Nice and Easy: Boys of the Big Easy book three

by Erin Nicholas

  Jack lined three of the six balls up again. At two, he still carried the balls with two hands and had to half-bend/half-squat to set them down, but he had no trouble balancing to wind up or staying on his feet as he contacted the ball with his toe.

  Shay, on the other hand, always tried kicking with her right foot first, but had trouble balancing on her left. But she also couldn’t swing her left foot, even though her balance on the right was much better.

  “Hey, you guys,” Lexi said, setting the pen down and crawling across the floor. “Let’s play bridges and highways!”

  She’d made up the game several months back. Jack and Shay both loved playing with little cars and trucks, and Lexi had thought up a way to get Shay using her seemingly weaker left side while playing.

  “Yes!” Jack ran to the bin with the miniature vehicles and grabbed his favorites—a fire truck and a black pickup that looked a lot like Caleb’s.

  Lexi smiled even as she rolled her eyes. Jack’s idol worship of Caleb was so obvious and so sweet. She felt a pang in her chest. She was so grateful to have Caleb in Jack’s life. Jack’s dad, Seth, had chosen medical school over marriage and a baby. He’d written her a ten-thousand-dollar check—well, his dad had—and had told her that he’d come find her after he was finished with his residency. She wasn’t holding her breath.

  Shay brought a dump truck and a blue sedan over, but Lexi said, “How about you be the bridge first?”

  Shay grinned and got on her back, lifting her butt up off the floor. Lexi and Jack drove the cars and trucks under her and then up her legs, over her stomach, and down her arms.

  “This highway is getting bigger!” Lexi exclaimed tapping Shay’s left leg.

  Shay lifted her leg off the floor. Jack made siren noises for the fire truck, driving it faster than the pickup from Shay’s foot to her hip. Shay giggled as the little wheels tickled her and Lexi smiled, but she noted that Shay’s leg didn’t stay up for very long.

  “Other highway!” she said, tapping Shay’s right leg.

  That leg went higher, but she couldn’t keep her butt up as high pushing with just her left leg.

  “Earthquake!” Lexi announced. They’d played the game several times before so Shay knew that meant she was going to march her legs up and down, and Jack and Lexi had to drive their cars up her leg before it lifted off the ground and threw them off.

  Shay marched her legs three times but then her butt collapsed to the ground.

  “Okay, country roads,” Lexi said.

  Shay lifted her arms and they drove on the smaller roads for a few minutes before Lexi parked on Shay’s forehead and grinned down at her. “Jack’s turn?”

  “Your turn!” Jack told Lexi.

  She grabbed him and kissed his cheek. “I’m the bridge now?”

  “Big bwidge!”

  She laughed. “I might be offended by that.” She got on her back and lifted her butt in the air. “You better drive fast,” she told them. “This is a monster bridge that is going to try to crush your trucks!”

  She lifted and lowered her butt as the kids laughed and tried to get their vehicles through the space underneath her before she smashed them.

  “Damn, I’ve really been missing out on playtime around here.”

  4

  The deep, low voice from the doorway made Lexi freeze with her butt in the air. She craned her head. Caleb stood with a shoulder propped against the doorframe, watching. Shirtless. Lexi quickly dropped her butt, felt the sharp edge of the fire truck poke into her back, winced, and worked to pull Caleb’s shirt down over her butt. She was wearing her shorts under the big shirt but with her hips in the air, the shirt had ridden up on her stomach, and she felt strangely exposed by the way Caleb was watching her lift and lower her hips.

  She cleared her throat. “Bridges and highways,” she said, gesturing to the kids holding the cars.

  “Come play!” Shay told Caleb, going to him and grabbing his hand.

  “Yes!” Jack agreed, running at Caleb. “Big bwidge.”

  Lexi laughed. “Yeah, this way I’m not the biggest bridge.”

  Caleb scooped Jack up, tossed him over his shoulder. “A bridge? Maybe I’m the troll under the bridge that eats the little kids who try to cross the bridge.” Caleb found a ticklish rib and Jack shrieked and laughed. Lexi felt herself grinning.

  “No, on the floor,” Shay insisted, pulling on his hand. “You be the troll under Lexi!”

  Caleb looked at Lexi and she felt her stupid cheeks heat. It was a game. With the kids.

  “I’d love to be under Lexi,” Caleb said.

  His voice was huskier, though Lexi doubted the kids noticed at all.

  Yeah, well, you are definitely more of an on-top kind of guy, Lexi thought before she could stop it. “He’s too big to be under me,” she told Shay. And yeah, she met his eyes when she said it, meaning the innuendo as well. Two could play this game. He’d seemed annoyed or confused by the conversation that morning about her being embarrassed over him not wanting to play with her last night. But if he was going to keep making comments like that one, she wasn’t going to just let them go.

  “Oh, I promise that we can make it work,” he said, holding Lexi’s gaze. “Might take some stretching. And spreading. But we can do it.”

  Geez. She felt the heat in her face. How could he be so dirty with the kids right there, talking innocently about a game? An actual game.

  It might have something to do with the fact that he wore a loose pair of black athletic shorts…and nothing else.

  “Lexi could be the troll!” Shay decided. “She’s little and can fit under you.”

  “She sure can,” Caleb agreed.

  Lexi could only think, Yes, please.

  “But she’s way too pretty to be a troll,” Caleb added.

  Caught off guard by the compliment, Lexi said nothing. Even when Caleb gave her a wink before he bent to sweep Shay up with his other arm.

  Shay giggled as he tossed her over his shoulder.

  “But I think both of you could be little trolls,” he told them.

  The kids giggled and wiggled. “We’re not trolls!” Shay said. “We’re pretty, too!”

  “No twolls!” Jack agreed.

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “If we’re playing bridges, don’t we have to have trolls?” He turned to face Lexi squarely and suddenly she couldn’t swallow.

  He had a child that she loved with all her heart over each shoulder, he wore a huge, happy grin, and her damned heart flipped over in her chest.

  Holding the wiggling kids, she could see all of his muscles bunching and rippling. From his shoulders and arms, down to his abs, and her mouth went dry. And she was vaguely aware she was staring. She was also vaguely aware that she wasn’t doing anything to stop it.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  He had both arms up, keeping the kids from sliding off his shoulders. His feet were spread, his legs braced. He was big and wide and hard and…she had no idea what he’d just asked her.

  “Lex?”

  She managed to drag her gaze from the trail of hair that ran from his belly button into his shorts. But she dragged it slowly. Up his abs, over his chest, and finally to meet his eyes.

  She’d never seen Caleb naked. She’d never seen him even this naked. There weren’t a lot of reasons for him to go shirtless when she was around. Unfortunately. She wasn’t going to waste the chance to check it all out.

  “Yeah?” she finally asked.

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “I don’t remember what I was going to say.”

  The fact that her looking at him had distracted him made a ribbon of heat curl through her belly. “Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He wore a half grin that made her swallow hard as he seemed to snap out of—whatever—and bent to set the kids back on the floor.

  “Bridges and highways!” Shay said, reminding them both of what
they’d been talking about.

  “Okay, so someone show me how to be a bridge,” he said, crossing to where Lexi sat cross-legged on the floor. He dropped down next to her.

  “Lay on your back,” Shay told him.

  He did and all Lexi could think about was running her tongue up the middle of his abs from the waistband of his shorts to the base of his throat.

  “Tell him the rules,” Shay said to Lexi as she reclaimed her vehicles.

  Lexi cleared her throat. “Um, okay. For a bridge, you just lift in the air.”

  He did and her eyes were immediately drawn to the front of his shorts where the material molded around his cock.

  Caleb coughed. “You keep looking at me like that and we’re gonna have a big roadblock in the middle of this bridge,” he said.

  Shay was already driving her car up his right leg, and Lexi knew exactly what he was referring to as the blue four-door approached his hip. She cleared her throat again.

  “Well, there can be road construction,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

  “Put your hand here,” Shay told him, pulling his right hand to his thigh. “Now I have to go around.” She drove her car down the side of his leg.

  “Swing!” Jack said.

  Lexi glanced at Caleb. His eyes were on her. “You can be a suspension bridge, too,” she said. “Sway your hips back and forth.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He moved his hips side to side.

  And yeah, Lexi had a hard time taking a deep breath.

  The kids moved their cars and trucks over him, even with the movement, making engine noises.

  “How about a racetrack?” Lexi asked.

  “Yay!” Shay told her.

  Lexi looked at Caleb. “Now you get on your side and curl up.”

  He did, turning toward her, propping his head on his hand, and pulling his knees up to curve into most of a circle. He just watched her as the kids raced their cars around and around him, pretending there was a ramp that launched their cars into the air to get over the gap between his shoulders and knees.

  “Oh, no, another earthquake!” Lexi announced. She met his gaze, which hadn’t left her face. “Roll back and forth.”

  The kids giggled and played through it all.

  “Okay, Golden Gate Bridge,” Lexi said. “Shay, you want to do that one, too?”

  “Okay.” Shay got on her hands and knees, then boosted her butt in the air.

  Jack drove his cars over her and Lexi followed with the dump truck.

  “Now do the drawbridge with me,” Shay told Jack.

  The two-year-old got on his hands and knees, facing Shay. Then they both raised their hands up, going up into a kneeling position. Lexi drove three of the cars between them.

  “Draw bridges you can drive under?” Caleb asked.

  She looked at him over her shoulder and shrugged. “Sometimes we use boats.”

  “Or my hippo!” Shay said. “Then he’s the lock-mess monster!”

  Lexi laughed. “Loch Ness.” She looked at Caleb. “Yeah, sometimes there’s water and we have monsters and even sword fights on the bridge with our soldiers.” The stuffed animals and plastic army men became all sorts of great things when they pretended.

  Caleb pulled himself up to sitting. “This is all quite a game. I’ve never played bridges before.”

  “It’s Lexi’s game,” Shay told him.

  “It is, huh?” Caleb looked at Lexi. “Very creative.”

  “Balls!” Jack announced, heading back into the playroom and straight for the soccer balls.

  “Can I color now?” Shay asked.

  She often asked for a quiet activity after they’d done something more physical. “Of course,” Lexi told her. Shay went to the cupboard for her coloring books and crayons and settled at the picnic table in the playroom. Lexi got up and crossed the room. She grabbed a pad of blank paper out of the same cupboard and took it to where Shay was sitting. She watched Shay open her coloring book. “Hey, after you color that picture, would you draw me something?” Lexi asked.

  “Okay.”

  “And I want you to draw something using only blue, red, and orange, okay?”

  “Okay,” the little girl said agreeably.

  Lexi made a mental note to ask Shay which colors she’d requested in a few minutes.

  She went back to the coffee table in the next room. Caleb was stretched out, propped up on one elbow again, watching her. She sat down behind the table, putting the solid object between them. For some reason.

  Him watching her so intently made her jumpy and she couldn’t really say why. Except that this was all new. Different for them. They never all hung out, just playing and lounging together. One of them was always at work when the other was here with the kids.

  This was all very…domestic. And comfortable. And sexy.

  Sexy? But yes, hanging out in the living room together casually, while the kids played and they watched, was sexy. Strangely. Though the shirtless Caleb didn’t hurt.

  And she was in big trouble.

  “What’s that all about?” he asked when she was settled.

  “What?”

  “The drawing with just three colors?”

  She glanced at Shay. “Oh. Well, sometimes she has trouble remembering things so I give her little tasks like that so she can practice. I’ll ask her which colors I wanted in a few minutes and see if she remembers.”

  Caleb frowned slightly. “You play memory games with her?”

  Lexi nodded. “And other games.”

  “Like?”

  “Naming things that are green. Counting the lamps in the house. Naming things that are bigger than her shoes, or what things would fit inside her cereal bowl. Just little learning things like that.”

  He looked puzzled. “Why?”

  She shrugged. She’d noticed that Shay had some trouble with her colors and numbers and categorizing things. “They’re just some things I’ve noticed she needs a little practice doing.”

  Caleb just watched her for several long moments. Then he said, “Is that what the bridge game is about?”

  “That’s more about her strength and coordination.”

  Caleb pushed himself up to sitting. “That’s to help her get stronger?”

  Suddenly she felt very self-conscious. She could admit that she’d been a very intense student during nursing school. She’d gone over and over her assignments. She’d asked a million questions. She’d been hyper focused. Nursing wasn’t something, in her opinion, that people should fuck around with. People were depending on them to make the right decisions to help them. People trusted them to take care of them.

  And she loved that. She loved having people put their faith in her, listen to her, and respect her opinion. She’d never really had that before. She’d always been the one who felt she needed help and had so much to learn from other people. But in the ER, she had to know what she was doing and she took that seriously. Patients listened to her. Her coworkers listened to her. She’d even convinced a cardiologist to take a closer look at a patient the other day. He’d listened…and realized that they’d missed a heart murmur.

  She got a little high off of all of that, but she knew she needed to dial it back outside of the ER. She didn’t know everything. She definitely didn’t know everything about pediatrics. That had been only one unit in school and she hadn’t worked with kids much, and definitely not outside of the ER. In an emergency, there wasn’t much time for involved assessments and she left all of that to other professionals.

  “It’s just some stuff I’ve noticed,” she said. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, but it just seemed that she’s so right-handed, well, right-side dominant, that I thought it might be a good idea to encourage her to use her left side more. And I’ve noticed that she doesn’t like to do a lot of intense physical play. I know Jack is on the other end of the spectrum and can barely sit still, so I try to balance it all out for both of them. I make up these games to get her playing more and then we do quie
ter activities with animal sounds or playing I-Spy around the house and stuff so that Jack does some quieter stuff…” She trailed off. She was going on and on. She pressed her lips together.

  “Lexi,” Caleb said quietly.

  She looked up, realizing she’d been drawing even more circles in the newspaper rather than looking at him. This time circling an ad for motor oil. But she didn’t need to buy motor oil. Caleb took care of that for her.

  “You’ve been working on this stuff with Shay for how long?”

  “Always. I mean, a long time. Whenever I noticed something, I’d try to figure out a way to practice it with her.”

  Caleb had a really strange look on his face now. He looked amazed and confused and…turned on. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

  He was so damned turned on he almost couldn’t stand it.

  Sure, he’d seen, touched, and tasted her nipple last night. He wasn’t able to completely forget about that. But it was so much more than that right now.

  Lexi had been working with Shay on the things that were hard for her.

  Not because she knew there was a problem. Not because the doctor or therapist had told her to. Just because she’d noticed it and decided to help the little girl she loved get better at things.

  That also meant that Shay’s issues hadn’t been completely neglected. She wasn’t as behind as she would have been otherwise.

  Of course, as the intense sense of relief crashed over him, he also felt a huge wave of guilt. Lexi had noticed something that he hadn’t.

  “Does this all help?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse.

  “The play and exercise?” Lexi asked. She lifted a shoulder. “Yeah, of course.” She gave him a little smile. “If you practice something, you get better at it, right?”

  Of course.

  Shay was better because of all of this. Of course she was. He loved that. The bubble of hope that expanded in his chest made it hard to take a breath for a moment.

  And then reality surfaced.