LITMIR.BIZ

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believe the detail!”

      Mike’s instant message notifier dinged. He clicked over and opened the fuzzy image his brother had just sent him, with the vague shape of a kidney bean in the middle. Leaning closer, he was able to distinguish head from feet, but not much more than that.

      “Nice,” he murmured, looking into the camera again.

      “I know, right? So how’s life treating you?”

      He shrugged. “Same.”

      “Ready to bail and come home yet?”

      “I’m not a quitter.”

      “Never believed you were. I meant, have you booked your trip home the day after your six months are up?”

      Laughing, Mike shook his head. “Don’t think so. I intend to make this work. Chicago P.D.’s not an option anymore.”

      Leo nodded, his good humor fading as he frowned in concern. “Are you okay? Everything healed up?”

      Mike rubbed his fingers against the scar on his neck. It was still red, but the tenderness had faded...physically, at least. Emotionally, he wasn’t sure it ever would. “Yeah. I’m fine. I guess I just haven’t quite figured out what I wanna do when I grow up.”

      “Well, there are a couple of people who might have some options for you to consider.”

      His interest piqued, Mike raised a curious brow. “Who?”

      “The twins.”

      “Mark and Nick?” His cousins were a little older, so growing up, he, Leo and Rafe had looked up to all five of the boys on that branch of the Santori family tree.

      “Yeah. They called Mama the other day and got your contact info. Sounds like they want to talk to you about some kind of business idea.”

      Hmm. Interesting.

      Mark was a cop, so Mike had crossed paths with him a lot at work, though they’d been at different precincts. Nick was in security, having gotten out of the Marines and become a bouncer at a strip club where his wife, Izzie, had headlined. Weird. But they made it work.

      “I’m open to hearing their idea,” he admitted.

      “We’d love to have you back in Chi-town, man. It’s gonna suck doing the daddy thing without Uncle Mikey around to lend a hand. Who’s gonna scare off all the boys who start coming around when my baby girl hits puberty?”

      “I think you’re more than capable of that,” he said with a dry chuckle.

      “I’m a lover, not a fighter. Madison says I’m going to be the first human-shape marshmallow when the kid gets big enough to start wrapping me around her little finger.”

      Probably true. With his huge heart, Leo was the nicest of the brothers, so generous and easygoing. Rafe...well, he was a bit of a hard-ass and sure didn’t have Leo’s breezy outlook on life. After so many years in Afghanistan, that was probably understandable. Ellie, however, seemed to have softened him some.

      Then there was him, Mike. The youngest, the cop, the one who had never seen an abused animal he didn’t want to take in, or met a bully he hadn’t ended up punching out.

      That was probably why he’d joined the force to begin with.

      It was also probably why he’d left.

      There was only so much head-banging-against-the-wall he could reasonably do. He’d never been able to really make a difference, and nearly losing his life while failing at his job just didn’t mesh with his genetic code.

      He and Leo BS’d a little while longer, then his parents came into the room and waved from the background. His mom raised her voice to shouting level, as if she feared she wasn’t being picked up by the microphone, and Mike pushed his seat away from the speakers just to get a little relief.

      Damn, how he missed his family. All of them. Parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. He had thought when he’d left Chicago that going to a place where there were no other Santoris would be good for him, a welcome change. He’d wanted to figure things out in a place where he had to stand completely on his own and would be by himself to think.

      He just hadn’t realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a loner until recently.

      For some reason, that brought Lindsey to his mind. He wondered if she had figured that out about herself yet. And if she had possibly considered the fact that maybe the two of them, as the outsiders, the loners, might in fact be a perfect match. If only it weren’t for their jobs.

       5

      ALTHOUGH LINDSEY HAD never taught kids, she’d put in plenty of days as a teacher’s assistant throughout her academic career. That meant subbing for professors a lot of the time. Before starting this new job, she’d figured teaching college freshmen wouldn’t be that much different than teaching high school seniors. And really, it wasn’t.

      These kindergartners, though? Oh, man. They were going to be the death of her.

      “Miss Smiff, Maffew took all the gween cwayons so nobody else can color their twees.”

      Blinking as she interpreted that rare dialect known as six-years-old-and-toothless, Lindsey sighed and swiped her hand through her hair. It was only first period, and she was a teacher, so a margarita was out of the question. But oh, could she use one.

      After being on the job for only five days, she had already decided Callie should be canonized. Lindsey had no idea how her friend—or any of the teachers at the Wild Boar School—did it.

      First off, she taught six classes a day and only had one brief planning period that wasn’t long enough to catch her breath, much less grade papers or prepare lessons. During the first period, this one, she taught all the K–3 kids. In the classroom, the kids were separated by grade into smaller work groups, and she spent the entire class period revolving between them, giving mini lectures to one while praying the others would stay on task with what she’d asked them to work on.

      The kindergartners rarely did. And her classroom “assistant”—one of the moms—spent more time helping her own kid with his classwork than she did keeping things running smoothly when Lindsey’s back was turned.

      After this period, she would move on to the fourth through sixth graders. Same setup. Then seventh and eighth. Ditto.

      This afternoon, she’d get ninth grade biology, then tenth grade chemistry. Finally, at the very end of the day, advanced chemistry, which had eight students, all seniors, all vying to be valedictorian of their seventy-five-person graduating class.

      Frankly, she’d rather have all seventy-five of those seniors in her physics class than try to have four eyes in her head to keep track of grades K-1-2-3.

      “Miss Smiff, did you heaw me? Maffew’s not being vewy nice. Do you think it’s nice to keep all the gween cwayons?”

      “No, it’s not very nice,” she admitted, turning away from the third graders. Again.

      From the beginning, her strategy had been to connect all of her class lessons so that each group’s subject was somehow related to the others. Today, she’d been talking to the kids about plant life. Nothing along the lines of oxygenation and photosynthesis...strictly, why some trees have flowers and others don’t. But the blank expressions on the faces of the kindergartners this morning, and their fidgeting bodies, had made her give that up and go right to the old I’m-not-a-parent-and-have-no-idea-how-to-handle-little-kids standby: coloring. Specifically, coloring sheets printed with bushes, trees and flowers, most of which required green. It appeared Maffew hadn’t remembered that whole “sharing” thing.

      “I’ll talk to him, Sarah.”

      “I’m Emily.”

      Oh. Right. She had only been on the job five days and hadn’t memorized

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