Chapter 10
“You’re pink,” Matthew said, studying her with a tilt of his head as he placed the lollipop back in his mouth.
“And you found my stash,” Jodi said with a mock glare and a growl as she reached up and grabbed the large bag of lollipops by his side, pausing with the bag long enough for the boy to grab a few more lollipops before she carried it around her desk to put it back in the-
“Your checkbook isn’t balanced,” Matthew announced with a bored sigh as he raised his legs and swirled around so that he was facing her with his feet on her desk. “I balanced it for you,” he said with a shrug as he focused back on his lollipop.
“You went through my purse?” Jodi asked, although really, by this point, nothing this kid said or did, or any of the Bradford children did for that matter, should really surprise her. She narrowed her eyes on Trevor’s youngest son as she asked, “Did you break into my computer again?”
“Yup,” he said, letting the word pop around his lollipop. “And you still haven’t told me why you’re pink.”
“That’s because you never asked,” Jodi muttered absently as she dropped her lunch bag on the desk and placed the bag of lollipops back in the bottom desk drawer. She picked up her checkbook only to bite back a groan.
“You’re off by sixty-two dollars. You might want to transfer some money into that account before it bounces,” Matthew said conversationally as he leaned forward and pointed at the column that he’d fixed.
“You do realize that you’re only six, right?” Jodi pointed out instead of admitting that there wasn’t any money to transfer. This was it, which was pretty sad because it wasn’t a hell of a lot.
She was going to have to run across the street during her lunch break and see if Mary could cut her a check a few days early.
She’d planned on working through her lunch break to get things settled for the renovation, but now it looked like she was going to be spending it standing in line at City Hall and then at the bank.
It also meant that she was going to have to stay an hour extra tonight to make up for the loss.
“You gonna tell me why you’re covered with pink streaks?” Matthew asked, studying her curiously.
“I’m part alien,” she said with a sigh, trying not to think about the twenty-five-dollar overdraft fee that she was going to have to pay now.
“I see,” Matthew murmured thoughtfully, studying her for a moment longer before he abruptly nodded and turned around before jumping off the counter.
“Where are you going?” Jodi asked, looking up in time to see the precocious little boy, who was secretly one of her favorites, head for the children’s section, which instantly put her on alert.
“To play with the other kids,” Matthew said with another one of those careless shrugs that made her nervous and for good reason. “And to tell them that you’re an alien out to steal their brains.”
“Wait? What?” Jodi asked, the sad state of her finances instantly forgotten as she rushed to go after the little boy before it was too late.
“What the hell happened to your hands?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Danny said, reaching over the passenger seat of his truck and grabbed his bag.
“Don’t worry about it?” Trevor repeated with a snort of disbelief as he gestured down at his hands. “It looks like you shoved your hands in acid!”
Danny couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison. “Close enough.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Trevor asked, keeping pace with him as he made his way to the old library that he personally believed should have been torn down years ago.
“It means that you might want to find another place to dump your wife’s science experiments,” he said, glad that Zoe wasn’t around for this conversation.
She was a really sweet woman and it would kill her to know that her food had actually harmed someone.
He’d rather die than hurt her. She’d been there for him during his recovery, sat with him and held his hand when the painkillers stopped working, read to him, and kept his family from aggravating the shit out of him.
“Zoe’s lasagna did this?” Trevor asked, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him to a stop so that he could look over Danny’s damaged hands.
For a moment, Danny could only stare at his cousin in horror. “That was lasagna?”
“Yeah,” Trevor said, sighing heavily as he continued to look his hand over. “Maybe we should get you to a doctor,” he said with a worried look, the same one that everyone in his family got whenever he so much as sneezed.
“Aidan already took care of it,” Danny said, pulling his arm away. “It will clear up in a few days.”
“Did anyone else get hurt?” Trevor asked, once again keeping pace with him.
“Some of it got on Jodi,” Danny said, deciding that using his nickname for his little neighbor would only encourage more bullshit, bullshit that he wasn’t in the mood for, not after last night.
“Shit,” Trevor muttered, looking truly upset. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, but if I were you, I would probably give her a month or two of free rent,” he said, wondering what he was going to do about Tinkerbelle.
The only thing he knew for sure was that he wanted her.
He wanted to be with her, to hold her, to bury himself to the hilt inside her and stay there while the rest of the world disappeared, but he wasn’t sure that he could be what she wanted.
The only relationships that he’d ever been in were in high school and those had been with teenage girls who thought a romantic night consisted of a movie, pizza, and sneaking him into their rooms later when their parents fell asleep.
Although he’d slept with more than his fair share of women over the years, he’d never dated any of them.
At least, not seriously.
He’d taken plenty of women out when he had downtime, but he’d never had to put much effort into getting them into his bed.
He’d never had to and most importantly, he’d never wanted to put in the effort.
If he came across a woman that wasn’t interested in wasting a little time between the sheets, he’d moved on without a second thought.
He didn’t have time for anything more when he was a Marine. Now…
Now he’d really like to see if there was anything behind this overwhelming attraction that he had for his little neighbor.
He wished his attraction to her was simple, something that he could work through by taking her to bed, but he instinctively knew that things with Tink would never be that simple. To be honest, he didn’t want simple.
He wanted something more, something better, he wanted Tinkerbelle and he would have had her too if it hadn’t been for that bastard Aidan.
He’d been working up his nerve to ask Tink out, fortifying himself on his second helping of that incredible meal, when the shameless bastard started to pout and whine.
He’d tried to tell Tink to just ignore him, but apparently, she had a soft spot for annoying bastards.
For the rest of the meal, he’d sat there, glaring at the smug bastard.
Several times, he’d dropped hints for the bastard to leave, but Aidan just sat there as content as could be while Danny tried to look for an opening to ask his little neighbor out.
Even that awkward moment when Aidan realized that he’d left his date in the hallway hadn’t been enough to get him to leave.
He’d simply shrugged, grabbed the bowl of mashed potatoes and finished them off while Danny sat there, contemplating beating the shit out of his brother with the gravy boat.
When Danny offered to do the dishes to thank Jodi for the incredible meal and to buy himself a little more time, he’d thought for sure that his brother would make a run for it.
He’d never expected his brother to join him at the sink with a shit-eating grin.
For the next thirty minutes, he’d worked beside his brother, jaw tightly clenched until the last pan was placed on the counter to dry.
She’d thanked them for doing the dishes and wished them a goodnight around a yawn.
Forced to put off his plans for another night, Danny headed for the door with Aidan trailing behind him, whistling a jaunty tune.
Once Tink’s door was shut behind them, he’d wished his brother a goodnight by placing him in a headlock.
He’d brought the bastard to the floor where he used Aidan’s shirt to secure his hands behind his back and then dragged the bastard down the hallway and shoved him inside the maintenance closet.
As he’d walked away, he’d tried to figure out a game plan to get Tink to take a chance on him, but so far, nothing.
“We’re going to have to replace these doors,” Trevor said when they reached the large, thick doors that made up the entrance to the old library.
Danny had a feeling the City Council wasn’t going to agree to that, especially since the doors were probably the original doors, but he didn’t say anything.
Instead, he grabbed hold of one of the door handles and tried not to cringe when the door slowly swung open on rusty latches, emitting a high-pitched noise that was barely noticeable over the sounds of children screaming.
“What the hell…” Trevor mumbled at his side as they tried to make sense of what they were seeing.
The large front room where he remembered Mrs. Pattinson, the old librarian who used to smell like butterscotch and dusty books, used to read to them was filled with screaming children covered with what appeared to be glue and glitter.
Frowning, he watched as the horde of screaming children clambered to get to the desk where-
“Oh, shit,” Trevor muttered just loud enough for him to hear when they both spotted Matthew, Trevor’s youngest son, sitting on the checkout desk with several large bottles of paste on one side and a pile of brown paper bags and baggies filled with cookies, brownies, and cupcakes on the other.
While the rest of the kids were flipping out, fighting over small canisters of glitter, Matthew sat there, calmly eating what appeared to be a rather delicious-looking sandwich.
Danny’s attention shifted to a closed door where he could just barely make out the pounding and the sounds of women demanding that someone open the door.
When Matthew spotted them standing there, he took another bite of his sandwich and gestured absently over his shoulder.
Almost too afraid to look but unable to help himself, Danny looked past his cousin’s frightening child and nearly swallowed his tongue when he spotted that delectable ass that he’d been fantasizing about for the past two nights wiggling enticingly.
This was definitely a pleasant surprise finding her here.
He may have groaned. He definitely licked his lips as he watched Tink try to escape the clutches of two seven-year-old girls by climbing on top of a cabinet.
Unfortunately for her, she was too short to pull it off, and fortunately for him, he now had his game plan solidly in place.
Grinning hugely and ignoring his cousin’s impending nervous breakdown, Danny sauntered over to the front desk to put his game plan into action.