“I...uh...actually wasn’t going to make a true home-cooked meal. I just picked up a roasted chicken from Duncan’s and some stuff for a salad. I’m not really much of a chef, but I thought I could manage a box of rice pilaf. So don’t get your hormones...I mean your taste buds too worked up.”
Ugh. She sounded like an idiot. What kind of woman stood in man’s bedroom and talked about hormones and getting worked up? He, like the rest of the town, probably thought she was beyond promiscuous, coming on to him like this.
He studied her from behind the metal-rimmed glasses, and she wished she could figure out what he was thinking whenever he looked at her. He stared at her as if she was some obscure test subject he could study and later write about in his own psychology textbook.
“Uncle Drew.” An anxious voice interrupted the tension in the room. “Come quick! Aiden got his cape stuck in the post of the top bunk. And it won’t come off his neck.”
“Ah, jeez...” Drew said before running out of the room.
She would follow him to help. But she had to get her pulse and her mixed emotions in check before she could be of any use to anyone.
Unfortunately, her familiar litany of prime factors was short-lived. Drew yelled, “Kylie, could you come help us out?”
“What’s wrong?” she asked as she entered the boys’ room. But she knew the answer before Caden could control his laughter enough to tell her.
Drew was holding Aiden’s suspended body, which was still clad only in the top half of the superhero costume and his underwear. But it wasn’t Aiden’s makeshift cape that was stuck in the bed rails. It was the little boy’s curly blond head.
Bless her husband, who was trying to sound calm but looked about as frazzled as a pageant contestant who’d run out of double-sided tape. “His head is wedged in here pretty well, and I’m worried that if I let go of his body to help dislodge him, he might asphyxiate.”
A good-looking and well-built man standing near her bed in a master bedroom, she could barely deal with. But this...well, this was a no-brainer for her. Kylie tried to keep her laughter in check as she said, “Hold him steady while I go grab something from the kitchen.”
Chapter Six
An hour and two sticks of butter later, the twins were sitting on the rag rug in the living room, wearing headphones and playing a math game on Drew’s tablet. Well, Drew hoped it was a math game. He’d set up parental controls the first day they got here, but these boys had proved to be tech-savvy enough to bypass those restrictions if they got an idea to. But at least they were behaving for once.
A loud knock sounded at the cabin’s front door, and he said a silent prayer, hoping to get through tonight without scolding his nephews or insulting Kylie’s parents. He sure hoped the Shadowview Military Hospital had a gym for employees, because Drew knew exactly where he would be spending his lunch hours this summer, working off steam.
Kylie’s heels pinged along the hardwood floor as she rushed out of the kitchen and toward the door. As his wife ushered her parents into the cabin, for a second Drew wondered if they’d look down their noses at his humble family’s little log house. Now that he’d seen Kylie’s flashy red sports car and her mother’s even flashier diamond ring, he guessed the Chatterson family was used to the finer things in life.
But the couple smiled brightly as Lacey handed over a bouquet of peonies to Kylie and Mr. Chatterson passed him a chilled bottle of chardonnay and a six-pack of locally brewed beer. Oh, how Drew was tempted to crack one of those bottles open right now.
“Hey, you’re that guy from TV,” Aiden said, looking up from the handheld screen. “The one on that sports channel who always yells at the baseball umpires. Coach Chatterson.” And just like that, the little boy looked back down at his game, already losing interest.
“Wait, you’re Bobby Chatterson?” Drew asked as he did a double take at the well-known scruffy red beard and the familiar emblem on his polo shirt. “As in the professional baseball player?”
Drew didn’t follow major league sports too much, but even he’d heard of the Hall of Fame pitcher. He could’ve sworn that Kylie had mentioned her father’s name when she’d introduced him, but for some reason—maybe because of his stretched-to-the-breaking-point nerves—Drew’s mind hadn’t connected those dots.
“You’re not a real fast learner, are you, Captain?” Bobby said before giving a knowing side look to Lacey and planting his large frame on the living room couch.
“Dad, Drew’s a well-educated psychologist. And he’s a lieutenant commander, not a captain,” Kylie said. Drew followed her into the kitchen to uncork the wine and help get the meal on the table faster, leaving his guests to linger in the living room.
She looked back to her parents, who were now watching the boys play on the electronic device. “Okay, everyone, dinner is ready. Mom, I know you don’t believe in kids not sitting at the table, but Drew and I figured we’d just have the boys eat at the coffee table in the living room so we could talk about, uh—” Kylie coughed as if the words were strangling her “—our marriage.”
“Your house, Jellybean, your rules,” Bobby said. Drew didn’t argue that, technically, it had been Kylie’s house for only a couple of hours.
“Maybe next time they can sit with us,” Lacey suggested. Drew took the twins’ plates to the living room, hoping that there wouldn’t be a next time.
“So, Drew, you’re a military psychologist?” Mr. Chatterson walked over to the table and sat down before grabbing a large knife.
Kylie had set the chicken out, and looking at the way the large man was already carving off half the bird for himself, Drew’s stomach growled painfully at the thought of making do with just salad and rice.
“That’s right, sir,” Drew said as he took a seat. “I’ve just been assigned to the Shadowview Military Hospital.”
“You must’ve gone to school a long time for that,” Mrs. Chatterson said as she took a sip from her wineglass.
“Well, I joined the navy as a reservist right out of high school. After I finished undergrad, they sent me to the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences for my doctorate. I did an internship at Walter Reed before they sent me out with ground forces.”
“So what does a military psychologist do?” Bobby asked. “Study psychological warfare and whatnot? Figure out how to play head games with the enemy, that kind of thing?”
“Actually, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder. As in how to treat it and how to train other soldiers in recognizing it in themselves and others.”
“Huh. Well, I guess they need people for that, too. Personally, I think psychological warfare would be more interesting.”
“Really, Dad?” Kylie said. “What do you know about it?”
“Jellybean, I wrote the book on psychological warfare. That’s what pitchers do. They sit up on that mound making the batter wonder, ‘Is this guy gonna throw a curve ball or is he gonna purposely aim to the left and bean me with a ninety-five-mile-per-hour rocket?’”
Wow, his father-in-law was a world-famous athlete and an author. Funny, out of all those books boxed up in the master bedroom, Drew didn’t recall seeing any written by major-league relief pitcher Bobby Chatterson.
But Drew tamped down his inner sarcasm and held his tongue throughout the rest of the meal, allowing Kylie’s dad to expound on the limitless ways he exercised mind control over his opponents.
Which made Drew wonder if his new in-laws were even the least bit fooled by this whole farce.
* * *
Kylie loved her parents to death, but it wasn’t until they left that she felt as if she could truly breathe. She finished off the ice cream in her bowl as Drew wiped down the kitchen counters. The boys were watching an animated movie about outer space on television, and Kylie longed to take a hot bath and climb into bed.
In fact, she longed to escape from this total wreck she’d made of her life.
She looked at the rustic simplicity of the cabin and the t
wo pajama-clad children sprawled out on the living room rug. For the next few months, this was her world—a cabin in the woods, a lack of skills in the kitchen and a set of eight-year-old twins who needed some understanding and some structure. She might live in a remote small mountain town in Idaho and she might have been raised with a lovable but overbearing father and four brothers, but she was still a girlie girl.
She didn’t do wilderness or cooking.
She liked pedicures and shopping trips and running water, which, thank goodness, she’d found when she spotted the old claw-foot tub in the cabin’s single bathroom. So maybe she’d have to move the Lego sailboat and the Star Wars figurines out of the way while she relaxed in the bubble bath. She was going to have to get used to moving around a lot of things in her life now.
As Drew finished up in the kitchen, Kylie sneaked away to her room to grab her toiletries and something to sleep in. She locked the bathroom door and ran the water, climbing into the tub before it’d even had a chance to fill up. She dozed off in the water and woke only when she heard a light knock on the door.
“Kylie,” Drew whispered. “Is everything okay in there?”
After what he’d witnessed in Reno, he probably thought she was prone to running off and hiding in bathrooms whenever the mood struck her. And maybe she was. “Yes, I’m okay.”
“Well, the kids have fallen asleep, and I was going to hit the sack myself. I just wanted to see if you needed anything.”
Yeah, she needed a plan. A schedule. If she was going to embark on this crazy pretend lifestyle with Drew and his nephews, she at least needed some sense of organization.
“Hold on.” She stood up from the lukewarm water and grabbed the blue towel, since it looked the least used. Step one in her plan was to find out if Drew had a washing machine and start a load of laundry.
Step two. Establish a schedule.
Step three. Find someone to teach her to cook. Kylie’d felt horrible when she realized that a single rotisserie chicken would barely feed her dad, let alone Drew and two growing boys. She should’ve known better—or at least have paid better attention to how her mom handled cooking for a house full of men. She couldn’t do takeout every night and, as cute as the boys were, she wasn’t convinced their manners were quite restaurant-worthy yet.
She slipped on a pink tank top and ruffled pajama shorts and exited her temporary sanctuary. Drew was folding blankets in the living room in his own set of pajama bottoms and a snug, faded blue shirt that read Go Navy.
Wait, step one should be to set up some ground rules for how they were supposed to deal with each other and her growing attraction to the man.
“Hey,” she said, holding her arms crossed under her chest and then moved them to her hips before returning them to their original position.
Ugh. Why was she so awkward around him? She’d never been so physically attracted to a man. Andrew Gregson made her question every rational thought in her head.
He met her gaze before glancing down her body. She felt her body heat up as though his large, tanned hands were touching her. She cleared her throat and he dragged his gaze back toward hers.
“So, uh, tomorrow,” he said. That was all he had to say? Was he going somewhere with this?
“Yep. That’s the day after today. What about it?”
He coughed. “Tomorrow I have to report for duty at the hospital, and the boys start their summer day camp.”
“Which day camp are they going to?”
“The Junior Crafters. It’s the one through the community center.”
“Don’t you think that one might be a little too juvenile for them?”
“Well, they are juveniles.”
“No kidding. What I’m saying is that maybe they need to be in a program that will stimulate them a little more so they’ll find less of a need to seek out inappropriate activities.”
He tilted his head, and she wondered if she’d already overstepped her role as temporary aunt. “What would you recommend?”
“Alex Russell does a white-water rafting day program for older kids. Maxine’s son is enrolled, and the boys seem to look up to Hunter. I think the twins might have more fun there.”
“That sounds a little dangerous.”
“It’s all supervised. And better for them to be rafting, hiking and doing wilderness activities with a professional than to sneak out of the kindergarten-level art class at the community center to see if their basket-weaving projects can float down the river.”
“You might have a good point.”
“Besides, Alex is good with young boys and runs a tight ship. I have a feeling the teenagers working at the community center won’t be able to keep up with Aiden and Caden.”
“But is it too late for me to enroll them?”
She tapped her lip, thinking. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take them over to Russell Sports in the morning and enroll them. I can also pick them up when I get done with my last client.”
“Are you sure?”
“No problem. I might even be able to swing by the market, too. Listen, I’m sorry about not having enough for dinner tonight. I should’ve been used to how much my dad eats, but for the past few years, I mostly only prepare food for one or else eat out. So this is my late disclaimer that I can help out with the boys and I can help clean, but I’m not much use in the kitchen.”
Drew smiled. “I’ve had roommates who’ve been less capable.”
Did he just call her a roommate?
Of course, that was all she was to him. That and some free babysitting. But it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to move in. She’d been the one to put them both in this awkward position. And they still hadn’t clarified things with her parents.
“So if we’re all set for tomorrow, I’m going to turn in.” She nodded her head toward the bedroom. “Are you sure you don’t mind me taking the big bed?”
“Not at all. Sleep well. Let me know if you need anything.”
Kylie made her way into the bedroom. She was used to sleeping alone, to living alone. So then why, in this house full of people, did she feel so lonely?
* * *
A shrill beeping shook Kylie out of her dream, causing her to roll over and send the biography of Sigmund Freud toppling to the floor. She pushed the screen of her phone, effectively silencing the alarm, and then looked at the fallen book she’d dug out of the boxes to help lure her to sleep last night. It certainly had done the trick.
She listened to the silence as she stretched under the bright homemade quilt. Maybe she should sneak out of her room before anyone else awoke and grab a cup of coffee to help get her through the morning. If today was anything like last night, heaven knew she was going to need it.
She didn’t bother getting dressed, figuring she could set up the pod machine she’d brought over from her place and get started on some hazelnut-laced caffeine before hitting the shower.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she saw Drew sitting at the table, an open box of Honey Smacks and a quart of milk beside him.
Maybe she should’ve put on her robe.
But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t already seen her in her pajamas last night—or a lot less the morning in Reno. Besides, he must’ve had the same idea to sneak into the kitchen for a quick breakfast before the chaos of the day began.
“Morning,” she said, looking at his faded T-shirt, which stretched across his muscular chest. Seeing his short, spiky hair caused her fingers to twitch. The only things proper looking about Saint Drew at this exact moment were his wire-rimmed glasses. He looked so warm and so masculine and so...
Coffee. She needed coffee, not lustful thoughts about cozying up with her handsome quasi-husband under that king-size quilt.
“Hey,” he said simply.
Maybe he wasn’t much of a morning person.
But as she plugged in her top-of-the-line brewer and filled it with water, she felt him watching her. A couple of times, while rooting around in the cupboards for where she might’
ve stored her K-Cups, she noticed the tilt in his head as he stared at her. Well, she wasn’t much of a morning person, either, and enough was enough.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” he asked, not even straightening up.
“Like you’re trying to figure me out.”
“Sorry, I can’t help it. I slept wrong last night and somehow tweaked my neck.”
“Oh, no. I knew that bunk bed was going to be too small for you. From now on, you’re sleeping in the master bedroom.”
“Then, where will you sleep?” Her mind flashed to them curled up together on that big bed. “It’s not like you’re that much shorter than me,” he added, and she realized that she’d stepped closer to him, and his head was angled so that he was staring at her long, bare legs.
“Oh, I can sleep anywhere.” She walked behind his chair, mostly to put herself out of his line of vision, then felt silly for standing there uselessly. She put her hands to his bare neck and began to massage. “I could sleep on the sofa.”
He groaned and leaned toward the table, offering her better access. “I can’t very well make a lady sleep on a couch while I’m all cozy in a king-size bed. Besides, what if the twins woke up and found you sleeping in the living room?”
“Then, I’d tell them their uncle is a terrible snorer.”
“I’m not, though.”
“How do you know you’re not?”
“Because nobody that’s ever shared a bed with me has complained.”
Her hands froze. Whoa. Were they still talking about snoring? Kylie sure hoped so, because the thought of Drew doing anything but sleeping in a bed with someone else had her feeling like an upside-down can of whipped cream, ready to discharge.
Speaking of which, an ice cream sundae would really help her cool down right now.
Ugh, she was being ridiculous. Of course he’d slept with other women before. He might’ve even lived with another woman before.
She forced her fingers to keep moving along the warm skin of his neck, and before she could change her mind, she asked, “Have you ever been married?”
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