LITMIR.BIZ

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a part sigh, part huff coming from her mouth, Claire stooped even lower so she could give Ethan a kiss on the cheek. No shorts for her today. Instead, she was wearing a denim skirt and a top. Barefoot. And with the way she was stooping, he could see her pink panties.

      Trisha wasn’t the only one whose gaze wandered in the wrong direction.

      Riley reacted all right. He felt that stirring behind his zipper. Felt his testosterone soar past normal levels.

      He glanced around, mainly because he needed to get his attention off her underwear, and he pretended to look at the house. It was in serious need of a paint job, and the white picket fence needed repairs, but the place had always had good bones. However, something was missing.

      “No cats?” Riley asked. There’d been at least a half dozen around when her grandmother was alive.

      “Gran gave them away when she got sick.”

      Too bad because Claire had always loved them, and apparently it’d been one of the tipping points for her choosing Daniel.

      “Ix it, peas,” Ethan said, holding out the car to Riley.

      It took Riley a moment to work out the translation: fix it, please. The car was in three pieces, and Riley took them with all the reverence that a vintage car like that deserved.

      “You don’t need to trouble yourself,” Claire insisted. “Just sit down and relax. You look exhausted.”

      Judging from the cardboard box and its contents scattered on the porch, she had been going through her grandmother’s things, and she pushed some of the items aside to make room for Riley.

      “I can get Ethan another car like that the next time I go to the store,” she added.

      But the fat tears rolling down Ethan’s cheeks let Riley know the kid didn’t want a new one. Riley eased down onto the porch next to him and tried to remember how he’d repaired his own toy cars after he’d given them a good bashing. After all, what else was a kid to do with toy cars other than create a perpetual stream of wrecks, increasing the gore of those wrecks with each new play session?

      “Got any superglue?” Riley asked her.

      Claire nodded, moved as if to go inside, but then stopped. “Really, you don’t have to do this.”

      Riley couldn’t be positive, but he thought maybe this had something to do with his walking-wounded status. Something that automatically put his teeth on edge. “Just get the glue.”

      Hard for his teeth to stay on edge though when she ran inside, leaving him alone with the kid. Ethan looked up at him. “Ix it?”

      “I’ll sure try.” Riley glanced around at the other cars, but he soon spotted what had likely caused the damage. Several big-assed action figures. He wasn’t certain who or what they were supposed to be, but they looked like a mix of the Grim Reaper, Cyclops and Mick Jagger. With big-assed lips and wings.

      “Here you go,” Claire said when she came racing back out.

      Riley took the glue and tipped his head to the action figures. “Your idea?” Because they darn sure didn’t seem like something Claire would buy.

      “No. Livvy, my business partner, is responsible. She took Ethan to the toy store for his second birthday and told him he could pick out anything he wanted. He wanted those. They’re supposed to be some kind of protectors of the universe.”

      Riley nodded. “Good choice.”

      Ethan grinned. The man-pact was back on, and the kid seemed to have forgiven him or at least forgotten about the hidden cookie caper.

      “Why are you out here anyway?” Claire asked.

      “Walking is part of my physical therapy.” Riley squirted the first dollop of glue to get the rear axle back in place. “I just saw Trisha by the antiques shop. She said Daniel’s got an office here in town.”

      Riley wasn’t going to win any awards for being subtle, but he figured it wouldn’t take more than a minute or two for the car repairs, and then he wouldn’t have any reason to stay. Any good reason anyway.

      “Yes, he does,” Claire answered.

      Clearly not chatty today. Riley went in a slightly different direction. “I guess Daniel did that so he could see you. And Ethan.”

      She didn’t huff, but that’s exactly what she looked as if she wanted to do. “You know how you don’t want to talk about your injury or the pain? Well, I don’t want to talk about Daniel. Deal?”

      Since she was as testy as he was, it was best to let it drop. Besides, it really wasn’t his business, only idle curiosity as to why the kid looked more like Riley than any real kid of his probably would.

      Best to move on to a different conversation thread. “How’s the box sorting going?”

      The sigh that left her mouth was one of frustration. So, testy, nontalkative and frustrated. Oh, yeah, this was a good visit, but at least the car repairs were going well.

      “I’m still looking for the letter Gran mentioned on the calendar. I have no idea what was in it or even if it was from her.”

      Riley glanced at the stack of letters that’d been tied together with white ribbon. “It’s not one of those?”

      Another sigh. Man, he was picking at scabs today. “No. Those are from various men,” Claire said, her forehead bunching up. “Gran was obviously, um, popular. It’s strange to learn she had so many things going on in her life that I never knew about.”

      Apparently that was a pattern Claire was continuing to follow when it came to her son’s paternity. Riley frowned. He really needed to get his mind on something else. Heck, the memory of her pink panties flash was better than this.

      “I brought down more boxes from the attic, and I’ve got at least twenty others to go through,” she went on. “Maybe I’ll find the letter in one of them.”

      “Maybe she decided not to give it to you,” Riley suggested. “Or she could have lost it.”

      He’d dropped in that last idea only because the first one sounded kind of sinister, as if the letter might be so god-awful that her grandmother had decided Claire shouldn’t see it after all.

      “I think it might have been from my mother.” Claire didn’t look at him. She suddenly got very interested in picking at the nonexistent lint on her skirt. “Or my father.”

      From her mother, yes, he could understand that. The woman had ditched Claire and then had died a while later. Not in a clean, it’s-your-time kind of way, either. She’d gotten drunk, thrown up and had choked to death on her own vomit. But Claire’s father was a different matter.

      “Do you even know who your father is?” Riley asked.

      She shook her head. Didn’t add anything else. Apparently, any talk involving fatherhood was off the table. In this case, that wasn’t a bad thing.

      From what Riley had heard, her father had never been in her life and had left her mother before Claire was even born. That made the man lower than pig shit, and as a kid Riley had often thought about what it would be like to punch the idiot for doing that.

      His own parents had disappeared from his life when he was a teenager, but that’s because they’d been killed by a drunk driver—an accident that Claire knew about all too well since she’d been in the vehicle.

      And was the sole survivor.

      Being in the backseat had saved her from dying in the head-on collision. The drunk driver had died on impact. His parents, shortly thereafter.

      It had hardly been his parents’ choice to leave. And despite the fact he’d been planning to go out of state for college, Riley hadn’t left, either. He’d stayed at home with Logan to help raise his then fourteen-year-old sister and Lucky. Though Lucky had been Logan’s age, only younger by

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