by Kira Archer
The stranger took Tyler down from his shoulders, and his smile warmed the residual ice from her blood that Tyler’s stunt and her own little foray into the pool had put there. Her son’s hand slipped into hers. She looked up at the man to say thank you.
The last thing she saw was the smile dropping off his face before everything went black.
Chapter Two
Elliot carried the woozy woman into his room, her little boy following anxiously behind.
“Is Mommy going to be okay?”
Elliot glanced down, feeling like he had in grade school whenever the teacher had called on him to answer a question he couldn’t answer—squirming with anxiety and no clue what to say. He sure as hell hoped the woman was okay because he had no idea what to do with the kid.
“No worries, little man. She’ll be fine. I promise.”
He laid her down on the bed, making sure her head was cradled comfortably on the pillows. She looked up at him, squinting like she couldn’t quite make him out. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. Within seconds, a faint snore emanated from her perfect heart-shaped mouth. His eyebrows rose, and he glanced back at the boy who giggled.
“Mommy’s snoring.”
Elliot bit back a laugh, held his finger up to his lips, and mock whispered, “Let’s be quiet so she can sleep.”
The boy nodded and clapped his lips together. He stood staring at Elliot. At a total loss, Elliot turned back to the woman. He took off her fanny pack—the fact that she wore one had probably shocked him more than her fainting into his arms—pulled a light blanket up over her and stood back. Her blond curls spread over the pillows like a halo. Her full lips were slightly parted, and he had the sudden urge to lean down and kiss her.
He almost snorted. The last chick he’d dated had been disturbingly into fairy tales and had made him watch a lot of Disney films. Casting himself in the roll of Prince Charming wasn’t something that had ever entered his mind before.
The little boy climbed up next to his mother and patted her cheek.
“Mommy,” he whispered.
When she didn’t respond, he looked up at Elliot, his blue eyes open wide.
The lifeguard had checked her out and had figured it was probably heat exhaustion combined with a possible panic attack, if the look on her face when she’d waded into the pool had been any indication. He’d recommended taking her to her room and calling the hotel doc. Elliot wasn’t real sure about hauling a nauseous, hysterical woman with a kid into his hotel room, but he’d done what the lifeguard suggested. The front desk assured him the doctor was on the way. Hopefully, the man would get there soon.
“What’s your mom’s name?” he asked the boy.
“Mommy.”
Elliot grinned. “I know, but what’s her real name? What do other people call her?”
His nose wrinkled. “Uncle Oz calls her Lenny, but Mommy doesn’t like that.”
Elliot laughed. “Lenny, huh. Oh. Uncle Oz? Is your uncle Nathaniel Oserkowski?”
“Yup. That’s my name, too. Tyler Nathaniel Oserkowski.”
“Good to meet you, little dude. I’m Elliot Debusshere.”
“My name’s not dude. It’s Tyler.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry. Hi, Tyler.”
Tyler just looked at him. Okay then. Elliot cleared his throat. “I’m your aunt Cherice’s brother.”
That got a grin out of him. “Aunt Cher!”
“Yep. So it looks like we’re family.”
Tyler’s face scrunched in confusion at that new concept.
There was a knock on the door, and Elliot hurried over to let the doctor in.
After a quick exam and diagnosis of mild heat exhaustion and anxiety, the doctor left with orders for rest and water, and he was once again alone with Tyler. Once the boy had been assured his mother would be okay, he’d turned his attention to his surroundings. Elliot watched the little kid wander around, poking into corners, looking into cabinets.
He pulled out his phone and dialed his sister, his fingers drumming on his leg until she picked up.
“Hey Elliot, how’s it going?” Cher said.
He exhaled, relieved she’d answered. “Not great. I ran into Oz’s sister at the pool. She had a bit of a panic attack and then passed out from heat exhaustion.”
“Oh my gosh, is she okay?”
“Yeah, the doc said she’d be fine. She woke up long enough to get some fluids in her, but she’s resting in my room right now.”
“Good thing you were there! Is Tyler with you?”
“Yeah.” Elliot turned his back and walked to the other side of the room so Tyler couldn’t hear him. “Can you guys come get him?”
“Sorry, bro. Oz and I are meeting with the minister in ten minutes.”
Elliot’s stomach twisted. “But… I don’t know anything about kids. What am I going to do with him?”
Cher laughed. “He’s just a kid, Elliot, not a rabid wolf. Give him a snack and put a movie on for him or something. He’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, but…”
“He’s a little…on the precocious side. Really smart. Just talk to him. If you get him going on something he likes, he can talk forever.”
“Great.”
“Oh, stop.” Cher sighed. “Talk about cars. He likes cars.”
“Cars, huh? Okay. But what—”
“Oh, the minister is here. I’ve got to run. If the doctor isn’t worried, I’m sure Lena will be up soon. Play with him. He’s a good kid. Talk to you later!”
The phone clicked off before Elliot could argue more. “Shit,” he muttered.
He turned around to find Tyler sitting on the floor in front of the mini-fridge, surrounded by all the contents.
“Tyler! What are you doing?” He’d taken his eyes off him for one minute. How did he get into so much so fast?
“You said a bad word,” Tyler said, clutching a mini-bottle of champagne in each hand.
“Ah! Give me those.” Elliot lunged for him, but Tyler dropped the bottles and moved on to a mini-bottle of vodka.
Shit. Lena was going to kill him. He’d been alone with Tyler for sixty seconds, and the kid was juggling booze.
“I’m hungry,” Tyler said.
What the hell do kids eat? He glanced at the pile of food on the floor. “Here,” Elliot said, tossing him a bag of chips.
Tyler tore into them with a look of pure ecstasy on his face. Elliot took advantage of the reprieve to gather up the remaining anti-kid snacks and drinks to hide them in a high cupboard. When he turned back around, only the back half of Tyler was visible. The other half was buried in the entertainment center.
“Whoa, little dude, what are you doing?”
“Can we play?” he asked, pulling out an Xbox controller.
Relief flooded through Elliot. Finally, something he knew how to do.
“Sure!”
Tyler’s face lit up like Elliot was his new best friend. “Yay!”
“What do you want to play?”
Elliott pulled out a stack of games, shuffling through them and discarding them just as quickly. He always made sure he had a hotel room that came fully stocked with some entertainment, but he’d never had to worry about having kid-friendly stuff before. The only game he had that wasn’t rated M was Minecraft. And that was probably a bit advanced for Tyler.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Six and a half.”
Elliot raised an eyebrow. He would have guessed younger. Then again, he’d never been close enough to an almost seven-year-old, so what did he know?
“You want to play this one?”
“Sure! All my friends play that one.” Tyler bounced up and down on the couch.
“Okay, okay. Settle down. Here, go grab yourself some of those snacks while I get everything hooked up.”
“Yippee!” Tyler scurried down and snatched up an armload of chips, cookies, and soda and plopped back down on the couch.
He’d consumed half of it by the time Elliot had ev
erything ready to go. Wow. And Elliot thought he could eat. This kid could chow him under the table.
“That good?” he asked as Tyler shoved a barbeque chip he’d dipped in a jar of Nutella into his mouth.
“Super yummy. Wanna try?” he asked, holding out another interesting specimen.
“Um, no thanks. Do you even know what that stuff is?”
Tyler shrugged and jammed it into his mouth. “No, but Mommy says it has good protein and vitmins.”
“Vitamins?”
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I know lots of stuff.”
“You do?”
Tyler nodded, sending his blond curls flopping all over and a shower of crumbs onto the couch. “Yup. Especially about sharks. I know lots about them.”
“Yeah? Sharks are pretty cool.”
“Yeah! Have you seen Jaws?”
Elliot raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Have you?”
“Yeah. But don’t tell my mommy. I’m not ’posed to watch stuff like that. I saw it when Uncle Oz fell asleep watching me.”
“Ah. Okay. I won’t say a word.”
“Do you have music?”
Wow. The kid was barely taking a breath. “Yeah,” Elliot said. “I’ve got some in here. You want to listen?”
“You got Johnny Cash?”
That one had Elliot’s eyes widening again. “You like Johnny Cash?”
“Oh yeah, he’s the best. But Mommy says I can’t play him for a while ’cause she gots a headache. So maybe we shouldn’t listen to him right now, since she doesn’t feel good.”
“That might be a good idea.”
“She likes the face song, though.”
“The face song?”
“The one where he sings about seeing her face. Mommy likes that one. But she says when you hear it, you have ta dance with a girl. I dance with her in the kitchen sometimes.”
It had been just five minutes and exhaustion already pulled at Elliot. Where the hell did all the energy come from? Another hour and he’d probably be down with a migraine from the sheer volume of words coming out of the kid’s mouth, but Tyler was kind of a crack-up. And Elliot could envision the beautiful woman currently lying in his bed dancing around the kitchen with her son. It was an appealing picture.
“You do? Well that’s very nice of you,” Elliot said.
“Yeah. Mommy says I should be a gentleman.”
“Well, she’s right. A gentleman is a good thing to be.”
“Yeah.” He put his head to the side, his little nose scrunched up. “But I don’t wanna dance with other girls. Just Mommy.”
Elliot laughed. “It can be fun dancing with girls.”
Tyler grimaced like someone was trying to force feed him lima beans. “Do you dance with girls?”
“Every chance I get,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Tyler made a gagging face. “Girls are gross.”
Elliot thought about the woman sleeping in his bed. “You won’t always think so.”
“I just dance with Mommy, if she wants.”
“Well, I’m sure your mommy loves dancing with you.”
“Yeah. Hey, do you have a car? Does it go fast?”
Elliot opened his mouth to answer, but Tyler kept talking. “I’m going to get a real fast car when I’m bigger. There’s a couple of us at home that are going to race when we get cars. Only, one kid backed out of the race so far. He fell off his bike when we raced those, so his mom won’t let him race anymore.”
Elliot’s ribs were beginning to hurt from the laughter threatening to erupt. If he let it out, he was never going to stop, and he didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings or anything. “You’re going to race, huh?”
“Yeah, I set that up already. Don’t tell Mommy that, either.”
Elliot nodded with exaggerated solemnity. “Deal. Hey,” he said quickly, before Tyler could start off on another tangent, “why don’t we play the game?”
“Oooh, yeah, I wanna play!”
Elliot handed him the controller. “Okay, little man. Let’s get our game on.”
Lena woke in a strange bed, buried deep in pillows with a cool breeze from the air conditioner blowing over her. She sat up slowly, a horrific headache pounding away at her skull.
Tyler!
All her aches and pains were eclipsed by a rush of panic. She swung her feet out of the bed, pausing when she heard Tyler’s laughter ringing through the room. She jumped up and hurried through the open double doors into a spacious living room. The hotel suite was decked out like a luxury apartment. In fact, it was bigger than the apartment where she’d lived before she and Tyler had moved in with her brother.
Tyler laughed again, and she looked over the couch to see him playing video games on a huge widescreen TV with a gorgeous man. Correction—the gorgeous god from the pool. Who apparently passed the time playing video games. Okay.
“Yeah! High five me, buddy,” the man said.
He held his hand up for Tyler to slap and then looked over his shoulder and saw her standing there. He passed the game controller over to Tyler. “Take over for me, buddy, okay? I’ll be right back. I wanna talk to your mom.”
Tyler looked over his shoulder. “I’m going to build a new room in the castle, kay? Hey, Mom!” He grinned at her, showing a mouthful of Oreo-encrusted teeth.
She sucked back a groan. “You okay?”
“Yep!”
The man hurried over to her.
“The kid’s a total natural. He’s already beat some creepers and built a whole new wing onto my castle. It took me a month to figure out how to do half the stuff he’s doing. I’ll never hear the end of it if my friends find out.”
Lena’s eyes widened a little in surprise. “Your friends know you play video games?”
His smile faded around the edges, and Lena flushed. “I’m sorry. I only meant… Well, I usually don’t let him play video games.”
And the fact that this guy had not only let him play video games but had spent the afternoon pumping him full of sugar and junk food and playing with him meant that Tyler would probably be completely obsessed with him. Tyler had a tendency to latch on to men, any man, who paid attention to him. Oz was a great father figure for him, but it wasn’t quite the same as having a real dad, and Oz was always so busy, even he didn’t always get to spend a lot of time with Tyler. The last thing Lena wanted was for Tyler to get attached to some random guy. The fact that he was beyond hot, and Lena wanted to get attached to him herself, was even worse.
The guy jammed his hand through his hair, the wary expression on his face reminded her of Tyler when he was caught doing something naughty.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “He didn’t say he wasn’t allowed, and I didn’t think to ask. He saw the console when we brought you up and wanted to play. I didn’t have much else here to entertain him, and he was getting into everything.”
She snorted. “Yeah, he’s good at that.”
Lena rose up onto her toes to see better over the couch, frowning at the pile of junk food surrounding Tyler. His little hand dove into a bowl of chips, and he promptly shoved them into his mouth.
“Tyler, no more junk food, baby. It’s probably almost time for dinner.”
Tyler groaned, but he kept his hand out of the chips.
“Sorry,” the man said again. “He was hungry, so I let him pick out some snacks. Since you were asleep, I didn’t want to wake you to ask what he usually ate.”
Lena swallowed back the lecture on proper child nutrition. The guy obviously wasn’t used to being around children. She should be thankful that her son was still in the hotel room in one piece.
“No. That’s okay. Really. I mean, I don’t usually let him eat junk food. He gets a little crazy when sugar gets into his system, so I usually stick to fruits, and cheese, and…” Lena stopped at the man’s growing concern. “Don’t worry about it. It was kind of you to take care of him.”
The sudden smolder in his
eyes warmed her down to her toes. “My pleasure. He’s a great kid. We had fun.”
Yeah, that was what worried her. It was going to be embarrassing if she had to pry her kid off some stranger’s leg.
He looked her over, his eyes narrowing in concern. “How are you feeling?”
“A little headache, but better. Thanks.”
“Glad to hear it. You gave me a scare there for a second,” he said, leaning in to give her arm a gentle squeeze with a half smile that set a few thousand butterflies loose in her stomach. “I’m Elliot, by the way. Debusshere. Cherice’s brother.”
Relief flooded through Lena that her child hadn’t been in the care of some stranger all afternoon. Well, he was a stranger, technically, but he was almost family so… That was better. Kind of. No, actually, it was worse. That meant they’d be seeing him all week. A week of the kind of attention Tyler had just gotten, and her poor little boy would be crushed when it was time to go home and he realized Elliot wasn’t his to keep. She needed to make sure Tyler knew it had been a one-time deal.
“I’m Lena, Oz’s sister,” she said, sticking her hand out.
He squeezed her hand as he shook it. His hand was warm and smooth and at least twice the size of hers. And he held it quite a bit longer than politeness demanded. “Yes, the bridesmaid. I’m the groomsman, at your service,” he said with a little bow.
The butterflies kicked into high gear. She clenched her ab muscles trying to squash the damn things. They had no business showing up to throw a kink into her life.
“Nice to meet you. Officially,” she said in what she hoped was a pleasant but casual tone.
“My pleasure,” he said again. “Tyler mentioned his Uncle Oz a few times, so I figured that’s who you were. I called my sister to make sure Oz knew where you two were.”