“Ellie, honey, how’s work?” Monica’s mom asks.
I tell her about a few of the projects I’ve been overseeing. My parents’ environmental firm has contracts to retrofit several aging buildings around Copper Valley to improve energy efficiency. We’re also working on initiatives with the local government to promote more recycling options around the city, and we’ve been branching farther and farther into other parts of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
She asks Wyatt about his job, and he downplays the whole flies jets with untested systems thing, because god forbid the man toot his own horn. Tucker’s too busy chowing down on everything on his plate to talk. He has a smear of ketchup across his face, which makes me smile, both because Tucker gets cuter every day, and also because it makes me remember holding Wyatt at ketchup-point this morning.
But then I’m frowning, because I’m not supposed to let myself find Wyatt attractive, since it’s bad for our health.
And I probably shouldn’t get attached to his son either.
Monica’s mom asks how we met and started dating, and we trip over each other telling contradictory stories that all make Tucker giggle, but we’re saved by Monica dropping into the seat on the other side of her mother.
“Don’t listen to them,” Monica says. “Their relationship thrives on one-upping each other. The real story is that they’ve been in love since they were teenagers but were both too stubborn and scared to do anything about it until recently.”
I open my mouth to argue, but I realize she’s boxed us into a corner.
She grins at me.
And Wyatt leaps up, uses his chair as a vault to fly across the cafeteria table.
“Wha—” I start, turning to watch him leap across the table behind us too. “Oh, shit.”
“Oh my god,” Monica gasps.
Jason drops his plate upside down and rushes to the table too, where Wyatt’s lifting Caroline Dixon off her chair and giving her the Heimlich.
Her eyes are huge, her face mottling, lips parted and bluing at the edges as she struggles to breathe.
Wyatt thrusts his fist under her breastbone once, twice, and on the third thrust, a piece of meatball flies out of her mouth and lands square on Patrick’s plate. I don’t know where Sloane or Mr. Dixon are, but they’re not at the table.
It’s just Mrs. Dixon and Patrick, who’s now rushing toward his mother too.
She gasps and sags and makes a very unladylike expression that’s too garbled to fully be called an expletive, but I’m pretty sure she just said fuck.
Wyatt helps her to sitting. “Okay now?” he asks.
She gulps hard, panting, and nods without looking at him.
“Back up, give her space,” Patrick snaps. He shoves Wyatt out of the way and squats. “Are you okay? Is anything broken? Did he crack a rib?”
“He saved her life, you jackass,” Jason snaps, approaching quickly from the other side of the long table.
“Quit fighting,” she rasps out. “And hand me a drink.”
Adrenaline belatedly makes my veins fizz. My legs wobble while Wyatt quietly steps away from the Dixons and returns the long way to our table.
“My dad’s a hero,” Tucker whispers.
“You’re damn right,” Monica says softly, her voice thick too.
Her mother’s fanning her face, eyes bright like she’s fighting back tears. “Lordy goodness,” she murmurs. “That was scary as all dickens.”
Tucker’s eyes are huge, borderline scared, and I reach across the table to squeeze his little hand. “Hey. It’s okay.”
“Did she die?”
“No, sweetie. She’s okay.”
He glances at his plate, full of hot dog octopi and big chunks of fruit and cookies. Then back at all the grown-ups fussing and panicking belatedly at the next table.
“Just chew it good,” I tell him.
He nods and gives me a brave smile, and I suddenly don’t know how I could do it.
How do you protect someone you love so much from ever getting hurt? Or let them hurt when they have to?
How do you survive it?
My respect for Wyatt is growing by the second.
Parenthood isn’t for the weak.
Monica heads to help Jason, and her mom sinks back to her seat, but I watch Wyatt casually walk past two families at the end of the rows of tables, all gaping at him like he’s the hero Tucker knows him to be, while he keeps his head down, hands in his pockets.
He doesn’t look up until he’s back in his seat next to Tucker, and then, his focus is all on his son. “Ah-ah, I saw that. Fruit swords before treasure cookies.”
Tucker grins, his fear fading with Wyatt beside him again. “Good job, Dad.”
I could probably explain what I do next, but I don’t want to.
Let’s just say it ends with me bending across the table, grabbing Wyatt by the cheeks, and planting a kiss worthy of a hero on his lips.
And there might’ve been some belated applause.
For him being a hero, I mean.
Not for me kissing him.
Because that would be ridiculous.
And dangerous.
But two hours later, I’m grateful to be safe and sound back in Beck’s house. No deer or foxes or wolves darted in front of my car, and clearly they didn’t get Wyatt either, since he pulls up right behind me.
Neither of us has said another word about Mrs. Dixon choking.
Or about me kissing the stuffing out of him.
And I’m not planning on mentioning it.
Especially the kissing part.
Until I walk through the basement door from the garage and realize there’s a huge water stain over the bar. “What—” I start, and then I know.
“The dishwasher,” Wyatt and I say in unison.
“I started it before we left.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Davis probably didn’t notice.”
I just gape at him and continue to point at the ceiling.
“I know, I know,” he sighs. “I’ll go get towels.”
I should argue that I’ll clean it up. That this is my fault for kissing him. But I know he’ll insist on helping, and then we’ll be within looking distance of each other, and I’m really, really starting to be convinced that we probably shouldn’t ever even live in the same town. “I’m going to bed. And I’m locking the door,” I inform him.
He smirks. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Dad, can I watch baseball?” Tucker asks through a yawn.
I don’t wait to hear his answer, because I’m already starting to get attached to both of them.
The universe is being a real dick.
Or maybe I need to quit looking for what’s easy—like Wyatt just landing in my lap this week—and actually figure out what I want to do about getting my life back on track.
He was right this morning.
The doctors didn’t know if they’d be able to repair my hip and leg enough for me to ever walk again.
But here I am. Limping my stiff self up the stairs.
I am going to be physically fine again.
It’s time to figure out what the rest of me needs.
Nineteen
Wyatt
The things I do for my friends.
When Beck asked me to irritate Ellie, I had a vague idea what I was in for. A prickly porcupine sniping at me? Yep, because I knew just how to poke it. Glares hot enough to melt iron? Wouldn’t have her any other way.
That uncomfortable feeling in my dick every time I thought of her naked?
Can’t say I haven’t been dealing with that anyway these past six months, when I wasn’t letting the guilt seep in.
Getting my toes done with Tucker, Ellie, Monica, Jason, the Blond Caveman, Sloane, and the mothers of the happy couple? At the Yo Ho Ho Spa?
Didn’t even cross my mind.
But here I am, in a fancy-ass massage chair with one foot soaking in a tub of flowery-scented water while a woman I’ve never met buffs, slathers, rubs, and does all kinds of weird shit to the other.
Tucker erupts in giggles every time his pedicurist tries to touch his feet, so she’s given up and is letting him suck on a pirate lollipop and just soak his toes in the bubbly spa water.
“Smile, honey,” Ellie says from her seat on the other side, holding up her phone to get a selfie of the three of us.
I glare at her.
She smiles bigger.
Tucker laughs.
“Beck gets this done all the time,” she tells me.
“He also parades around in his skivvies. Are you texting this to him? I will…” I wiggle my brows at her, a clear threat to kiss her, or touch her, or cause some other disaster to befall us “…if you text that picture to anyone. Or post it on social media. Or do anything other than delete it.”
Her brows twitch like her face is battling between scowling at me and giving me the I dare you look.
“It takes a man very secure in his masculinity to get his toes done,” Monica calls to me from her seat in a massage chair on the opposite wall.
The Blond Caveman has his nose tucked inside a financial magazine and ignores her.
Jason grins at me. “She’s right, you know.”
“Oh, hush. Wyatt has no issues with his masculinity,” Ellie says. “You should’ve seen him mopping the floor of the kitchen last night.”
“You should’ve seen us mopping the floor,” I tell her.
“I was a big helper,” Tucker says proudly. “I mopped buckets full.”
Monica sends a quizzical glance at Ellie.
“Dishwasher flooded,” Ellie explains.
“Well, thank god it was Beck’s house,” Monica says.
I choke on a laugh, because that, at least, is the truth. I texted him a picture and told him Ellie and I got carried away doing the dishes.
He replied with a picture of his middle finger, and his assistant pinged me two minutes later to say that she’d scheduled a drywaller to come in and repair the water damage next week, and to enjoy washing dishes by hand in the meantime since the earliest she could get a new dishwasher was five to seven days.