Single Mom Seeks... (6 page)

Lily watched as her daughter’s face went from sad and stormy to happy and excited. Ginny looked relieved, Jake extremely pleased. He must have told Nick about Brittany wanting a tree house and Lily being unsure if she trusted herself to do the project.

“I want to help,” Brittany told Nick.

“Okay. Let’s go to the backyard and see what kind of tree we have to work with.”

She put her little hand into Nick’s and followed him into the backyard, Ginny and Jake going after them.

Lily just smiled up at Richard. “Well, I guess we’ll see you…whenever.”

He looked all put out, then practically yelled, “This is my weekend with them, after all.”

“I know, but if you can’t make it, you can’t make it, Richard.”

He threw his hands up in the air. “And exactly who is that man?”

“He told you. He’s our new neighbor. Isn’t he just great?”

And then Lily turned around—leaving her ex standing there fuming—and followed the weekend tree house construction crew into her backyard.

By the time Lily made it into the backyard, Nick had the kiddie construction crew organized and heading off to follow his orders.

Brittany was headed upstairs to find a book with a picture of exactly what she wanted for her tree house. Ginny was getting a tape measure from the kitchen, and Jake was headed to his house for a ladder.

Nick stood leaning against the biggest tree in her backyard, waiting, looking a little unsure of his reception.

“You mad at me?” he asked, when Lily made it to his side.

She thought about it, then admitted, “No. Not really.”

“You sure?”

“Gee, Nick, why would I be mad?”

“Because I jumped into a situation that was none of my business,” he said. “Gave your ex the idea there was something going on between us, when there really isn’t. Made sure he had to face the girls before walking out on them this weekend, which was really not my decision to make, and then promised your daughter a tree house that you might not want her to have.”

Lily nodded. “Yeah. You did. That’s quite a list.”

“So, I’d say you have a right to be mad.” He looked a bit sheepish, as if to say he just couldn’t help himself. “I just want you to know, I would have stayed out of it if he hadn’t started shoving you backward with that little finger of his. Besides, it’s not like I hit him or pushed him up against the side of the house or anything, and believe me, from where I stood, he deserved it and I sure wanted to give it to him.”

“Okay.” Lily would have freely admitted Richard poking her in the shoulder had really annoyed her. “But I could have handled him.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t have, Lily. I just thought…you shouldn’t have to.”

“Well, he’s my ex. I was crazy enough at one point to trust him and marry him, to have children with him. That means I have to deal with him,” she reasoned, not wanting to think about how it felt to have another man act like he had the right to protect her from the big, bad world. That was too much to think of at this moment with so many other things going on that she had to deal with.

“All right. I’m sorry,” Nick said. “I have trouble standing by when a guy is manhandling a woman.”

Lily wasn’t sure what Richard had done would qualify as manhandling, but she let that one go.

“Tell me to stay out of it in the future, and I will,” he said, sounding like he meant it. “Unless I see him put his hands on you in a way I don’t like, and then you’re just going to have to be mad at me. Because if I see him do that to you, I’m not walking away from it.”

“Well, if that’s as reasonable as you get…”

He rolled his eyes in surrender, blew out a long, slow breath and finally backed down. “Maybe we could work out a signal or something. One for me to stay the hell out of it and one that says I can do what I want with him?”

“That I’d accept,” she said, laughing. “What did you say you do for a living, Nick?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Mommy?” Ginny came running toward them, holding out a tape measure. “Is this what you and Nick needed?”

Lily took it from her. “Yes, sweetie. That’s it.”

She looked back at Nick. “I forgot the paper and the pencil. I’ll go back.”

And then she turned and ran back to the house before Lily could stop her. All because one take-charge-kind-of-man had taken over and started issuing orders.

Lily looked back at him and said, “Let me guess. Cop?”

“Army for a long time,” he admitted. “Most recently, FBI.”

“Oh.” Even more dangerous than she thought. But she could see it in him. A man who didn’t stand by while someone pushed a woman around, and one who was used to sticking his nose into unpleasant situations.

“I’m on leave right now, to get Jake settled,” he said. “But I’ve worked Missing Persons in D.C. for the last three years. There are a lot of nasty people in this world, Lily.”

“Richard’s an insurance agent. I think by definition, they’re not very dangerous.”

“You never know. People you’d never think would do something violent can get pushed too far, especially when strong emotions are involved—like in a divorce. And then they can do things you wouldn’t believe possible.”

“Then we’re perfectly safe, because the only real emotion Richard seems to have left toward me or the girls is annoyance,” she shot back, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

Because it hurt to say it, to admit it and to have anyone else know it.

“Oh, damn,” Lily said, feeling it like a fist in her midsection.

It happened like that sometimes. She could be going along, living her life, taking care of her girls, thinking they were all just fine, and then some nasty little memory popped into her mind of great times or awful ones. And then it felt like someone had shoved a fist into her belly, catching her completely unaware, and it just hurt so bad she could hardly stand it.

She shot Nick an exasperated look and then put her back to him, wishing she could just disappear.

H
e gave her a minute to get herself together, for which she was grateful, and she took the time to lean against the tree, fighting for a steadying breath of her own.

She was supposed to be a strong, capable woman after all.

She’d just argued that very thing to Nick, and here she was ruining it all by nearly dissolving into tears at the idea that her ex didn’t give a damn about her and the girls.

“You okay?” Nick came to her side, put an arm around her shoulders.

Lily fought against that, too. Honestly, she did.

No one held her anymore. No one had in a very long time.

And it felt so good to have someone close, a grown-up, someone big and strong who wasn’t depending on her to take care of him. Who actually seemed interested in taking care of her.

He would have no idea how seductive that idea was to a woman in Lily’s shoes. Someone to take care of her for a change.

“You can just cry it out, if you want,” he offered. “I can handle a few tears. I mean, I don’t like them, but I’m tough enough to take it. Go ahead.”

Lily laughed through a shimmer of tears in her eyes and she thought she might be able to hold back now.

“You’re not one of those men who just dissolves into nothing at the idea of a woman crying?”

“Now what kind of man would I be if I did that?” he said easily, still holding her pressed against his side.

Okay,
Lily thought.
Just for a minute.

She leaned into him, feeling how solid he was, how capable he seemed, how calm in the face of her little emotional storm and Richard being such a jerk.

It was like something inside of her was inching ever closer to Nick, the sweetness of him, the steadiness, the strength, the temptation of him, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to pull away.

What would be so wrong with it?
she asked herself.

“Ah, Lily, I’m sorry,” he said, giving her a little squeeze, his chin, his nose, then his lips nuzzling against her forehead.

Lily got herself together and backed away, shakily, but she did it.

Because of how very much she wanted to stay right there in his arms.

She shrugged, tried not to look like she’d just lost it and then had to tear herself away from him. “It just…sneaks up on me sometimes…how bad it can still feel to think of everything that’s happened.”

“I’m sorry, Lily. Really, I am. Especially if I made things worse by getting in the middle of it,” he said, still too close for her own comfort.

She was grateful in a way for the high-handed way he’d gotten in the middle of everything with Richard, to have Richard see her as someone who’d have a new, gorgeous man by her side. And she appreciated the way Nick had stepped back immediately when he heard the girls coming. She didn’t think they’d seen any of it.

But it was sheer pretense, and it needed to stay that way. Because it was dangerous to depend on anyone else but herself. Richard had taught her that very well. She no longer believed a woman could count on promises of any kind from a man.

Which made Nick Malone an obviously very nice, but very dangerous man.

Lily took one more step back to try and save herself.

“This is not your fight, Nick,” she said quietly.

“I know,” he agreed. “I won’t do it again unless you ask me to intervene. I mean it.”

“Okay.” Lily nodded. “And it’s really not up to you to decide whether I tell my girls their father’s a jerk or he shows them that he’s a jerk.”

“Yeah. I know. I thought he probably wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye and walk away from them today, and then I thought, if he’s really going to do that, he should at least have to face them.”

“He deserves that, yes, but I’m not sure if that’s the best thing for my girls right now, and that’s my decision to make,” she insisted.

“You’re right. It is. I’m sorry, Lily. The guy just really pissed me off.”

“Well, join the club,” she said.

She was trying to figure out where they went from here when Jake yelled from the back of the driveway, “Hey, did you mean this one?”

He was carrying a small ladder.

“No, the big one,” Nick yelled back, and Jake disappeared, ladder in tow. “So,” Nick said to her, “the way I see it, I have a lot to make up for. And Jake and I owe your daughter a tree house.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, we do. I’m the one who promised her one. Oh, hell, I don’t even know if you want her to have one,” he admitted.

“I don’t mind her having one, I’m just not sure if I trust myself to build her one that’s safe.”

He shrugged, grinned ever so slightly, like he knew he was pushing. “Well, then…there is something I can do to make this up to you. What do you say? We could make a project of it. You, me, the girls and Jake?”

“I’m sure you have better things to do than build a tree house this weekend,” Lily said.

He shook his head. “Well, I could start going through massive amounts of paperwork having to do with my sister and her husband’s estate to try to get it settled. I could try to figure out how much money’s going to be left for the boys. Hopefully, they can get through college on it, but I’m not sure yet. I could start getting used to the idea that all that’s left of my sister and her husband’s lives is a house full of stuff, a bank account here and there, bills left to be paid, forms to fill out, a sum of some money, and three boys…. Believe me, I’d much rather build a little girl a tree house.”

“Okay, but you have to let me pay you and Jake.”

“No way. I’m not going to take money from you for building a tree house, especially when I’m the one who told your daughter I’d make sure she got one.”

“I will pay you for your time,” Lily insisted.

“How about we take it out in trade? Jake and I have had take-out three nights in a row. It’s getting old really fast.”

Lily knew that would make Jake happy, and she’d just double what she was making for herself and the girls. “Okay. Deal.”

Lily hadn’t quite known what she was getting into.

Her daughter wanted something akin to a kiddie mansion in a tree. A lavender and pink kiddie mansion.

But they soon figured out that as long as it was lavender and pink, with some scalloped trim along the roofline and a balcony, Brittany would be happy.

“Balcony?” Nick whispered in disbelief to Lily as they stood perusing shades of lavender at the paint store later that night.

“So she can play princess,” Lily explained. “Little girls go through a phase where they still want to play princess on a balcony with the prince down below, begging for their hand.”

Jake stood back from the overwhelming rows of paint shades, close enough to Lily and Nick to hear, and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“I wish I was,” Lily admitted.

“But…like…most houses don’t even have balconies, right? I mean, how’s a guy supposed to do that, if the girl doesn’t even have a balcony?” Jake looked really confused, then turned to Nick. “You never did the balcony thing, did you?”

“No way,” Nick said.

Jake looked mightily relieved. “Whew.”

Brittany came back with a paint strip with a horribly bright purple on it and held it up to Nick. “I like this one.”

“Well…that’s…an interesting color.” Nick took it from her, then went two colors down on the paint strip, to something decidedly less bright “But the thing is, you’ve already picked a really bright color for the trim. The pink. And I think your mother, as a decorator, will tell you that colors with a lot of contrast look best together.”

“Contest?” Brittany asked. “The colors are gonna have a contest?”

“No, contrast. More like…different. Really different,” Nick tried. “And one way to make the colors really different is to use a bright color for one and a lighter color for the other. So if we did the bright pink, like this one, for the trim, we should probably go with a lighter purple. Like this.”

He put Brittany’s bright pink next to a lavender that was almost white, it was so light.

“See how well they go together?” he asked.

“I guess so.” Brittany frowned a bit, then went back to the brighter color. “But I still like that one.”

“Well, we might need a second trim color. So I guess we could get some of that, too. We’ll use all three.”

“Okay,” she said, happy again.

Jake muttered something about girls being so weird and about being hungry. Brittany skipped the rest of the way through the home building store. Ginny kept throwing suspicious looks at Lily and Nick, like she was wondering if something was up between the two of them. Nick clearly didn’t understand princess balconies or princess colors, but was obviously committed to doing what he’d promised, to build Brittany a fabulous tree house.

And Lily?

Lily was thinking stupidly that Nick was really good with her girls, much more patient than her ex, and that he was good with Jake, too, and that she was having fun in the store, buying supplies for their project, and looking forward to the weekend spent with all of them working together to build Brittany’s tree house.

Like Lily was anywhere near the point of wanting another man in her life or her children’s.

And then Nick Malone had to come along and build play places in pink and purple with princess balconies, even though he clearly thought it was a silly idea, just because it was what her daughter wanted.

Don’t do this to me, Nick,
Lily thought.
Don’t.

But he just kept right on. Charming her daughters. Guiding Jake with a blend of gentleness and firmness she couldn’t help but admire, and acting like he was perfectly at home with Lily this way. Like this could be their little family, and the story had a happily-ever-after ending, and Richard and her life with him was nothing but a bad memory, fading away to almost nothing.

It was like she sat back and watched it all unfolding in front of her.

And she had a wicked craving for fudge.

Much as she tried, there was no way for Lily to hide the tree house’s construction from her sister, because it was all that Brittany talked about, nonstop, all weekend, and Brittany loved to answer the phone.

So by Saturday morning, Lily found Brittany on the phone telling her aunt Marcy all about her wondrous tree house and the most wondrous tree house builders, Nick and Jake.

Marcy must have broken all landspeed records in getting to Lily’s house to see the wondrous tree house builders for herself.

She found them all in the backyard, Marcy’s youngest, Stacy, who was a year older than Brittany, exploding onto the scene, giggling and chattering and dancing around the base of the tree as Brittany told her all about her princess tree house.

At that point, Nick was shirtless, having worked up a manly sweat from his construction efforts, and hauling a stack of two-by-fours from the driveway into the backyard, his back thankfully to Marcy, as Marcy stood on the edge of the driveway, her mouth gaping open in a look of complete and utter awe.

“Who is that?” she finally managed to say.

“My new neighbor,” Lily admitted, planting herself between Nick and Marcy, trying to have a few words with her sometimes-pushy, always-talkative older sister, before Marcy charged the scene and started talking to Nick herself.

Marcy’s mouth gaped open even further. “Thaaaatttt moved in next to you?”

Lily nodded.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Marcy nearly yelled that.

Nick’s head swung around, along with the boards, muscles rippling in his arms and shoulders from the effort in a way that had Lily going weak in the knees. Marcy might have been drooling. Lily couldn’t be sure. She waved at Nick to tell him everything was fine and to go on moving what he was moving, because that would take him farther away from Marcy, at least temporarily.

“Please,” Lily begged her sister. “Please, please, please do not embarrass me.”

Marcy had the nerve to look offended at that.

Lily sighed and begged some more. “Please!”

“He’s the Fudge Guy!” Marcy figured it out right away. “He’s the reason you sounded so funny on the phone that day we were talking about fudge!”

“Yes.”

“When you thought you had a fever that day, you were looking at him!”

“Yes, I was! All right! Now you know. Could we just…not do this right now in front of him?” Lily said in a furious whisper.

Marcy huffed and puffed some more, like she had reason to be offended. “And you let me think it was your hairdresser, and that you were going to do nothing but get your hair done this weekend, when this…absolutely gorgeous man is in your backyard, sweating and flexing his muscles, stripped down to nothing but his jeans and all that gorgeous man-skin. Oh, my God! Men just stop looking like that at some point, you know? I mean, I’m sure you and I can’t stop traffic like we used to when we were…I don’t know. A few years younger—”

“You might have stopped traffic, but I never did,” Lily insisted.

“I’m not going to argue with you about that, because you’ve never seen yourself as you really are. But for now, my point is, men just stop looking that good when they reach a certain age, and it’s just a shame, you know? Because it’s really nice to look around and see really good-looking men. It’s just a little perk to a woman’s day to have that kind of scenery around her.”

“I’m sure you look enough to know,” Lily said.

“I like to look, so what? It’s not a crime. I don’t touch. It’s nice to have something good to look at, and that man…he is worth looking at. Which you’ve obviously been doing and keeping it from me.”

“Yes, all right? I did. I didn’t tell you because—”

“Mommy, look!” Stacy called out, a look of pure glee on her face. “A princess tree house!”

“I know, sweetie,” Marcy said, grinning for all she was worth as she looked from her daughter to Nick, who was bent over a board doing something, his nearly perfect backside encased in a worn pair of jeans.

Marcy just gaped for a moment.

“Mommy!” Stacy yelled impatiently.

It was all Marcy could do to tear her gaze away. “What? What, sweetie?”