But For You (A Matter of Time #3)

One

The man was a pig, and it wasn’t just me who thought so.

Rosa Martinez, who lived on the other side of the Petersons, agreed with me.

In fact, all the women who lived on our cul-de-sac were of the same mind.

Steve Peterson, whose wife had just caught him cheating on her—again—was filth.

It wasn’t the fact that they already had two children; it was the fact that she was currently pregnant with their third.

“No,” he told me as we put the kids down. “You use that word too loosely. She’s an acquaintance, Jory; she’s not a friend.”

“She’s my neighbor, Sam, and her man’s a dog, and if she needs my help with whatever, I’m gonna give it to her.”

“I’m not saying not to be nice to her, but just don’t stick your nose in their business.”

I ignored him.

“Jory Harcourt!”

I gave him the most indignant look I could manage. “So, I’m what, nosy now? I’m the busybody neighbor?”

He threw up his hands in defeat.

I gave him a superior grunt because I thought he was on his way out of the bedroom to check the house, make sure all the doors were locked, and the stove burners were off, but then I realized he hadn’t moved. “What?”

“You’re very cute.”

I squinted at him. “Thirty-two-year-old men are not cute.”

“You’ll always be the twenty-two-year-old club kid I saw for the first time lying in the street with a beagle on top of him.”

I squinted at him. “I thought George was a Jack Russell.”

“Nope.” He came toward me. “Beagle.”

“Go away.” I smiled at him, trying to shoo him out of the room. “Go make sure the zombie horde can’t get us.”

But instead of leaving, he grabbed me and bumped me up against the wall in our room.

With his hot mouth nibbling up the side of my neck, his hands frantically disrobing me, and his hard groin pressed to my ass, my mind went completely blank.

There was no way to concentrate when I had 220 pounds of hard-muscled man focused on getting me in bed.

But the next day, as I staggered around my kitchen—I never had been and never would be a morning person—I saw my neighbors on their front porch.

Christie Peterson was smiling tentatively, and her husband was scowling.

I just wanted to go over and punch him out.

I had an idea of what I must look like—robe on, T-shirt and pajama bottoms under that, bunny slippers looking all bright-eyed and happy; I resembled the nosy neighbor in every sense.

A throat cleared behind me.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” I asked pointedly. It was Wednesday, not Saturday.

The warm rumbling chuckle was next. “You think maybe now, since you’ve got one kid in preschool and the other in kindergarten, you should start thinking about going back to working from your office?”

Obviously, my sanity was in question because I was still working from home. I hoped the look I gave him when I turned and squinted conveyed my displeasure.

He snorted out a laugh.

I all-out scowled at the supervisory deputy US marshal standing beside me at the kitchen sink. We had both been looking at the Petersons. “Why would you say that?”

“Say what?”

“You know what you said.”

He pressed his beautiful lips together in a hard line so he wouldn’t smile.

“Sam?”

“No reason.”

“Spit it out.”

He cleared his throat. “I just think that perhaps you being home during the day is giving you cabin fever, and maybe you need to get back out in the real world and talk to some grown-ups.”

I huffed out an exasperated breath. “Sam, just because I don’t go to the office doesn’t mean I’m starved for adult contact. I talk to Dylan every day; I talk to Fallon every day. They’re my business partners; they need me, and they keep me involved with what’s going on at the office.”

“Okay.”

“I send out more emails than both of them combined!”

“I’m sure you do,” he said, sliding his hand around the back of my neck, then squeezing gently, massaging, and easing me closer. “I just think that maybe you getting out of this house during the day would do you some good.”

I batted his hand away, whirling on him. “I go to the store, to the park, drop kids off at school, pick them up … when do I not see people?”

He grunted, rolled his eyes, and put his coffee cup down in the sink before his dark smoky-blue eyes flicked to mine.

“No,” I almost squeaked, turning to run. So not fast enough.

You would think that a big man could not move like that, with so much speed, but Sam Kage’s athleticism and strength were never to be underestimated.

At forty-three, he was just as powerful as he’d been when I first met him, and I finally understood the whole getting better with age thing.

The man looked the best he ever had, and he lived well in his skin, content and happy, both personally and professionally.

I was proud of him and told him often. He was an amazing father, a wonderful husband, a great son, and the kind of friend anyone would be happy to claim.

I was biased because I loved him, but still, I saw people look at him and knew the truth.

Four years after beginning his new job as a marshal, he was now the supervisor of the Chicago field office, overseeing five other deputies and three clerks.

I had thought once he moved up, he’d become a sheriff, but apparently, all they did was add the “supervisor” in there.

A sheriff was a totally different thing.

It made no sense from a Western standpoint.

In every movie I had ever seen, the deputy got moved up to sheriff.

As usual, Sam had just shaken his head at me when I had mentioned that to him.

As I ducked around the island in the middle of the kitchen, I thought for half a second that I would get away from him, but as he grabbed, yanked, and pinned me against the refrigerator, I realized how wrong I had been.

“All I meant to imply,” he began, tilting my head up with a hand on my chin, “was that since you have a five-and-three-quarter-year-old, and a three-year-old—soon-to-be four—now, you can do a half day at the office instead of working full-time from home. After you drop them off, it might be nice to pick up a fancy cup of coffee and go to your office and actually see Dylan and Fallon and talk to them face-to-face.”

“Did Kola tell you to make sure you said five and three-quarters?”

“Yes, he did. I was informed that, as he will be six later this month, calling him simply five was no longer applicable.”

“Did he say applicable?”

“Yes. I blame your brother for teaching him big words.”

I smiled at him, no longer interested in talking to him, far too entranced with his mouth.

He had the kind of lips made for kissing, plump and full, and when he smiled, there was this curve in the corner that could break your heart.

Not that the rest of his rugged features were without appeal.

His dark smoky-blue-gray eyes with the deep laugh lines at the corners; his long, straight nose; the hard square jaw.

And the thick copper-gold eyebrows were a treat too.

His voice, over the phone or in person—low and husky, edged with a growl—could send rippling heat through my entire body.

But the man’s mouth, the shape of it, the feel of it … really, I was a fan.

“Are you listening to me?”

I lifted up from my height of five-nine to his of six-four, and he bent down at the same time. Our lips met and parted, and his tongue slid inside to taste me.

The sounds from the peanut gallery—choking and retching—and the tug on my robe instantly drained the heat from the encounter. Sam snorted out a laugh as he broke the kiss, both of us eyeing the short people standing close to us.

“That’s disgusting,” Kola assured me with a glare that a five-and-three-quarter-year-old shouldn’t have—full of judgment and revulsion.

“Why?” I asked snidely.

“Your mouth has germs,” he informed me haughtily. “That’s why you told Hannah not to lick Chilly.”

“No, I told her not to lick Chilly because the cat doesn’t like to be licked by her.”

“He licks his body.”

“He does,” Hannah, our three-year-old, agreed with a nod. “Kola’s right.”

“But he doesn’t want you to do it,” I assured my daughter.

“How do you know?” Kola questioned.

“Yeah,” Hannah Banana chimed in again, always her big brother’s backup. “How do you know?”

I had to think.

Kola waited, squinting at me.

Hannah was waiting as well, one of her perfectly shaped dark brows arching. It was new. She had the same way of looking at me that her father did, like I was an idiot.

“Do not lick the cat! Nobody licks the cat!” Sam ordered when the silence stretched for too long.

I started laughing; only my husband would have to make such rules.

He looked down at his son, Mykola Thomas Kage—Thomas after Sam’s father—soon-to-be six years old, going on forty, who was full of questions and opinions.

We had adopted him when he was three, from an agency in the Netherlands.

When we made the final trip to bring him home, he saw us from the window of the orphanage director’s office and ran to the door to meet us.

We were there two weeks, and he started to call Sam Daddy, which Sam was madly in love with hearing.

Though Kola had been taught the American word father, it was not his, not the one he had grown up hearing and waiting to use for someone who belonged to him. So, he tried out the one he knew on me.

Pa.

So simple of a word, but it meant so much.

I had heard it in the streets when we visited, along with the more formal vader, and seen kids run to their fathers, using it.

Not the Papa I knew, not what Sam’s father was called by his grandchildren, but instead just Pa.

When Kola called to me, I answered to it, and his face—the way it lit up, the absolute blinding joy—was a gift.

Sam was Daddy, and Daddy represented Kola’s new life and his new family in the United States, and I was the comfort of the old. I was Pa, and he had named me.