“I haven’t encountered a woman recently who willingly told me to have it my way—about anything,” Steve was quick to add, in case she thought he might be referring to something strictly sexual.
“I find that really hard to believe.”
Her response caught him up short. “Oh? Why?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re a lawyer. Aren’t all lawyers supposed to wear the opposition down until they agree with you?” And then she thought of the one possible exception to that. “Unless, of course, you’ve been socializing with other lawyers. Then, of course, the back-and-forth arguing could literally go on for hours, I imagine.” And that made her think of something else. “By the way, did I tell you I’m considering a new character in my dinosaur lineup? I’m thinking of calling him Clarence Darrow-Dinosaur,” she told him.
Trying to keep up with her was definitely a challenge. The woman had a mind that insisted on jumping from topic to topic. “Clarence Darrow-Dinosaur?” he repeated.
She’d just thought of the name as she told Steve about this new character. “I thought I’d give the kids a double blast of history this time around, have a small biography of Clarence Darrow in the accompanying book as well as some background on whatever dinosaur I decide to make Clarence.” Chewing on her bottom lip, she looked up at him. “Any suggestions?”
It wasn’t as if he had a favorite dinosaur he wanted to lobby for, although watching Jason play with his new best friend had suddenly made him rather partial to a T. rex. “I’m fine with any kind you want—except for a raptor,” he qualified. When he’d been a kid, he’d seen them vividly portrayed in a movie and the vicious image had stayed with him for years. “They really do give me the creeps.”
“Got it. No raptor. What about a brachiosaur?” she suggested. “They’re not flesh eaters,” she added when his expression remained blank.
The one piece of information did the trick. “They get my vote,” he said.
“Brachiosaur it is, then,” she said, finalizing the decision.
Erin glanced over into the family room and saw that Jason was apparently giving his new friend a tour of the room and explaining things. She’d united the boy with his dinosaur and fed both him and his father. Her work here was more than done. Time to retreat into the sunset.
“Well, I really better be going or I am going to be horribly behind by tomorrow morning,” she told Steve.
“You do sleep, right?” Steve asked. He was disappointed to see her leave so soon, but he knew he had no right to monopolize this woman, especially after everything she’d done.
“Sometimes, if I’m not too far behind.”
Although, more accurately, there were times when she got only a couple of hours at best. She felt as if there was so much she still needed to make up for and catch up on. The two years she’d spent in the hospital felt like two decades at times.
“Just remember, it’s good to slow down once in a while,” he told her. “Burning the candle at both ends does catch up to you eventually.”
My God, had he been talking to her mother? Erin wondered. The next moment, she dismissed the idea since even she hadn’t known she was going to be spending time here at his house. There was no way her mother could have known that and given him a pep talk.
“I’ve got a ways to go before that happens,” she assured him.
“You’d be the best judge of that,” he agreed. Well, since she was determined to leave, the least he could do was escort her out. “Here, let me walk you to your car,” he offered.
“That’s not necessary,” she demurred. “Besides, you don’t want to leave Jason alone.”
He glanced over his shoulder toward where his son was. Not in his customary pose—lying flat on his stomach and looking straight ahead at the TV screen, glassy-eyed, mowing down aliens—the boy was sitting upright on the family room floor talking to the toy Erin had brought to him.
“Jason’s not alone, thanks to you,” Steve pointed out. “And I’m assuming that you didn’t park in the next development, so it’s not like I’m going off on this tremendous hike.”
“No,” she agreed. “I parked my car right at your front curb.”
That was what he’d thought. Steve nodded at her response. “I think that Jason and Tex Jr. can spare me for twenty feet.”
He walked her to his front door, opened it for her, then waited as she crossed the threshold. Once she had, he followed closely behind. He left the door opened behind him in case Jason came looking for them—or him.
But right now the focus of his attention was the petite woman next to him. “I’d like to thank you for going out of your way like that for Jason. I really appreciate your effort.”
She could feel color preparing to creep up her neck. Direct compliments, even simple ones honestly rendered, embarrassed her to no end. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, where to look. What to do with her face. Was she supposed to look gratified, humbled, or what exactly?
So she fell back on what she usually did under these circumstances. She shrugged the words off. “It was nothing.”
But Steve—or his words, she was beginning to realize—was not that easy to shrug off.
“No, it most definitely was something,” the lawyer insisted. “And I owe you. Big-time.” In keeping with what had become a magical evening, he offered, “One free wish of your choosing.”
Humor curved her mouth and then moved up into her eyes, making them sparkle.
“You belong to the genie union?” she asked.
“Hey, if you can bring my son a dinosaur in a cowboy hat and suddenly wind up tapped into his imagination—something that I was becoming convinced had deserted him—then I can make at least one wish come true for you,” he informed her.
“Wouldn’t that depend on the kind of wish I make?”
Steve nodded. “It would.”
He still didn’t see it, she thought. She could tell by the look in his eyes. So she tried to make it clearer for him. “So I’d better not wish for anything outlandish,” she surmised.
“One man’s outlandish is another man’s mundane.”
He was better at this than she’d thought, Erin realized, tickled. The man had potential. Not only that, but try as she might not to, she could see herself being drawn to him. If life weren’t as hectic as it was for her, she could see herself being drawn to him a lot.
“Still, I’d better think on this wish before making it,” she teased.
“Take as long as you like,” he told her magnanimously. “There’s no expiration date on it.”
And if it kept her interacting with him—with them, Steve amended, throwing his son into the mix—until she decided on her wish, well, then it was all to the good, wasn’t it?
She nodded her head as if taking it all in. “Good to know.”
He smiled at her. Then his tone sobered ever so slightly as he said, “I had a really nice time tonight.”
Since he’d said that, she felt it safe to admit, “Me too.”
He didn’t exactly know why—since in reality he barely knew her—but he felt close to her, closer than he had to a lot of other women he’d known longer and better. “I can’t remember the last time I did, actually,” he said.
Since they were being so honest, she felt she could admit to that, as well. “Me, too.”
He grinned at her a little uncertainly. “Are you just being polite? Or—?”
“Or,” she chose. It was getting late and she was still standing here on the curb beside her car. If she didn’t get going, she was liable to spend the rest of the evening here, talking about nothing and enjoying it immensely. “Now I’d better go before my car turns into a pumpkin.”
“I thought it was a coach that turned into a pumpkin.”
“I was upgraded,” she answered with almost a straight face. “But t
he mice must be really worried by now,” she said, pressing the release button on her key chain to disarm her car alarm. Four locks rose and stood at attention.
“Can’t have worried mice,” he agreed. “It interferes with their productivity.” And then he laughed. He couldn’t remember when he’d enjoyed talking such nonsense before. “You certainly are unique.”
“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.” After she got into her car, she was about to close the door when she saw him stopping it at the last moment. “Something wrong?”
“Other than you leaving too soon? No.” Steve caught himself and regrouped. “I’d like to see you again,” he told her. “Would that be all right with you?”
All sorts of excuses rose to her lips, excuses about production schedules and meetings and having to do presentations for another toy-store chain. But what ultimately came out was, “That would be very all right with me.”
Then, embarrassed by the way she’d blurted that out, Erin pulled the door out of his hand with a quick yank, shutting it. The next second, she was pulling away from the curb.
But she did glance up into the rearview mirror a couple of times to see if Steve was still standing there at the curb.
He was.
Her heart managed to skip a beat each time she did look.
She kept glancing up into the mirror until she could no longer see him.
Chapter Nine
Erin had just fished out the key to her house and was about to put it in the front door lock when she heard the phone inside ringing.
Her adrenaline automatically sped up as she quickly pushed the key into the lock.
She had an answering machine and knew how to retrieve missed messages with the best of them, and more likely than not, the person on the other end of the line was either a wrong number or someone trying to get her to donate to some foundation created to look after retired, one-legged, cross-eyed carrier pigeons.
But whenever she heard her phone ringing, Erin always felt she had to do her very best to pick up the receiver before the person on the other end of the line hung up, no matter what.
Now was no exception.
Hurrying, Erin managed to unlock her door and get to the phone just as the fourth ring was kicking in. At that point, the call was being routed to voice mail.
She grabbed the receiver anyway and rather than waiting out the message, she tried to talk above her own voice, which was leaving instructions that every individual over the age of three knew by heart.
Hearing the shrilled piercing beep go off after her recorded message ended, Erin tried talking to the caller again.
“Hello, are you still there?” When she didn’t hear anything, she tried one last time. “Hello?”
This time, she heard someone respond. “Is this too soon?”
Already agitated, her heart stopped in midbeat, then sped up to make up for it. She paused for a moment, thinking she had to be imagining things. Still, she knew she had to ask.
“Steve?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She could almost hear his smile. “Is this too soon?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Too soon for what?”
“Too soon to invite you back?”
All but hugging the receiver against her ear, Erin felt warm all over. And she knew if she grinned any wider, she was in danger of rupturing her cheeks. Obviously he’d been serious when he told her that he’d had a nice time.
Still, she downplayed the moment. “You really hate to cook that much, huh?”
“Oh, I wasn’t inviting you back to cook for us,” he told her. “Although that certainly is an idea to keep on the back burner. I was actually thinking of inviting you out to a movie.”
She hadn’t been exaggerating about having an extremely busy schedule. It was a given and had been for the past three years of her life, but suddenly, confronted with this impromptu invitation, for the life of her she couldn’t remember a single thing she had written down on that schedule.
The only thing that she could remember was that warm feeling she’d had sitting at the dining room table with Steve and his son, talking. Laughing. For just the briefest instant, she knew exactly what it was that her mother kept telling her she was missing out on. She was missing out on the feeling of making a connection, of having a family to talk to, a family to just sit in silence with.
Maybe someday...
“Do you have any particular movie in mind?” she asked him.
“That’s strictly up to you,” he said. “Anything you want to see is fine with me,” Steve assured her.
She didn’t even have to think. She knew. “How do you feel about going to see The Magic Carpet?”
There was a long pause on the other end, as if he was trying to find just the right words to bring up what could be a delicate subject. “You do know that’s a cartoon, right?”
“I know,” she told him. “I thought that Jason might enjoy seeing that one better than some of the other movies that are currently playing in the nearby theaters.”
“Jason?” Steve asked, puzzled.
“Yes. Jason. Your son,” she added for good measure, doing her best to hide her amusement. “Short guy, seven going on eight, nice smile—”
“I know who Jason is,” he said with a confused laugh. “But I’m just kind of surprised that you’d want to take him along with us to the movies.”
They’d gotten along very well at Steve’s house. She didn’t understand why he didn’t just automatically include the boy in this invitation he was extending.
“Why does that surprise you?” she asked him.
“Most women would look at bringing a seven-year-old along as a veiled attempt at babysitting,” Steve told her frankly.
“I’m not most women,” Erin pointed out.
Which was why he was breaking his own promise to himself about taking a break from this whole soul-wearying concept of dating and asking this woman out. Because she was so very different from the rest.
“No, you are not,” he agreed heartily. Still, he wanted to make sure this wasn’t something she felt as if she had to do. “Are you sure you want to see The Magic Carpet?”
“Oh, I’m sure, all right,” she said, then added whimsically, “Don’t forget, I’m the one who spends her time talking to stuffed dinosaurs.”
“I’m definitely not about to forget that part,” he told her. Because as far as he was concerned, he and Jason were damn lucky that she did. At least for now, it appeared that the video game with its threatening aliens had fallen by the wayside. “I’ll let you pick the date and time,” he told her.
She didn’t have to think about that, either. “Well, it would have to be on the weekend,” she reminded him, “since we both work and I’m sure that your job is probably even more demanding than mine,” she said, not wanting to sound as if she were giving herself airs as to her own importance, “so making plans to catch an evening show would be difficult, not to mention that it would most likely be past Jason’s bedtime.”
She’d managed to impress him again. Granted, what she’d just said took only a very simple calculation but it was also something that most single women wouldn’t even think of.
Hell, most single women wouldn’t be willing to sit through ninety-seven minutes’ worth of death-defying antics by a wise-cracking hero who happened to be in possession of a magic flying carpet that flew to his rescue every time.
“Saturday, then?” he assumed.
“Sunday would be better, if that’s all right with you,” she prefaced, then explained, “Sometimes we have to have emergency Saturday meetings.”
She’d managed to pique his curiosity again. “Out of sheer curiosity, what constitutes an emergency in the world of stuffed-dinosaur manufacturing?”
She supposed t
hat had come across a bit melodramatic. “Well, for one thing, we’re starting to fall behind in meeting our orders.”
“That many people want your product?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” she cried with enthusiasm. “I never thought I’d feel like I couldn’t keep up production to meet the demand, but that day is starting to draw closer and closer—thank God.”
“Then I guess you need to hire more people, you know, expand,” Steve suggested. From where he stood, that seemed like a simple enough solution.
“We’ve thought about that,” she answered, “but to be honest, I’m afraid that if we go ahead and hire a couple more workers, it just might jinx us and suddenly, people will stop buying Tex and his friends and we’ll be stuck with a whole bunch of dinosaurs that nobody wants to buy anymore.”
He gleaned a piece of insight out of her answer. “You’re superstitious?” Steve asked.
“Just a tiny bit,” she admitted. “I mean, I have no problem with walking under ladders or stopping to pet black cats or ignoring spilled salt on a table—other than just to clean it up. But taking too much for granted and expanding the company kind of feels as if I’m just thumbing my nose at fate or whatever is behind all this success we’ve been having. It just seems to be too cocky for me to think this sort of demand can continue indefinitely.”
“Cocky?” he repeated with a laugh. “You? Somehow cocky isn’t the first word that comes to mind in describing you—or the tenth word, for that matter. I think it’s just common sense, not cocky. Think about it,” he advised. “Hiring more people might be something that you and your company need to look into in order to meet your commitments and deadlines. You really don’t want to get on the wrong end of that. Not being able to meet your commitments might hurt your reputation and at this point in the game, your reputation is everything.”
“How much do I owe you for that legal advice, counselor?” she teased.
“Consider it on the house,” he told her. Then, in case her sense of honor made her object to that, he reminded her, “After all, you didn’t let me pay for the dinosaur.”
Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 10