Roberts,” he said and attempted to extend a hand to me but realized at the last moment he couldn’t let go of Eric. “We moved next door last week.”

  “Go away.” I’d had enough of people on my doorstep. So far, Mia hadn’t woken up, and I might just get away with it. “Take your friend and go.”

  “We’re sorry. Eric’s not had a good night.”

  Mia’s piercing cry split the night, and I closed my eyes and counted down from ten. “You morons have woken up my baby, for fuc—for goodness sake.”

  I left Sean and this Eric guy and slammed the door in their faces. No point in trying to stay quiet when Mia was awake. I stopped outside her room, calmed my temper, cooled my stress, and pasted a happy smile on my face. All the books said that with Mia only six weeks old, I was probably a blur to her, but I never wanted her to see me unhappy. If there was the smallest chance she understood complex layers of loneliness, fear, and anger, then I would keep working on pushing them behind a smile.

  I placed the bowl on the hall table and headed straight for the crying. The scent in my room was that of the small, scrappy human who had taken over my life. It was a new baby smell, talc and cream, and warmth. I scooped her from her cot, feeling every tiny molecule of my stress vanish in an instant. Snuggled with her head up and under my chin, my hand supporting her tiny diapered rear, she mewled unhappily.

  “Aww, Mia, I bet you’re just as sad not to be sleeping as I am,” I murmured to my sweet, precious baby girl. She couldn’t have been hungry, or at least she shouldn’t have been. She’d finished her last bottle a little while back, and I went through my emergency checklist, which was fuzzy and unfocused and lodged in the back of my mind somewhere under a desperate need to sleep. One thing the nurses had drummed into me, followed by my sister, was that routine was everything and I needed to learn all the checklists until they became second nature.

  Second nature they weren’t, not yet, but I could work through them step by step.

  The room was warm, but not too warm, and Mia’s crib was right up against my bed. She didn’t feel hot to the touch, and with the sniff test carried out, I didn’t need to change her diaper after I’d done so an hour earlier. Or thirty minutes. I couldn’t quite recall the time. Only that it was dark and past midnight. Her crying lessened, and she wasn’t hunting for a bottle like a baby bird. She lay against my chest, all soft and sweet and wanting her daddy to fix it all.

  “It’s okay, Mia. The shouting men have gone. I made sure of it.”

  She hiccupped, and I rubbed her back before picking up the embroidered pink blanket, a gift from our surrogate, and taking her out to the living room. We snuggled on the sofa, me and my girl, and she sprawled over my chest as I pulled the soft blanket over her. Within minutes she was slumbering again, and I fought napping myself long enough to get her back to her crib. My phone showed it was three a.m., Mia was asleep, and I climbed into my bed, scooting next to the open-sided crib, and for a little while I stared at the miracle that had changed my life forever.

  Familiar fears rose inside me, the ones that had plagued me ever since I’d received the email about the successful implantation. Was I good enough? Was she okay? Why couldn’t I have stopped a drunk man from shouting and waking her? She shouldn’t know fear or anxiety. She should never be pulled from innocent sleep.

  I was her dad, and she was my daughter, and I had never loved anyone or anything the same as I did Mia Francesca Haynes.

  Sean

  Eric and I made it back home, stumbling and with a lot of cursing from him. Our front door was no more than thirty feet away, and I’d left it wide open after answering the phone. Cap the black lab stood in the doorway, his tail wagging as he bounced with excitement, waiting for two of his favorite humans as they headed toward him.

  “Move back, Cap,” I instructed, and after a low woof, he danced aside and let me help Eric over the threshold. I closed the door, with Eric’s weight leaning on me, and we were finally in. Cap sniffed around, sat back on his rump and held up a paw. God knows what he was trying to ask for.

  “Let’s get you in the shower,” I murmured, but I wasn’t sure Eric was capable of hearing everything. He was lost in a place that only another first responder could understand, in a frightening headspace filled with failure and death.

  The last shift had been rough for the first responders at a three-alarm fire. I worked in the Emergency Room, so it wasn’t my job to be at the building. It wasn’t my job to decide who to reach first as fire destroyed one of the upper floors. I hadn’t been the one who’d watched people die just out of reach of safety. No, I was the lucky one out of all of this, because I’d made it all the way home before Eric called me. I’d never forget his words; I’d heard them before.

  Shit. This is bad.

  As soon as he’d hung up, not able to say anything else, I’d called the hospital where I worked, but Soledad Memorial didn’t need me. The survivors of the fire were being taken to Mercy, and there was nothing I could do to help them or my best friend. When he’d called me a second time, hours later, drunk, his lieutenant speaking for him, saying he’d put him in a cab and send him home, I jumped out of bed and was ready to pick him up.

  But the stubborn-ass firefighters who formed the rest of his shift were all, he’s strong; he’ll be fine; we all will be; hey, let’s have another drink; he’s already left in a cab, so you can’t pick him up.

  The three of us living in this house had wildly different ways of coping with the things we saw. When I felt as if I’d failed, I went for a run, then would come back and lock myself in the bathroom, taking a bath and thinking everything through. When it happened to Leo, who’s a cop out of the eighth division, he questioned everything his faith ever taught him and took long lonely walks with Cap. But Eric? I understood why Eric was drunk because that was how he dealt with the tragedies, the pain, and the indescribable horror of not being able to save everyone.

  I managed to do some general medical checks, then got his huge drunk ass in the shower. Keeping the water warm I washed his hair, scrubbed off the stink of vomit, and then wrapped him in one of the giant purple towels he loved. An extra-large one for the six-five behemoth that was firefighter Eric Lester. With Tylenol at his bedside, plus two bottles of water, I got him into his bed and even attempted to get underwear on him.

  We’d been close since we were too young to remember, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go rooting around his junk trying to get him into boxers. It was a losing battle because he wasn’t exactly helpin
g, so I gave up and just tucked the quilt around him. When I thought it was safe to leave, after I’d placed a trash can right by the bed, he tugged me to sit down next to him. He didn’t sound as drunk now, but the emotions were raw.

  “We tried, Sean. We couldn’t get to the last floor. The people there were trapped, and the fire doors… they were locked… I tried.”

  I knew he did. I bet the entirety of Engine 63 did. I knew for sure that every single one of his shift would have put their own lives at risk to keep people safe.

  “I know you did,” I said firmly and squeezed his hand. “Try and get some sleep, and I’ll be in my room if you need me.”

  “It wasn’t safe,” he blurted. “Fire doors… none of them…”

  “I know,” I said uselessly, just agreeing with everything he said.

  “We need to hold someone acc—account—”

  “Accountable,” I finished for him.

  “That,” he muttered, then he closed his eyes, turning onto his side and curling into a fetal ball of misery.

  I shoved his clothes into the wash, added my own, then padded in my shorts to my room, taking a shower to clean off the stink of puke, and more so to stand under the water and let the weight and heat of it work my shoulder muscles. Tragedies like the fire tonight, in a place a whole lot less fancy than this neighborhood, would be a call to arms. Politicians demanding change, condemning landlords. Then it would all fade away, the same as every other time. During my last shift, I’d removed three bullets from a ten-year-old caught in a drive-by shooting. Still, the guns were out there, and the noises the people in charge made were quieter each time.