Single Mum Seeks…

“Sorry. I thought you heard me.” Jake shrugged, like the possibility of a crushed throat was no big deal. “So, what are you doing? Did you go run?”

“Not yet.”

All of a sudden, Jake looked very interested. “Wait a minute? You’re not…you know. Sneaking somebody out of the house, are you?”

“Sneaking someone out?” Nick repeated.

“You know. Like…a woman?”

“No, I am not sneaking a woman out of the house,” Nick said.

“’Cause, if you want somebody to sleep over, I’m fine with that. Is it that Audrey woman? The one with the giant—” Jake lifted his hands up and held them about a foot away from his chest. “And the really cute daughter? ’Cause, I’d really like to know the daughter.”

“No, it’s not her. It’s not anybody.”

“Not anybody I know, huh? Okay—” Jake looked way too interested.

“Not anyone at all. No one was here. I wouldn’t do that.”

Nick started to say not with Jake in the house, but that sounded a bit hypocritical. Was he supposed to pretend to be a monk? Just because he was single and raising a kid? One who happened to be a teenage boy, no doubt with raging hormones of his own?

Nick didn’t think so, but what did he know about the etiquette of single parents and their sex lives?

Not much.

He’d never been seriously involved with a woman with kids.

Hardly been seriously involved with any woman.

“So, you’re just going to do without until I’m eighteen?” Jake asked, like he couldn’t quite believe it. “’Cause I thought you’d be really cool about things like that. I thought…you know. You’d bring your ladies over here, and I’d bring mine, and we’d both be cool with that.”

Nick did a double take. “You have ladies? Plural?”

“Well, not exactly,” Jake said. “Not at the moment.”

“Okay, one? You have one? Who you intend to entertain in your bedroom? At fifteen?”

“Well…maybe.”

“No way that’s gonna happen,” Nick insisted.

“Really?” He looked crushed.

“Really,” Nick said, barking out the word.

“Jeez,” Jake grumbled, looking all put out. “I thought—”

“Well, you thought wrong.”

Jake grumbled as he made his way into the kitchen, no doubt hungry already. After all, it had been a whole six hours or so since he’d eaten. Nick had found him in the kitchen at midnight, gulping down a giant bowl of cereal. Now the kid was already up and hungry again.

Nick couldn’t sneak a woman into and out of this house, even if he’d wanted to. Jake got hungry too often to make that work.

And had ideas of entertaining, all of his own.

“Jesus!” Nick said, more of a prayer for help and understanding than anything else. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

And he couldn’t even go for a decent run, because when he opened up the door to do that, he saw Audrey lurking behind a tree at the house next door, looking for him, no doubt.

Nick slammed the door and wondered if he could wait her out.

Didn’t the woman have to go to work? Or take care of her kids? Did she have nothing better to do than stalk him?

He’d either have to find a way to avoid her, by finding out her schedule and running at a different time, or convince her he wasn’t interested, and he’d bet she hadn’t heard that from many red-blooded American males. It might be hard to convince her it was true.

“Damn,” he muttered.

He was mowing the grass later that morning when Lily pulled into her driveway and got out of her little SUV, neither of her kids in sight.

He waved and kept on mowing, wanting the job done before it got too hot. But then he saw her open the back of her SUV and start wresting with a pile of wooden trim, and he cut off the mower and went to help.

“Here,” he said, coming up behind her and catching an errant piece that was dragging on the ground. “Let me help.”

“Oh.” She whirled around, but the trim wasn’t all the way out of the vehicle and didn’t quite move with her.

Nick had to move fast to keep it from going all over the place and from hitting the ground and getting scuffed up.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, wondering if she was naturally jumpy or a bit of a klutz.

“No. You didn’t. I just…forgot I was holding all that and then…well, you know the rest.”

“I’ve got it. Let me carry it in for you,” he said, wiping the sweat off his face with his forearm and hoping the trim didn’t slide out of his hands.

“Okay. Thanks.”

She fished out her keys and headed for the back door, leading him through the kitchen and into the dining room, the top half of the walls freshly painted a muted gold tone and ready for the wide, white trim.

“Anywhere here is fine,” she told him.

He piled the wood in the far corner. “You doing all this work yourself?”

“Yes. I like it. I used to be an interior decorator, but I found out I liked making all the decorating decisions myself, much better than following someone else’s orders, and I like doing the physical work on a house myself. So after the girls were born, I started rehabbing houses and selling them.”

He looked around at the room in progress and the kitchen that she’d obviously already done. “You do good work, Lily,” he said.

“Thanks. How are you? How’s Jake?”

“Jake’s…as good as can be expected, I think,” he said. “But what do I know? How do you think he is?”